These are not lies, these are changes in our understanding of viral epidemiology that we have seen happen throughout the course of the pandemic, concomitant with the introduction of increasingly more contagious strains. Science has a lot of uncertainty in it and we’ve seen a lot of hypotheses refuted in the past year: surface transmission and microdroplets (actually mostly aerosol), mask inefficacy (they do work! mostly when everyone wears them), and herd immunity (probably harder than we initially expected). These are all things that were just poorly understood and understudied pre-pandemic. Our understanding of them is still rapidly developing and changing now. I realize it’s hard for the general public to understand, but science doesn’t know everything and we need to be able to accept when our understanding of something changes in light of new evidence.
