A long read (especially wading through the first few paragraphs), but explains quite well why people listen to those who spread "fake news":
quillette.com/2021/01/16/rise-of-the-coronavirus-cranks/
An extract:
"The answer, I think, lies in despair. Since March, there has been a sense of living in a nightmare from which one cannot awake. The non-pharmaceutical interventions introduced to contain the virus—especially lockdowns—have been soul-destroying. The economy is battered beyond belief, redundancies have gone through the roof, and there are more grey weeks of a cold winter lockdown to endure. On the other hand, we also have a potentially lethal and frequently debilitating virus infecting at least 50,000 people a day, hospitalising 4,000, and killing close to a thousand. That, too, will go on for weeks and, assuming you believe in germ theory and exponential growth, these figures would be much worse if we resumed normal social contact.
It’s an awful situation to be in. It’s a zero-sum game in which disease and death is traded off against misery and poverty. Until the first vaccine arrived in December, COVID scepticism offered people a way out. If the dangers of the virus were being overhyped by fearmongers, and lockdowns were entirely ineffective, then societies could reopen secure in the knowledge that there was nothing that could be done to reduce the death toll (which would, in any case, be a fraction of what we were told). The comforting lie that trade-offs could be avoided has proved irresistible to those who have surrendered to confirmation bias and constructed a parallel and preferable version of reality."
