The game is stacked against you pretty heavily. Fact checkers optimize for factual content, disinfo is optimized for spread.

One has an economy of scale which works very well, and even yields financial incentives, the other does not accomplish either. https://twitter.com/JaneLytv/status/1259515144276774912

Agriculture struggled against this for years: farmers and professors trying to break through an increasingly loud, well monetized group spreading disinfo about GMOs.

The economics of attention didnt work out, and expert market share never took off

Unfortunately the experts themselves are still torn on the right approach: optimize for virality and potentially come off as a jerk? Use a more traditional scicomms approach that gets maybe 1/10th the traction?

Meanwhile press continued a "both sides" approach to the science.

This will only get worse. Class action suits will inevitably pop up in the space as people will see a revenue stream from doing so, and a jury of laymen are now reasonably open to the idea that maybe a COVID vaccine IS dangerous

I am doubtful a vaccine ever reaches market

A huge part of the problem? We dont understand how consensus around these things gets formed by the public terribly well just yet.

But it's a highly effective tactic to put just enough doubt around the expert perspective and nullify that high ground.

And so the experts show up with the science behind them only to find the battlefield is entirely flat, and that they lack the mechanism for capturing the needed attention that the other side has.

Sappers had undermined the scientific consensus faster than they realized