With all due respect, this statement tells me with near-certainty that you've never worked a patient-facing role in healthcare. The fact that you feel free to espouse your opinion on the subject directly related to patient-facing care should be a red flag to you.

I have worked in healthcare as a paramedic. My wife is a nurse. My mother is a nurse. My brother-in-law is an MD. The public-health policy makers usually have worked in patient-facing healthcare. My local public health director was one of the best and brightest physicians I've EVER met. He cut his teeth working on eradicating smallpox in his youth, and has remarkable depth in his knowledge of epidemiology. ...All of us agree that this definitely IS different than the status quo. It is NOT different from historical precedent though, and there are many people that are quite alert to these things. These same people would notice unusual clusters of patients suggesting a terrorist attack, chemical exposure, water contamination, etc. Just because it requires knowledge you do not have doesn't mean that experts wouldn't have identified this. Which, funny enough, is exactly what DID happen.

If I frame all dysfunctional human interactions through the lens of “tyranny” then I see “tyranny” everywhere.

That is how all confirmation biases works. That is why they are all uninteresting.

Falsifying one’s own biases is much more fun...

The world today is less tyrannical (as per Orwell’s concept) than it was when he was alive. Only when you ignore all moral progress do you get to paint contemporary society with Orwell’s brush.