I agree public health officials in certain countries did a poor job. For the most part they were medical professionals who aren't necessarily experts (though some of them were and some countries had expert advisers to set policy). There were many unknowns and it wasn't clear what to optimize for.

Public health is tricky and you might be faced with various dilemmas getting people to potentially do something that might not be beneficial for them as individuals for the (supposed?) sake of the community. Supposedly one reason why masks were not recommended, despite their sort of obvious effect on respiratory diseases, was to prevent a run on masks that are needed by medical teams. Is this sort of white lie ok? Would telling the truth result in a higher toll for medical professionals? This isn't simple. What I mind more is the sort of doubling down on the obviously wrong advice when the shortages weren't there any more, which seems to be an ego thing.

I think the science was decent and there was access to most of it. There were real gaps in terms of where the virus was going to go and the new vaccines. What was lacking was not really science but rather common sense and maybe what we may call engineering. Science is too slow to react to emergencies.

Clearly the pandemic was a traumatic event for humanity with long term consequences, including erosion of trust.