The undermining of science has given people like this more of a voice. US leadership has got to the point where science is largely disregarded and leaders just impose whatever they think is true regardless of facts.
The hydroxychloroquine debacle is one thing because there's no way as a layman to gauge that. It's still wrong, but I understand that people were worried and there's no intuitive route to "this won't help".
This feels like something where even laymen should be skeptical. Baseline, disinfectants are generally not medicine. Really, I would hope our education system was good enough that people hear "chlorinated disinfectant" and can jump to "probably an oxidizer and very bad for living things".
When hydroxychloroquine was first proposed for COVID there was actually reason to think it might help. It is known to interfere with one of the mechanisms that COVID uses to enter cell membranes. The FDA in the US and equivalent regulators in many other countries gave it an emergency use authorization.
A few months later with more data it was found that it had some bad side effects and that it wasn't actually useful against COVID (most of the time COVID used a mechanism other than the one that hydroxychloroquine interfered with to enter cells).
Scientific method is practical. Scientific fact is a belief system, not unlike religion. This doesn’t undermine science, it’s just stating what these things are. Scientific belief can be helpful.
These silly beliefs though can be harmful as is the case with Chlorine Dioxide and that horse deworming medicine they said would cure Covid.
Don’t confuse or try to link these things together. The reason that the government is now full of idiots is that people voted those idiots in. It wasn’t due to clarity that science is part belief system.
In my unbroken experience, they possess a demonstrated ability to believe in trivially disproven lies.
Some might say, who cares about what idiots think? Well, these idiots get one vote, just like the rest of us.
If it was just laziness, their belief wouldn't persist in the face of better information.
Willfully clasping onto an absurd premise this way strongly implies to me there is some sub-optimal psychology in play. There is a needful relationship inside that is being sustained (at a starvation level) by these exploitive external forces.
You can still have and respect beliefs, but distinguishing fact from belief is purely in the realm of philosophical debate. That doesn’t mean you have to accept absence of absolute truth or facts, but there is much we don’t know and that we think we know but we don’t, and that is logical and illogical. Life is dichotomy.