People just aren’t buying appeals to authority anymore. They are demanding more.

In the US, people just don’t seem to trust the status quo. The government is very, very corrupt and has been for a long time. Corporations are shady and many have been implicated in some pretty damning controversies that have affected our health with relatively little consequence. Regulation essentially doesn’t exist.

If experts explained why certain “controversial” things are safe and laid out the science and reasoning, a lot of these concerns would likely vanish.

But, we generally don’t address concerns, even concerns that seem fairly legitimate to the people that hold them. We attack these people, calling them names - effectively pushing them further down their rabbit holes. Plenty stand to profit off of their fears and encourage their (potentially dangerous) perspectives.

And we definitely don’t address legitimate concerns properly (from experts or otherwise), which adds fuel to the fire (and adds legitimacy to these bad actors who are quick to point out these issues) and more trustworthy sources are silent.

This is all a failure of media, government, leadership, and education. I reason that distrust in experts is a symptom of those failures.