It's not a nefarious plot....it's the incentives. Now we're into the realm of economics and the impact of incentives on human behavior. In terms of the structure, there has been a lot of money to be made out of COVID. From the beginning, for example, Fauci heavily funneled money into studying vaccines, less money to study new drugs, and almost no money for repurposed medicines. Have you asked yourself why?
Masks are a similar story. Remember the story of lockdowns (at least in the west excluding the very severe initial lockdowns imposed by some of the Europeans) has been that white collar workers basically work from home, but blue collar workers (ranging not just in supermarkets and pharmacies garbage fire police and medical offices/hospitals, but also pot shops, liquor stores, constructions, plumbing, heading/air, fast food, restaurant take out, factories, and even retail) had to keep working. So you had the well off basically able to isolate but the not so well off forced to work. Needless to say some of the "essential workers" (among which remember teachers were too scared to work) were worried about spending long hours with coworkers and magically the government came out with "masks are better than vaccines"...and when the Danish study came out, it was pulled from publication twice (which the authors the study themselves attributed to the fact that there was censorship).
Then remember there was the entire CDC school reopenings guidance and it turned out one group which was drafting it was the teachers unions.
I know you might like to think that science is this purity, but when it gets mixed in with politics it's not, and it's terribly naive of you to assume it is (no doubt because being a part of that group, you want to think the best of it). It's not a grand conspiracy theory, but it does have to do with human incentives...and as I told dad4 before: I'm not interested in preaching....preachers have their role in society....I'm also not interested in the purity of the science....that's what people in the field are for....what I'm interested in is policy, but because of the failure of science, we are left with a paucity of conclusions, so lot's of people are guessing, and more often than not, those on team panic/safety have been more wrong than rightl
p.s. I'm actually not putting in that much effort into it. As I've noted, one of the limitations which I will gladly cope to is that I don't have the time or interest to deep dive. I'm only interested to the extent it has any actual impact on policy, which i can in turn use to see where the future is going.