There's also the evidence-based Medicine vs. the ratings-based Security (HSE?) Theater thing.

Medicine vs. Quackery didn't really differentiate in the mind of the public until sometime between antibiotics and advances in trauma care (and CPR, to a lesser extent) in the mid-21st century. Things like antibiotics, X-rays, naloxone, tourniquets, hip replacements, "actually" work. Like work work, in a way that is visible and relatable in simple mechanical terms. Nothing like the Ghosts In The Blood and The Mysteries of The Poppy Seed of our ancestors.

Unfortunately, there's simply not a whole lot to do about a whole lot of things, other than essentially rest, eat well, stay hydrated (no alcohol), smoke fewer cigarettes, and maybe something to ease the discomfortable symptoms. This can be barely acceptable for a physician to say, let alone a press secretary, let alone one from The Bad Team.

Headaches[1] and anesthesia[2], as counterexamples, are not as straightforward. Note the number of ridiculous* headache treatments across time and space, as well as the number of "Science Has Solved Anesthesia!" articles[3] (it has but a first significant piece to the puzzle).

But these really only affect the individual and don't spread like a communicable disease (or ransomware, Big Homo, witchcraft, etc.), so they're also bad examples in a way. Humanity gets really weird when we can't see (and/or shoot) The Problem - Spooky Actions At A Distance or something, idk. Things also get controversial in the area of what the AHA classifies as IIB or III[A] recommendations[9], where there are different shades of "doesn't work", only one of which is really harmful.

Anyway, all of this is to say that there's a certain common-sense value to certain things [4,5,6,7,8], if only the appearance of doing something to appease a scared and generally-ignorant public.

The measures themselves are also mostly common-sense, and designed in parallel ("Swiss Cheese Model") with the knowledge that they won't all be followed all the time, and are targeted and measured over large aggregates (states, counties, 100k people, weeks, months). Nobody is necessarily harmed by someone not wearing a mask, because its benefit is probabilistic by design.

But there's always that group of people, usually with exceptionally little knowledge of the subject area at hand, who insist that, e.g., construction workers must wear gloves and safety goggles while eating lunch (the sign does say "PPE must be worn at all times"!), that life jackets must be worn even on shore, and so on, who are so self-assured/righteous in their ignorance that not only are they unafraid, but feel compelled to push their ignorance on everyone else, because they misunderstand things so badly.

This seems to be the real crime, which made everything more authoritarian than it needed to be. Consent is predicated on being informed, and it's no surprise people felt all kinds of ways about having to make major life changes based on flimsy evidence, especially all of the overly-simple, factually-incorrect (but probably well-meaning) statements made - again, mostly not by Scientists writing Science -but blue checkmarks, journalists, the Tumblrati, etc.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5353082/
[2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2004259117
[3] https://www.futurity.org/general-anesthesia-sleep-brains-neu...
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/
[5] https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
[6] https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2019/02/breakthrough-resea...
[7] https://acumenmd.com/blog/seriously-use-a-parachute/
[8] https://www.futuremedicine.com/doi/10.2217/cer-2021-0171
[9] https://www.wikidoc.org/index.php/File:Classofrecommendation...