And yet, on February 25 this year, an unvaccinated child died of measles in Texas. Amid vaccine scepticism, the disease, declared eliminated in the US in 2000, has seen a resurgence.

This is the central paradox of the post-Covid era: that unparalleled scientific achievement could do little to halt a profound collapse in institutional trust.

The pandemic should have reinforced the idea of expertise; instead, somehow, movements around the world that undermine it have grown.

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The scientific response to Covid-19 represented human collaboration at its most brilliant. Researchers redirected their collective energy in a manner reminiscent of history’s greatest collective efforts (think, the Manhattan Project and the Apollo space programme).

By the end of 2020, journal repository PubMed Central hosted 89,000 Covid-related submissions. Traditional competitors shared data. Pharmaceutical companies compressed decades-long vaccine timelines into months.

Diagnostic capabilities expanded. Countries built oxygen plants almost overnight. Medical protocols evolved rapidly as clinicians shared frontline discoveries. By late 2021, genomic surveillance systems detected variants with increasing speed, allowing for more targeted responses.

Even public health messaging, while far from perfect, demonstrated extraordinary reach. By March 2020, for instance, the idea of “flattening the curve” entered the global vernacular. Billions adopted new habits, and countries implemented varying degrees of lockdown.

Yet as science advanced, public consensus fractured.

By mid-2020, at least in parts of the world, masks were political symbols as much as they were public health tools. Vaccines — breakthroughs by any objective standard — became objects of suspicion. Among those who refused to take them were the tennis star Novak Djokovic, who opted to forgo his spot in the 2022 Australian Open instead.

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The virus didn’t create this epistemic crisis, though it did reveal and accelerate it.

“Post-truth” was the Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year in 2016. It was defined then as circumstances in which “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. (The term itself dates to the 1990s.)

Meanwhile, in his 2018 book Post-Truth, philosopher Lee McIntyre warned that the systematic rejection of empirical standards for establishing truth represented an existential threat to democratic discourse. What followed was a fundamental weakening of societal immune systems against misinformation. Holocaust deniers and flat-earthers, who once occupied fringe spaces, gained in strength.

During the pandemic, conspiracy theories reached mainstream adoption, with QAnon followers moving from niche forums to the steps of the US Capitol.

The result: facts about vaccine efficacy, viral origins and treatment protocols became contested not on scientific grounds but ideological ones. Institutional pronouncements no longer settled debates; they initiated them.

While the problem is not solely an American one, it is perhaps best captured by the American experience. The second Trump administration has chosen, as its key decisionmakers, people who have prominently defied institutional wisdom.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, who once claimed Covid was “targeted to attack Caucasians and black people” while sparing “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese”, now guides health policy in the US, as secretary of health and human services.

Elon Musk, currently in charge of reshaping the country’s government workforce, has spoken in support of conspiracy theories that range from dangers hidden in Covid vaccines to voter fraud in the 2020 election.

The damage extends beyond one administration and one pandemic.

The erosion of expertise extends well beyond public health too, causing cascading failures across domains that rely on scientific consensus.

The US is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and appears to be retreating from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) entirely, driven by the climate-sceptic policies of the new administration. The Trump government has fired hundreds of researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), weakening not just America’s climate research capabilities but global ones.

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In a strange dichotomy, we are now both stronger and weaker, as a global community, than we were a decade ago.

We have a vastly enhanced technical capacity to combat future pandemics and emergencies. New vaccine platforms allow for rapid drug development, genomic surveillance systems can now provide early warnings, and treatment protocols are refined and ready.

But our social capacity to implement these solutions has deteriorated dramatically.

This is where the pandemic paradox reaches its fullest expression: we emerged from it with unprecedented tools to fight disease but unprecedented resistance to using them.

The measles outbreak in the US exemplifies this irony: deaths from a disease the world has known how to prevent for decades.

How we seem to be learning precisely the wrong lessons from the pandemic is a social and political question that calls for deep enquiry (and urgent correction). For now, this might be the truest legacy of Covid-19: that it shone a spotlight on the erosion of epistemological commons upon which our response to the next crisis depends.

And the next crisis isn’t just coming, it’s here. Breaking new records one temperature breach at a time.

(binayak.dasgupta@htlive.com)