Now what is the measure by which that is judged? Of course, if we are to say that only the governments with a spotless record are trustworthy, then the only trustworthy governments are fictional ones.
That might be a bit unreasonable of an expectation for an organization made up of fallible humans, though, so many reason that some non-zero number of mistakes are inevitably bound to happen, even within bounds of trustworthiness.
At the end of the day, trust is a personal judgement call. But it's my opinion that if you have an impossible standard of trust, you may just have an unreasonable opinion.
This isn’t an engineering problem where you can just hit some metric. Trust gets earned informally on person-by-person terms over a long period of time.
People in St. Louis died / were killed at the direction of the US Army. Frankly, if they decide they don’t trust vaccines that government officials recommend, I can’t tell them their distrust is invalid. They’d be right. For decades, administration after administration has lied to them about what the government did to sabotage their health.
The course of action in this specific case that would build rapport would be to plainly tell the public the truth. It’s not rocket science where you have to invent a metric. Keeping the secret allows the government to avoid oversight. So that it can do the same sort of thing again? Because it is doing the same sort of thing right now?
Yes, as I said, trust is a personal judgement call.
However, I doubt anyone who distrusts the damn COVID vaccine because of the story in the OP is not going to be convinced by anything. There's such a ridiculously weak association between those activities that the person is simply ignorant of how the world works.
Their personal beliefs may be sincere, but they are not a person worth convincing of anything because they draw their conclusions through superficial means.
Consider the perspective of a person whose loved ones died because the US Government sabotaged their health.
They might know more about how the world works than you imagine.
“not a person worth convincing” — Not worth convincing them to protect their health? Clearly their health was considered expendable by the government when the experiments were carried out. The government should demonstrate that this fact has changed.
The US government is not some monolith. It's ~3 million different people, under different operational silos, none of whom worked there back when the project in the OP happened. The link between Pfizer/BioNTech and the Manhattan-Rochester Coalition is extremely weak. The severity of anyone's experience has nothing to do with any strength or weakness of that link.
If there is no longer anything to hide then government officials should be open and candid about what happened to begin to restore trust. In theory they work to serve us.
If someone believes that Pfizer/BioNTech and the Manhattan-Rochester Coalition have anything in common that is relevant to their trustworthiness, there's no amount of transparency that can convince them of anything.
Really, the only way you can be sure that nobody is out to get you is to disconnect from society entirely. Otherwise, you'll have to trust others a little bit.
For me, I'm pretty sure that the Manhattan Project doesn't have much to do with the operations at Moderna.
Other than the US using a fake vaccination program to find Osama.
I say this as someone who got the vaccine as someone first in the line.
I’m pissed at the government doing this, because I can’t blame folks for not trusting the government over this. And what that means is the next pandemic will take so much longer to deal with because of this distrust.
I absolutely understand why someone might not understand the practical and operational differences between the development of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and how that chain of command has nothing in common with CIA operations in Pakistan. It's a very explainable opinion, but that doesn't mean it is correct.
If you "understand why someone might not understand," then I don't get how you could also believe someone with an incorrect understanding "is not going to be convinced by anything" or, even worse, is "not a person worth convincing of anything."
Your response to conspiracy theorists is to place the burden of proof on them and then ignore them since your understanding transcends theirs? That may work for you as an individual, but on a macro scale, it seems defeatist, and also unhelpful to all sides (since you're neither convincing them to give up unfounded theories, nor increasing safety against actual conspiracies for yourself).
If a government agency doesn’t use vaccines as a vector for some ulterior purpose, then it’s nothing like the other time when it used vaccines for some ulterior purpose?
The pronoun 'it' in that sentence is referring to tens of millions of different people in different centuries. It is absolutely silly to pretend that they're a single actor.
Again, you're saying this as if it is a monolith, which it isn't. The information you're asking for isn't something that "the government" as a whole even has, only a very few specific people ever had the information and they're probably dead now. And certainly the CDC/FDA/NIH doesn't have a clue. So distrusting them for something they don't even know about is hand-waving away a whole hell of a lot of nuance here.
You might as well say that you're not going to trust anything Tom Brady says until the NFL tells the truth about Nicole Brown's death. Just because someone is a member of a group doesn't mean they're all acting in lock step.
Now what is the measure by which that is judged? Of course, if we are to say that only the governments with a spotless record are trustworthy, then the only trustworthy governments are fictional ones.
That might be a bit unreasonable of an expectation for an organization made up of fallible humans, though, so many reason that some non-zero number of mistakes are inevitably bound to happen, even within bounds of trustworthiness.
At the end of the day, trust is a personal judgement call. But it's my opinion that if you have an impossible standard of trust, you may just have an unreasonable opinion.