Except that, until very recently, most of the relevant data has been freely available. What is still being collected is available too, but isn't as complete because testing is being curtailed. You can download rather complete data sets directly from the government of Ontario's public facing COVID websites, and you can get epidemiological studies directly from Public Health. Same with Government of Canada COVID data trends page, and probably every province. I don't have the time to analyze them all, since it's merely a personal pre-occupation, but I know how and where to look. It's similar enough to my own work that I can tell where a recommendation is soft pedaled in order to pass bureaucratic/political muster. The essential information is right there, both in data and essentially plain English, even when the language is softened considerably.
Since the pandemic began, at nearly every turn, Federal and Provincial decision makers have had the information they need well in advance, but there have been a number of key instances where decisions were needlessly delayed despite broad scientific and medical consensus.
The impression of dissent fostered by social media is one thing - seeking out and amplifying outliers in order to torque the narrative. Perhaps even more problematic is a general weakness in mainstream scientific media that doesn't really understand the importance of scientific process, which is essentially conservative about what it knows, and loathe to make absolute declarative statements. That's not sexy. Media wants the "news" and so often reports on the most tantalizing bit, the hypothesis itself. This is the suspicion, albeit of trained investigators (scientists), that can't possibly be rigorously tested yet, that might simply be a misread clue, or a completely irrelevant one. It leads people to believe that science is dancing all over the place and cherry-picking data to serve some other agenda, when it most certainly objectively is not doing anything other than testing hypotheses that are falsifiable - that is, can be refuted by empirical test or observation. Over time this kind of reporting reduces everything to pseudoscientific impressions and conjectures which no one appears to refute, because it's not reported when they are refuted. The refutation is where all the science is, but the "news" doesn't cover that. People don't understand what they're seeing/hearing is at best incomplete and then... politics, conspiracy, confirmation bias, general ignorance despite the sheer abundance of information. This produces other dissonances in the population. Ask yourself how can people with so much information understand so little? We live on a continent where in recent memory, since the Scopes trial in the USA, 14 states have tried by various tactics to insert creationism or otherwise limit the teaching of evolution in science curriculum.
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