A couple things made me notice things were off.

Jay Battacharaya and another author published a piece on the WSJ, around April 2020, arguing that COVID isn't as deadly as some are claiming. They argued from a natural experiment of a cruise ship full of elderly people which had a COVID outbreak and was quarantined for some time, yet the severity of cases was quite mild. Yet this piece was largely ignored and they were smeared as prioritizing money over lives (since they were on the side of ending lockdowns)

Around the same time, I kept hearing the words "Follow the science" being bandied about everywhere, including by my own administrators. But I know that science is something that takes a lot of time. I knew that there couldn't have been much science to follow at that point, so "follow the science" didn't make sense. I then realized that all they mean by follow science is actually "follow the government policy".