Blame the sheep
Even if you believe there are groups sufficiently powerful to purposely induce collective hysteria (it’s actually mathematically impossible), those that fell into it are themselves culpable for having done so.
~ The evidence was available if they had looked.
~ Had they supported civil liberties, they would not have supported the draconian interventions.
~ Had they had any grasp of their own human tendency to groupthink, they might have extricated themselves.
And politicians and anyone else with positions of power are more culpable than the rest.
~~
As an aside, I’m happy to say that, despite censorship from all the angles, my Science Moment channel at YouTube just reached 4000 subscribers. I never intended to get up close and personal on issues in and around politics, but what a dearth of leaders within academia we discovered come March of 2020!
~~
Don’t forget to get a copy of our decade-in-the-making book, Expressly Human. My ability to promote it is getting harder each day, what with yet another one week ban at Twitter.
The Academic and Medical 'professionals' acquitted themselves disgracefully, for the most part. You'd maybe expect all that education to inoculate a mind against the allure of Totalitarianism. Apparently, it doesn't. I might even speculate the reverse, that the educated mind provides the richest soil.
Re: "it’s actually mathematically impossible"
Why? Is there a video on that? Seems to me that money can buy near-unlimited outreach. If Pfizer, Gates, whoever; drop big bags of money off at all of major media, media will say just about anything. Then there's at LEAST 10% of the population stupid enough to digest and regurgitate almost literally anything and another ~70% of the population is willing to farm out all their critical thinking skills to their favorite "expert".
When the media drums beat loud enough on an issue, ~80% of the population keeps their mouths shut and they fall in line; their understanding of their cultural zeitgeist is formed by media and the 10% of idiots . If all of media and 10% of the population is going nuts, and dissent is quashed, then it's just a downward spiral from there and I think the criteria for "hysteria" has been met. And all it took to get going was big bags of money, and a morally aimless society.
I'm not sold on Gates and WEF's influence, but I don't understand your confidence that you can objectively demonstrate they were not able to puppeteer civilization into hysteria.