I mean, I don't think that anti-intellectual trend can be divorced from the general messaging problems here. If you roll back to mid-March 2020, things like

* Masks don't help, there's no point in wearing them

* Lots of people are gonna get infected, all we can do is tamp down this current spike

* We'll go back to our normal lives in a month or two

were all well within what was reported to be the expert consensus at the time.