Let's begin with a few facts. Business people have an interest in making money, i.e., taking money out of your pocket and putting it in their own. That's it. That sums up what the goal of business and businesspersons is.
Journalists have an interest in attracting readers to purchase copies of their newspapers or periodicals, i.e., distracting your attention away from other sources of news and information. That's it. That's what they do. They write stories to attract readers enabling their investors-mostly local businesses and multi-national corporations who pay for advertisements- to make money off of the readers.
Politicians have an interest in getting elected to office. That's it. That's all that they do. Sure, they talk about having an interest in their constituency, but politicians need to make a living. To do that they must be elected to office every 4 to 6 years. So, they are constantly campaigning. For some, such as the current President, he never stopped campaigning. Since day-1, he's had more than 300 campaign rallies to ensure that others do not gain any ground over him.
In a pandemic, the general public need reliable data coming from authoritative resources to make judgements about what to do. Unfortunately, because people whose primary responsibility is to collect and to convey this information to us have interests of their own, they have failed to provide people with timely mission-critical data.
There is a pandemic of misinformation that few, if any, are able to organise, sort, disseminate, and distribute. For example, some privately owned data collection companies have begun to scrape data from questionable sources, published interpretations of said questionable data, and then used these seriously bad findings to convince you that you should give up your personal privacy by enrolling in their data collection schemes.
The coronavirus has led to some seriously problematic behaviour in the business and government community. Businesses are capitalising on people's fear. These companies stand to make a tremendous amount of money from the general public's vulnerable state. Perhaps in a few years time research ethicists will be publishing articles and books on how bad this time period was. To my mind, deep within the thick fog of the pandemic, I believe that there are private companies using the fear and anxiety to gain a market advantage. Such behaviour should be stopped because they resemble the horrors of the Stanford Prison Experiment.