Organize with socialists, make use of mutual aid. Provides an IRL version of what you’re seeking here- uou are in no way alone. This is how most people live and it is by systemic design.
There’s a lot of power, and value, in making local irl connections so that when you need help or just to talk to people, you’ll know that you have options. Also, some options take time, so getting on top of them now will pay dividends. Examples include food stamps and subsidized housing. Finally, lefties sometimes like to help each other get better jobs.
Of course I can also suggest ways to live cheaply, but there is a hard limit under this economic system and you might already be there.
Also please feel free to DM if you want to talk about anything.
The core issue is ignorance and and poor abilities at investigation. School fails so many people. And, societally, most people seem to feel they’re entitled to opinions even if they know nothing or very little about a topic, which helps keep them ignorant and unable to critically investigate topics and sources.
Finally, the “trust in institutions” issue. These institutions should not be trusted, they have been overtaken by capitalism. Healthcare is profit-driven and the tendency is towards poorer science that covers up dangers and inflates benefits. In addition, people have no sense of agency over the state (they’re correct about that), so a feeling of understanding can temporarily substitute that.
The question is what to do about it. Well, individually, you can do very little. You can try to convince people through argumentation, like you mentioned, but this is very difficult. The example of vaccines makes it clear that this is someone that bought into these ideas without critically engaging. They probably did so for a number of reasons, including societally-ingrained hubris, peer pressure, personal experience, personality, politics, and the production value of whatever got to them first. Your task is to sow doubt (ask challenging questions) and try to rebuild from shared understanding.
The best way to combat this, more generally, is not as an individual, but as a member of an active organization that combats all of this at once, and with a plan for how to do so adequately. This would best be a socialist org, as the thing you’re fighting is actually the discursive mass media and education aspects of capitalism. e.g. on COVID’s origins, the common understandings and claims in the West are simplistic and unscientific, and only exist for political reasons, to scapegoat why a given country did so poorly at handling the pandemic, to isolate China in a new cold war. You could become an expert in the science, follow geographic phylogenies and the terminology of epidemiology, but you don’t really need to: you really just need media criticism skills, which is all about politics, economics, and being a big nerd.