The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill (From Wired) presents a pretty curious tale of science policy, and the way that rules-of-thumb tend to propagate to become well-know-truths.
This is not the first time I've come across this type of story (or the more general case that an oft-repeated thing becomes truth since 'there is no need to check because "it is obvious"; after all, "it is being said everywhere".', not to mention the many related "conditions", such as illusory truth or confirmation bias)... but it is the first time that I've seen something like this so directly related to a major public-health crisis. A parable for our times indeed.