I don't mean this to be snarky at all, but I think you have to define "the left" to get this answered appropriately. There's lots of people who could encompass "the left" depending on who's defining it, who might have very different reasons.
That's exactly what I was looking for, so thank you.
In that bunch I'd say a mix of scientific illiteracy and only seeing what you want to believe in the media.
In my experiences anyone outside of my scientific acquaintances network who I send a journal article to goes "I don't know what that means." They might, deep down, believe that there's a real problem with COVID, they've almost certainly been told that by someone at some point, but everyone else is out without a mask, and Wen/Gandhi/Balloux/etc said on NPR or in the WaPo that everything's fine, so it probably is.
Out of people I know first hand or tangentially through other people who have admitted that they got COVID and have had issues ever since, every one of them for 2 years now said they knew there were risks but it was easier to ignore the possibility and reassure themselves with minimizer articles than to reconfigure their lives. Complete and total COVID ignorance still exists, but it's way less common than we'd like to believe.
