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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

The guy from Slate Star Codex made a great point about this: Initially, the CDC refused to recommend wearing masks to inhibit virus transmission because there weren't rigorous studies supporting that usage. At the time they must have viewed it as irresponsible to recommend protective measures that weren't properly evidenced.

But, the reason there weren't rigorous studies supporting mask usage was not because they don't work, but because nobody was willing to run a study where you exposed half the subjects to a virus without any protection just to prove that masks would help the other half. It's the same reason there aren't any double-blind studies proving that parachutes help you if you fall out of a plane.

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That’s not the primary reason. They selfishly wanted to protect mask supplies for medical use and so spread FUD around public mask usage. It was criminal and people should be held accountable. Masks work for some value and whatever that value is, it accumulates as more people wear masks, and the idiots in charge gave up months of that reduction so that people wouldn’t buy up all the masks at Home Depot. Only they still bought all the masks, and then used the CDC’s own FUD as their own to not wear them and convince everyone else not to wear them.

When I bought my N95 masks in mid february, every Home Depot has already been cleared out and the masks sent to China where they were valuable. I had to visit 5 stores to buy a few leftover.

That was well before the CDC and surgeon general were telling people masks are bad for you don’t buy them. The masks were long gone by then.

I don't consider that selfish. It's like Triage. Healthy doctors and other medical professionals are of special importance in a pandemic, and preserving supplies of protective equipment for them was especially important.

It’s selfish when the advice isn’t “we need n95s, everyone else please at least pull your shirt over your nose”

White lies are still lies that cause people to lose faith in any advice you might have.

Given how easy it is to create home made mask which is better then none, it is absurd.

> That’s not the primary reason. They selfishly wanted to protect mask supplies for medical use and so spread FUD around public mask usage.

No, this is specifically addressed in the SSC piece. The CDC has been against masks for many years; their advice on masks this year was the same advice they've always given. There is absolutely no reason to believe they put any further thought into it than that.

For what is worth: many health authorities world-wide have used the same strategy (conserve mask for healthcare by not advocating/dissuading their use). Taiwan and Korea being notable outliers.

So it is not that the CDC was malicious / selfish / conspiring. They did what they believed was the best policy response. Even if we know better now that they should have just published instructions on making community masks and advocating their use.

> Initially, the CDC refused to recommend wearing masks to inhibit virus transmission because there weren't rigorous studies supporting that usage.

> nobody was willing to run a study where you exposed half the subjects to a virus without any protection

Running the studies is effectively impossible due to ethics constraints. The CDC were probably lying about their reasoning because if you put all these facts together the CDC would not ever be able to take a position on countermeasures until it was clearly too late. I dunno what their idea of Disease Control is for pandemic, but a little bit of "balance of probability" thinking probably happened.

Even if we'd discovered masks were a complete waste of time, the cost-benefit of everybody spending $10 for hastily sewn cloth mask was clearly in favour of recommending the idea. We've had entire economies parked up, I'm sure the labour could have been found to do some knitting. As projects go it would have been a very productive use of time. They just didn't want to disrupt the supply of medical masks and showed a rather dire level of panic and unpreparedness.

Archive link to the referenced post: https://web.archive.org/web/20200415084132/https://slatestar...

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