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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

My issue is that why did US health officials say masks were not effective against respiratory infections, when health officials from Asian countries had deemed them effective.

Because Asian countries were basing their advice on science and the US was basing the advice on what would poll well with Republican voters who believe individual freedom is more important than community welfare. The US absolutely did have access to all the science, and chose to (temporarily) ignore it in order to try to gain votes the presidential election.

If Asian countries had been going in to an election and courting votes from a strongly conservative base their advice would have been different.

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I have to disagree on your assessment about whether our science community based the advice on polls from Republican voters.

I was in favor of masks (might have helped since I lived in Asia previously), and debating people early on about the usage. I don't know about now, but there was a lack of published evidence on non n95 masks, and even the use of n95 masks were debatable because of fit tests.

As someone else pointed out, this is what Sweden says to this day.

"The scientific evidence around the effectiveness of face masks in combatting the spread of infection is weak, which is why different countries have arrived at different recommendations."

I doubt the Swedes are trying to sway the US election.

https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/the-public-health-agency...

France officials had the very same discourse regarding masks (highly discouraged in February and March, became mandatory in a lot of places in July). The current government is very much closer to US democrats than republicans, to say the least. Probably not a right vs left decision.

Masks can't crush a pandemic. See daily cases in Japan.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/japan/

The science you are referring to is very weak. The only randomized trial on cloth masks was completed in 2015.

>Because Asian countries were basing their advice on science

Actually for the most part this isn't true, our government was also telling us to wear masks but because of our previous experience with SARS everyone wore them anyway. Now of course it is illegal not to wear one.

> Because Asian countries were basing their advice on science and the US was basing the advice on what would poll well with Republican voters who believe individual freedom is more important than community welfare.

It was the WHO who repeatedly stated that healthy people shouldn't wear masks, or close borders for that matter, and most politicians across the world didn't question that. And why would they, it's the job of the WHO to understand the science for us.

(If anything, Trump was initially harder on COVID than most by pushing for travel restrictions. At that time it was the Democratic NYC establishment that put individual freedom over safety [1], the two positions only flipped later on.)

The initial response, especially by the WHO, was an absolutely disaster. Asian countries did better than the US and the West in general because they _didn't_ listen to the 'experts'.

[1] https://twitter.com/billdeblasio/status/1234648718714036229

Of note, all the stuff about border closures making things worse was 100% politically motivated bullshit with no foundation in science - even the New York Times ended up admitting it: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/world/europe/ski-party-pa... (What they don't admit to, but was really obvious at the time, is that in the US it was driven in part by anti-Trump politics - the press quite openly associated it with all his other border policies they hated, there was a piece of pre-pandemic fiction about Trump frantically closing all the borders to stop a disease that was already in the US that circulated all over social media as a supposedly prophetic warning, and I think Biden's campaign even pushed the idea that Trump's travel restrictions made things worse after that NYT piece came out. Of course, in reality it was actually the whole of Europe who ended up frantically closing all their borders far too late, whilst the US stuck to targeted and relatively timely travel restrictions - if I recall correctly, pretty much the exact opposite of the "prophetic" anti-Trump fiction.)

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