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Comment by outime | Hacker News Reader

> You could be truthful and say "While masks are effective, please dont horde them as they are needed by the hospitals".

I’m not a politician nor I defend most of them in general but do you expect that people would not hoard them when everyone was (back then) panicking at a new extreme deadly virus?

So the easiest solution (not necessarily the best) was to do politics which is to deceive. If a country says that the masks are very effective yet only selected people will get them, even if it makes sense factually speaking, riots will ensue because that’s how masses work (in most big countries anyway). If you deceive, you gain time and everyone will eventually get their own masks, which is how it played out.

Hopefully I don’t get shunned by this. I’m just trying to illustrate that plain transparency at extreme situations may just not be an easy option as you put it.

Edit: wording

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When you are an institution like the CDC you need to be trusted to be effective. So, yes, the most expedient solution to the mask problem is to lie, but it's not worth the long term damage to credibility when they are inevitably caught in that lie.

It’s a pick your poison situation. Reputation may have been damaged (who knows really, masses seem to forget rather quickly nowadays) but the alternative might just have caused a lot more trouble.

No, when you're the CDC, you disseminate the facts as they are known at the time. You don't lie to supposedly keep masks from being hoarded. Considering that's exactly what happened, I fail to see how it could have turned out much worse.

Just take a look at Fauci as an individual. He's never said masks don't work. He did say "there's no reason to be walking around with a mask," back in March, but, back in March, that was likely true. And, it's not like he hasn't reversed himself when new data comes in. That's precisely why he still has credibility: because what he says is always in line with the best available data.

I can’t talk specifics about CDC as I’m european but this way of acting was present in most of the countries around the world and I think it’s somewhat safe to think that it decreased masks demand to a certain point (1%? 20%? 30%?). Even in solid democracies with high trust like Finland they lied so that people wouldn’t hoard that much.

Also I IMHO doubt that Fauci didn’t know about mask effectiveness - sure, maybe he didn’t know the very specifics but it was kind of obvious back then it wasn’t going to harm and one could infer that it’d probably help somewhat (nowadays it’s clear). IMHO all authorities just agreed to transmit a similar message around the world so they could in the meantime arrange more mask orders and sort out the distribution as production speeded up while avoiding massive riots and/or poor masks made at home that could’ve been worse than nothing.

He didn't say they weren't effective. He said it wasn't worthwhile to be walking around wearing one at that time. The virus wasn't anywhere near as prevalent then as it is now, and, people had no real sense of how quickly this thing could spread.

People were going to hoard masks no matter what. Lying to them doesn't help, but it definitely reduces trust.

We can’t know for sure but I bet many people didn’t hoard or didn’t even bother to buy any in the beginning because of this announcement. At big scale (e.g. USA) this means millions of saved masks.

And I agree with your last point of course.

> At big scale (e.g. USA) this means millions of saved masks.

At what cost? How many people have died because mask wearing was discouraged during the early part of the pandemic? We will probably never know, but I would not be surprised if that advice caused a lot of deaths by allowing the virus to spread more easily.

The benefit was to save masks so health workers would get them (at least most of them) and the goal was more or less met. Cost? Probably too high. Alternatives?

Again I don’t defend these actions, I’m just trying to reason why they decided to go that way and not the most instintive one “let’s be fully transparent” (at least for HN anyway).

The many public figures dismissing masks after things really got going in July killed more people than the communication mistakes in February. Then they kept dismissing them in August and September and October and November and December, and many are still doing it now.

Face coverings were ordered in many states starting in April.

This is true.

A competent administration would have bought up enough of (or all of) the PPE inventory as soon as they understood what was coming. At that point, there would have been no need to lie, because there would have been nothing left for the public to hoard.

I'm not blaming the CDC, or the SG. I'm blaming the political decision makers above them

Ideally, they could decree companies to prioritize shipments to hospitals and health workers and set-up a task force to route all purchase decisions through the govt. until mask shortage is solved.

> So the easiest solution was to do politics which is to deceive

I disagree. politics is not to deceive. Politics is to guide and educate. The longer we accept the rationale that politics is inherently an immoral game, the more our minds accept the status quo.

Those politicians who lied must be held accountable. Those who pushed for the truth but took actions to prioritize health workers should be rewarded.

Yeah there are better solutions but they’re not the easiest nor the fastest. Lying ticked those boxes and so they did it that way in many places.

Politics is IMHO all or a majority about deception unfortunately and once you accept this these actions just make more sense and you stop playing their silly game. I decided to move to a smaller and more healthy democracy because I knew degeneration of politics back in my (somewhat big) country was only going to get much worse and in some cases that can mean literal death to me and I could do nothing to change it. Well, all this is way too off-topic so let’s leave it for another time as it’s an interesting one :)

I can see this being a point but there was no place to debate this sort of a thing. I would never downvote you.

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