Yes, experts will lie to you sometimes
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It was simply unclear whether cloth masks or the simple medical masks would help significantly if the population would wear them. The data about SARS-CoV2 specifically was sparse, and there also wasn't as much about mask effectiveness studied as one might have expected.
And at the same time there was a concern about shortages of PPE like N95/FFP2/KN95 masks. But those were used in a professional setting, with people that are taught how to use them, in direct contact with potentially infectious people and with other measures in place. That is a very different scenario than just giving everyone masks.
Both can be true, that we have good evidence that N95 masks work for professionals in direct contact with patients and in combination with other safety procedures and that we didn't have good evidence that masks (whether N95 or other) would help for regular people.
I think you could have made the justified assumption that masks would very likely help enough to be worth it back then, and some people certainly did that. But the degree to which it would help wasn't certain, and I think the concerns about shifting the supply to places where it was less useful was very real.
The communication about this was messed up in several places, but I think in part because it's two separate issues that seem a bit contradictory at first glance. It's quite hard to communicate that well.
In general, the CDC and medical community offers information and guidance, not policy (which is what the feds dropped the ball on). Which they did. Unfortunately, nuanced and evolving guidance leads to conspiracy theories, claims of lies, and even just unintentional distortions.
I couldn't find the original Fauci quote, but the WHO quote from the linked article is a lot more nuanced than "masks don't work."
Samed with the linked FOX article about the CDC/the Surgeon General.
> “There may be a day when we change our recommendations particularly for areas that have large spread going on about wearing cotton masks, but again the data is not there yet,” he continued. “We are continuing to follow it.”
Unfortunately, when science is concerned, looks like politicians simply need to couch what they say with "this is what we believe we know now, but things may change". Otherwise, when things do change, everyone comes out of the woodwork to accuse them of lying. There's no nuance possible: "They said this thing early on, and later things changed and now we know it's not true. They lied!"
A lot of people simply hold politicians accountable for the very first things that they say, and if they ever change their mind later, that's "flip flopping" and it's interpreted as evidence that the first thing they say was a deliberate lie! They just can't grasp this idea that truth constantly changes as we learn more about the world.
I tend to agree.
My reasoning, at least for Canada last year, was we were following the WHO advice with respect to Influenza. I say this because Dr. Tam is part of the WHO, cited the organization numerous times throughout Q1 2020, and I've read the recommendations document which was published before Covid-19. The document did not recommend mask usage or border restrictions until a situation got out of hand, mostly due to a sparseness of studies suggesting the efficacy of masks.
Of course, IMO the major flaw was they assumed Covid-19 was like the flu. We in Canada should've looked to Asia who experienced SARS with us and follow suit with their rapid strategy rather than assuming we had Western exceptionalism and that it wouldn't come across the ocean.
There was really no good reason to believe that they wouldn't work to some degree for the general public. Concerns about the lack of fit testing could have been mostly alleviated by instructing people on the importance of and how to perform a pressure check themselves.
The original concern seemed to be about supply, as people were specifically instructed not to buy N95s. Of course, that didn't stop the Chinese government and Chinese aid groups from buying essentially everything in the supply chain and shipping it to Wuhan. If supply concerns were the real issue, it's difficult to understand how this was allowed to happen, but the government was making a lot of mistakes back then.
So I think the initial instinct was to assume COVID would be roughly similar to influzenia. But what wasn't then known what that COVID had a significantly larger % of pre-symptomatic spread. This changes the calculus significantly. Something like 50% of covid spread happens before symptoms. Flu is much much lower.
I also think the effectiveness of masks (for currently non-symptomatic people) is an open question. It's certainly helpful, but the idea that has taken hold that "if everyone just wore their masks it would be over soon" is bullshit. It's a cheap and easy way to reduce transmission rate, but not enough to get below 1.
I'm okay wearing one inside even after full vaccination until everyone has a chance to get one. It's theater at that point, but its impossible to tell a vaccinated person from vaccinated just by looking at them. So I understand making everyone do it.
no, that's the same kind of ignoble lie that degrades trust, and blindly accepts mass coercion to boot. we shouldn't promote such dishonesty, nor ill-defined use of force.
Instead of "you have to wear a mask because VACCINES DONT WORK" (which is the current, deeply stupid, messaging), they could just say "everyone has to wear a mask b/c we don't know who is vaccinated and who isn't."
if you’re vaccinated, you’ve already drastically reduced your chances of spreading the virus to others, and it’s overwhelmingly unlikely that wearing a mask will lower that risk meaningfully further.
that also has the positive knock-on effect of encouraging vaccination as an avenue toward herd immunity, rather than the punitive inverse, which discourages it.
Calling them "easy" or "cheap" dismisses all the negatives. It's not cheap or easy for people who have to wear them 8+ hours a day at work.
There are now a set of children born into a world never having seen a strangers face. Plenty of data out there on how important seeing faces is to infant brain development.
It makes many activities a pain in the ass. For example I could never dream of wearing a mask while working out at a gym... I don't care what "the experts" say it is disgusting to even consider wearing a mask over my sweaty face. Experts who say it is is fine to do so are just gaslighting the public.
It also is just ugly to look at. It is a constant reminder to be afraid.
It was one thing if it was a few weeks. But this has been going on for almost 9 months now in many places.
Calling it "cheap" and "easy" just shrugs off and dismisses peoples feelings. It's a form of gaslighting, really. Gaslighting has been a constant thing for the entire duration of this. Anybody who expresses anything other than max-doom and max-panic is told in no uncertain terms they are crazy and need to shut up, stop thinking and blindly listen to the "experts".
yes, that's the point of them. distancing, despite being a better general mitigation, isn't unambiguously obvious enough, so we have masks to drive the point home.
Even in the U.S., we had several documented instances in March of asymptomatic superspreader events, including the Skagit Choir on March 10.
It would have been one thing if public health officials had remained neutral on mask wearing, but instead they actively discouraged it, and promoted interventions like hand washing and disinfecting surfaces, which had no real scientific support and are now believed to be essentially ineffective.
Lots of videos that you can watch on youtube. Fauci and WHO later admitted that they lied because they wanted to reserve masks for hospital/emergency people.
It's not a question of whether or not they were lying. They admit they lied. That makes them liars and then all of their assertions after that date must be taken as probably a lie.
We then had '2 weeks lockdown' to flatten the curve. Which was a lie. We are over a year now.
Moreover, when Fauci and co switched tune and started saying everyone had to wear masks. They said it 'so that we can reopen.' Which was a lie. Everyone is wearing masks and lockdowns still happening.
https://www.who.int/news/item/20-01-2021-who-information-not...
Basically everyone was running PCR tests at 38 cycles. Fauci has come out and explained that 35 is the max. Anything over 35 is a worthless test that's a false positive.
Even more important: All those 'asymptomatic' carriers. Ya those are false positives. In fact at a minimum the worldwide numbers are inflated nearly 100% or more. https://www.uchealth.org/today/the-truth-about-asymptomatic-...
It's just another lie. Maybe there's another good reason to lie? Perhaps to stop spread you need false positives and not false negatives? I'm sure we all know about confidence levels. Perhaps the real reason is that they want to inflate numbers. If the numbers were 50-90% lower, could they justify lockdowns?
The problem with frequent and constant lying and getting caught. You become the boy who cried wolf.
What happens if a new virus starts spreading. Perhaps a far more deadly one. Are people going to believe the boy who cried wolf?
That's not a false positive. False positive happens when there are no viral particles in the sample, but the test comes back positive. Those are very rare with rt-PCR and can usually be tracked down to cross-contamination. Cycle count has nothing to with those.
If there is no SARS-CoV-2 genetic material in the sample, there's nothing for rt-PCR to amplify.
You're not arguing with me. You are arguing with Fauci. https://youtu.be/a_Vy6fgaBPE?t=231
If you could explain to me if you don't mind. Why are you saying Fauci is wrong? Was he lying again?
>If there is no SARS-CoV-2 genetic material in the sample, there's nothing for rt-PCR to amplify.
I made my entire post literally Fauci and not me at all. I made no comments or assertions.
rt-PCR test cannot distinguish between live, replication-capable SARS-CoV-2 and its remains, or inactivated copies. It detects short snippets of genetic material, not the entire virus.
You can read much more in depth about why there was a bad cycle #. At the time of creating the rules they didn't have a real copy of the infected person. They simulated it. https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download
It was a mistake on their part, but the reasoning is irrelevant here. Mistakes are going to happen during a crisis.
The problem is the ongoing pattern of lying.
I genuinely people like Tam and Fauci are trying to the do the right thing but it sets for extreme levels of distrust by lying. The next pandemic may be much worse because we simply lost trust in experts because they lied.
I'm just saying that this particular argument, about cycle count and false positives, is not one of those cases.
"Moreover, positive real-time reverse transcription (rRT)-PCR test results that are close to the limit of detection (LOD) of an assay have a greater likelihood of being false positives. One key explanation for this is that when specimens become contaminated with very low levels of test target during the laboratory testing process, it produces a high Ct positive result near the assay LOD."
https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/ma...
The intent of covid tests isn't to see if you have a tiny insignificant spec of SARS-CoV-2 in your nasal passage. The intent is to see if you have Covid19 and are possibly contagious. When you amplify too much, you are defeating the purpose of the test. A tiny spec of remnant SARS-CoV-2 doesn't mean you are contagious or have Covid19. It just means you have a tiny spec of viral material up in your nose.
Experts were deliberately "shading facts" or leaving out important context to influence the public to act a certain way.
That's really not much different than lying! I would argue it is lying but others might disagree.
The end result was that for at least a few weeks Americans went around believing masks don't work. I vividly remember reading these reports and telling friends "well y'know they aren't recommending masks I guess they don't work to protect you". I wasn't alone all the people in my friend group came to the same conclusion.
And yes the experts are smart! They can hide behind "well we never explicitly said they didn't work!", or "we didn't have all the data and didn't feel confident recommending them"
But they were not transparent about what they knew! And the reason they weren't being transparent was to protect mask supplies for medical personnel.
People can hide behind the legalese and lawyerly defense of "well it wasn't technically a lie!" but to many normal people like myself that's just laughable! The intent was to mislead the public! Most people just consider that lying...
>It was simply unclear whether cloth masks or the simple medical masks would help significantly if the population would wear them.
That is under-stating what the early messaging was. In Canada, the official messaging was not neutral, it was actively anti-mask early on. It focused entirely on the potential (unproven at the time) dangers of wearing masks and discounted any potential (unproven at the time) benefits.
Given how many Asian countries were heavily using masks early on, given how many health professionals were arguing in favour of masks early on, and given how quickly policy did a 180 to mandatory masks, this messaging could only be one of three things: intentionally misleading to protect supplies of PPE, intentionally malicious (why??), or incompetence in communication strategy verging on criminal negligence.
I welcome any arguments to change my mind. That early messaging should not be underplayed as "it was complicated".
I had some N95 masks from woodworking at the beginning of the pandemic. I remember the messagging being that the public should not buy N95s, and in fact if they had any, should donate them to hospitals.
I do not recall any messaging sayinig masks (N95 or otherwise) were harmful or there were any associated dangers. But they were pretty clear that you don't need them, and if you have them you should give them over. I 3D printed face shields to donate.
So if benefits may be zero and people are risk-compensating and living a more risky life because of the false sense of security that comes with a mask, people would be worse off if they wear a mask. This was all explained in the early days of the pandemic. It wasn't some hush-hush behind the curtains plot by the ruling class.
I remember reading it somewhere, though I cannot find it now so it may not have been true, that light cigarettes tend to be more harmful than regular ones: people who smoke them tend to inhale them deeper and smoke them more frequently than they would a regular cigarette, which negates the positive effects of using a light and then some. The mask concern was similar.
> "what fauci said was true (given tolerance for the natural ambiguity inherent in speech). in most cases, masks have been, and continue to be, primarily a palliative and signaling device, not a mitigation. for healthcare workers, it's actually an augmentative mitigation used with other imperfect mitigations in controlled circumstances to get the best possible outcomes from their use. masks are poorer mitigations in most general circumstances in comparison to the easier alternative that is (context-specific) distancing."
>
> "at various points, he's buckled to the prevailing political winds to keep his job, but that particular statement was a moment of lucidity and frankness. it threatened the dominant mediopolitical narrative, so he eventually backed off."
masks are valuable to politicians and the media for the concrete feedback it provides for their own power and voice. it emboldens politicians as the first order effect, while other order effects are simply not that important to them. that's what "politicizing masks" means.
Why not simply... make more?
> Both can be true, that we have good evidence that N95 masks work for professionals in direct contact with patients and in combination with other safety procedures and that we didn't have good evidence that masks (whether N95 or other) would help for regular people.
Yeah, because we all know the third year of Med School teaches you how to wear a mask. Without that crucial bit of knowledge you really can't wear one.
besides the obvious lack of spare manufacturing capacity, we didn't really need to. we already had the simpler, more effective, and immediately available mitigation of distancing. masks are for performative signaling and any old piece of cloth is fine for that, as we saw eventually be recommended.
the question was about making more masks, which is literally limited by economic realities. you'd also need to provide at least some rationale for the rest of your statement for it to be taken seriously.
But there was some inertia. Most of that stuff is made at scale in the East (speaking in very broad terms), which takes a few weeks to ship to the West. Some would have been made 'over here', but not that much.
Another factor was testing that the masks are up to spec. In hospitals etc they would be hesitant to get masks from a company that used to make other textiles if they haven't been vetted for the production of medical or N95 masks yet.
And a final factor was simply fuckery with companies vs government contracts. Plenty of companies offered that they could or had made masks to the various governments (I'm thinking of NL and the UK at the moment), but said governments did not go for it. Instead, they funneled billions to shell companies that only existed for a few weeks, placing orders for millions of units of PPE. On new companies. With a postal address at best. That did not have production plants.
I hope there will be / there is a big investigation and anyone that was involved in funneling billions to these shell companies, I presume for personal gain, get put away for a long time.
Knowingly telling falsehoods is only lying when it's done for reasons like personal gain, avoiding blame and covering up misdeeds.
The population doesn't deserve the truth, and reacts badly to it; it is better if the people are steered like livestock. Or perhaps treated like children. Children are told lies with a view toward controlling their behavior.
Given how much credibility and trust matter to managing a public health crisis it feels weird for the press to be so uninterested. Maybe they worry covering that would come across as questioning "science" at a dangerous time?
I mean, why has the media never asked politicians to produce some kind of end state to restrictions? Why have politicians and “experts” been allowed to just extend things and “wait two more weeks” without articulating a clearly defined goal?
Why has the media never questioned high cycle rates for PCR tests?
Why has the media constantly downplayed good news?
Alas....
These are already in place. Most panels are looking for trajectories of illness and hospital capacity. Note, I have found these metric-based plans much easier to find for certain states: https://covid19.ca.gov/safer-economy/ https://www.flgov.com/wp-content/uploads/covid19/Taskforce%2... (see page 9) https://forward.ny.gov/metrics-guide-reopening-new-york (see "Diagnostic Testing and Contact Tracing Capacity") https://www.mass.gov/doc/reopening-massachusetts-may-18-2020...
> Why has the media never questioned high cycle rates for PCR tests?
The turnaround time of testing? I'm not sure what you are bringing up here.
> Why has the media constantly downplayed good news?
This isn't a covid problem. For a variety of reasons, the media downplays good news across the board. They have a vested interest in keeping viewers "tuned in" to problems.
Except perhaps for a brief period at the beginning of restrictions, every state imposing restrictions, at least that I am aware of, did so with a concrete set of milestones which governed step-down.
There is no excuse to not have a fixed set of KPI's with a well defined end-state that includes a full return to normal. "Science", even rapidly changing science, doesn't tell you what KPI's to use. If the goal is hospital capacity, great... use that. If you can't formulate and articulate the goal, including a full return to normal, maybe you shouldn't have imposed the restrictions in the first place.
Honestly the fact that the plans keep shifting lead me to believe that the governor isn't actually looking at the data at all but is instead trying to feel the room to see when it is politically "safe" to fully reopen. A strong indicator that the time to reopen was a long time ago...
To say that someone "has no excuse" only makes sense once you have at least as much understanding as they do of the context in which they are making decisions. Anger makes it easy to ignore others' perspective. Anger makes it easy to fool yourself into thinking you are holding others accountable skillfully.
Personally, I'm surprised this article suggests Fauci lied, because I definitely remember reading about the full explanation behind the CDC's recommendation against public mask wearing way back in March 2020. I remember reading that the recommendation against public mask wearing was mainly due to supply chain concerns, and that the general public should use improvised masks instead, if they can.
...maybe a lot of people only heard the short soundbites instead of the full story...? I'm just speculating here.
If felt like we lived through four ages in as many months at the beginning of last year.
The CDC post is in line with Fauci's recommendation. My understanding is that the original recommendation was to avoid a shortage of masks during a critical period of the pandemic.
Attempting to tell people the details would conflict with the idea of a soundbite: final advice from an expert. Which is a bit unfortunate, because at the expert level a lot of knowledge is not final, it's a discussion with nuances that change as evidence is produced.
It's probably not great that world has ended up with no attention span, but here we are.
Right... imagine handing over control of society, the economy, and more to computer scientists because of a computer crisis that is killing people at scale (hospital ransomware, a virus that spreads via Bluetooth and causes cell phones to explode and kill people, a virus that causes car accidents, all of them simultaneously, etc.) Imagine Dr. Stallman becoming a new public figurehead that wields incredible power over the lives of Americans. At his word, any industry can be shut down overnight in order to save lives. At his word people must carry their phones around in faraday cages or wear tinfoil lined hats for legitimate scientific reasons. At his word, all people must stop playing online video games if he deems it necessary. Seems absurd, but that's essentially what happened here.
What happened here is a fairly cynical culture of message paternalism that didn’t survive contact with reality and, frankly, needs an overhaul in my opinion. I don’t think it will get that overhaul unless people ask for it. In the meantime, its results speak for themselves.
[1]: https://www.jhsph.edu/academics/degree-programs/master-of-pu...
And yet Dr. Fauci became the US public health figurehead despite not having a degree in public health. Dr. Fauci has a BA in classics and an MD, and has spent his career specializing in immunology. Shouldn't we have picked someone with actual experience and background in public health and not someone who has specialized their career in studying viruses? Fauci is first and foremost a researcher, not a public health figurehead who is good at communicating with said public.
there's an unlimited supply of such 'experts' willing to trade message for power.
we the people must question and challenge the so-called experts publicly. that would constrain the mediopolitical narrative in a way that reflects the general wisdom of the crowds. where we go wrong is allowing the mediopolitical machine to lead with a self-serving narrative which preemptively correlate opinions along their preferred axis rather than the collectively wise one.
it's a age-old battle but one we must continue to wage.
That's horrifying. Can you provide the email text they sent you?
Looks like this was coming from your friend - as a friend - and not the CDC as an organization?
Sounds like maybe instead of whining, her organization could have made sure that healthcare get the PPE by... manufacturing more.
Not like it's their job or anything.
Another study from the University of Georgia showed similar results: https://research.uga.edu/docs/units/communications/UGAMaskGa...
A Q&A with the researcher state the following:
"The results that gaiters can provide a similar level of protection as CDC-recommended masks was consistent with our expectations. However, we were somewhat surprised to see the multi-layer gaiters provided by MISSION performed so much better than the masks we tested (96% reduction in respiratory droplets vs. 81%)."
https://research.uga.edu/docs/units/communications/Gaiterstu...
There's a false narrative on gaiters/buffs due to research in August related to lost cost technology for testing masks, developed by Duke researchers, that has been misinterpreted by the media. Here's one of those Duke researchers:
“It was a development of a simple technique. It was not a systematic study of masks,” Fischer said. “The interpretation was that all neck gaiters suck. That is not what we said.”
https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2020/08/duke-universit...
My non-native English might betray me, and I didn't follow Fauci's statements from the beginning, but based on the quoted article, where is the lie?
"they weren’t recommended" doesn't mean that he said masks, made of cloth or otherwise, don't work.
To me, that doesn't sound as "bad for you". Maybe if "not recommended" is taken out of context (and extrapolating that into "not recommended because masks don't work").
It's still not a lie, as far as I can tell.
N95 masks are strongly believed to help but do not buy them. Save them for health care workers. We do encourage you to wear bandanas, gaiters/buffs, homemade cloth masks, or other non-medical PPEs. They are of unknown efficacy but they can't hurt. But don't buy N95s.
Which a lot of people would have heard as: You really should be wearing N95 masks and others won't do you much if any good but we need to save them for the important people.
(At which point, a lot of people would have been F this and tried to buy N95 masks for their own protection.)
Clearly if they were being recommended to front line workers, etc, they are expected to have at least some efficacy.
Personally, I think it's a bad example of "experts lieing", even if it is potentially a lie under some very narrow reading.
If I say "You should smoke cigarettes because it will help you lose weight." That advice is a lie, even though on a technical/literal level cigarettes do help you lose weight.
> "You should smoke cigarettes because it will help you lose weight."
Standing to you the above is not a lie and I agree. I think it's a bad advice, but not a lie.
https://chomsky.info/19670223/
Spoiler: It's to tell the truth.
They're doing a job, and that job is not science.
You don't get to decide for other people if being lied to is ok. That is a decision they have to make for themselves, and in general they will not trust people THAT LIE TO THEM. People at this scale need to be treated like sheep, but if they figure out you're herding them they stop listening to you.
Not really. Tell people the truth. Tell them what you know and let them decide for themselves how to act on that. Have faith in your fellow humans to do the right thing, even if it doesn't always seem like it is right to you.
"Mother knows best" assumes everybody shares the same values and belief systems you do. That is a poor assumption.
Tell this to thousands of Americans who lost their jobs from international trade agreements. Sorry we had to take away your ability to earn an income and then lie about why we did it. We actually had your best interests in mind.
You often hear the phrase "nanny state" used by the middle of the US against the coasts, so someone using this parental phrasing as if it's a good thing surprises me. This is exactly the type of patronizing that reinforces that nanny-state impression and destroys trust in expertise.
That's what Fauci did. The problem is that nobody bothered to actually listen. In the video where he was allegedly lying, he said that he thinks that masks are ineffective at preventing you from receiving covid and that they should be saved for healthcare workers and people who are sick.
I wonder why this explanation got buried. Perhaps the lesson here is that rather than blaming experts for occasionally getting things wrong, we should focus on promoting media literacy instead, so that people get accurate information they need.
Or consider this example: Devi Sridhar, one of the UK scientific advisors, is a proponent of keeping UK borders closed for the next several years and requiring expensive hotel quarantines like Australia or New Zealand. In interviews, she has depicted people opposing this policy as simply "upset they can't go on holiday". In fact, much of travel from the UK is not inane holidaymaking but going to see family abroad – it’s an immigrant-heavy country – and the less affluent couldn’t afford hotel quarantine on return. Here we have an expert putting up a caricature, because being honest about the impact of policies would weaken her push.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-...
If masks were seatbelts, this is what authorities would be telling us:
Seat belts by themselves are not effective at saving lives. Safe driving, like keeping your distance and staying within the speed limit, or staying home and not driving at all prevents accidents. Seat belts may encourage a false sense of security leading to dangerous habits like tailgating and speeding. Thus, there is no reason for drivers to wear seat belts and doing so could in fact reduce traffic safety. However, if you're a passenger, you may wear one if you feel that it is beneficial. People still die while wearing seat belts; we are currently evaluating whether they are effective at all for the driving public, even though we have had motor vehicles with seat belts for the better part of a century. There aren't enough seat belts; please save them for professional drivers like long-distance truckers on whom we rely to deliver toilet paper and flour. If you feel you need a seat belt, you can make a slightly effective one at home out of duct tape or knitted yarn. But please don't go out and buy large quantities of duct tape or yarn, either; in this crisis, your leaders need these materials to hold their rhetoric together.
But this statement:
"But to keep those truths to yourself is to take on a responsibility you were never trained to bear."
His entire argument is that no one could figure out a way to redistribute income from the winners to the losers after the free trade.
Maybe the truth these policy makers know is that telling the truth would lead to them losing their jobs. That's more or less the same thing for both involved groups "economically."
But, I love this discussion. Well done.
But... we're not babies. I get that many experts have good intentions. But treating adults like babies is a good way to come across as an enemy.
> When experts make guesses about whether the public can handle the truth, they aren’t acting as experts; they’re acting as amateurs. They’re winging it.
This is a start, but it's bigger than this. Experts are amateurs at understanding all the nuances of anyone's daily lives beyond their own. It's not just that they say "I'll lie here, because it will be good for people," and they misjudge how people handle lies. It's that very often experts have revealed that they don't understand what it means for something to be "good for people" beyond their narrow expertise.
Unfortunately, it seems to me experts increasingly think that their domain is the only one that matters, so they (as experts) should make decisions without consulting on whether someone in a different field that might have more, better information.
Also, the "least-lethal way to fail" argument assumes that there aren't other lethal trade-offs coming from down stream impact in areas outside an expert's vision.
That is just an appeal to authority. Which has been par for course. This whole mess is built on a tower of circular references where everybody says "well, the other guy said to do it and they must have a good reason for it".
That being said, I too share a hypothesis that improperly worn masks (aka 95% of all masks being worn) do more harm than good. I'd love to see studies that show it but in this environment good luck getting it funded, much less published. Authors of such a study would probably get death threats.
Also being said, it isn't upon the skeptics to prove that masks dont work. You cannot prove something doesn't work. The burden of proof is on the people who say masks work in a way that makes them work their non-trival costs to society. Logic has been inverted the entire time this mess has been going on... somehow it is up to the skeptics to "prove" that restrictions don't work, "prove" that masks don't work, and "prove" that it is safe to return to normal. Nope. That isn't how it works.
- There aren't any good randomized controlled trials to tell how well mask wearing works due to ethical concerns of experimenting on pandemic prevention methods. I could see why researchers would be reluctant to force people NOT to wear masks during a pandemic, since there's a good chance they could be putting people in danger.
- Several studies found that wearing masks are effective at reducing transmission of other respiratory illnesses, so I could see why the CDC issued guidance on wearing masks when faced with a respiratory illness like COVID-19.
- There's also randomized controlled trials referenced in the analysis that suggest masks are effective at reducing the occurrence of influenza-like illness.
I'm looking for studies that suggest face masks are ineffective, but I'm not finding a whole lot...I found a few websites claiming that masks were ineffective, but upon closer inspection, the studies they were citing compared N95 masks to standard surgical masks, not masks vs. no masks. I would love to read any studies you find suggesting that masks are ineffective at reducing the transmission of respiratory illnesses!
I was with him up to here. This is a bit of a handwave that deserved deeper treatment.
It isn't obvious that America has ever been made worse off by free trade. The US government has been waging a War on Savers from at last the 90s. 40 years of anti-savings policy seems like a much more obvious culprit than free trade.
In the last 30 years the States burned huge amounts of resources fighting silly physical wars, engaged highly questionable monetary policy and run up jaw dropping amounts of debt (I haven't yet found anyone who will argue it is going to get payed back in real terms, the evidence otherwise might be overwhelming). Foreigners and free trade didn't do that. The Chinese are out there talking about the Belt & Road, the biggest infrastructure program ever. Their army is deployed close to the border.
George Washington seemed to think it was:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_of_1789
Free trade only hurts if you're not among the richest countries. It prevents countries from escaping the middle income trap, since their industries are not able to sustainably compete with imports.
America was not able to compete with British textiles when the tarriff of 1789 was passed. It wasn't the poorest country in the world, but it wasn't among the richest like it is today.
The problems it causes to the US are actually so obvious that it has a name (Triffin dilemma)
I say this as someone with a science degree: public distrust of science has been at least partially earned. Now, it has become easier than ever to catch out some mouthpiece in an eventual lie, and it doesn't matter how Noble that lie is, as the Noble Lie gives way to the Politically Expedient Lie (still for our own good), and from there to the Convenient Lie (which is for someone's good, if not necessarily ours).
Can you say the same thing to a small amount of seasoned pros that you can to a large number of New Guys?
No: I've perturbed the question in terms of size and skill. You're going to say something dumber and simpler (and likely less efficient) to the New Guys.
So I can get 20% the way to empathy for Fauci.
The larger conceit of government, by no means limited to Fauci, is that the federal government can boss everyone around like cattle. A year on, it kinda looks like these pencil-necks were just a bit over their skis.
If I remember the interview correctly, he still felt better about being mocked for that than giving up a "shame on me" soundbite. He figured that would be replayed for the rest of his presidency. So this embarrassment was the least bad of all options to get out of the situation he put himself in.
I am not a fan of president W. Bush, but there's more going on there than meets the eye. Kinda interesting to understand part of his thought process. I think he was a terrible president, but I have no doubt he is a sharp guy.
I seem to remember this being the justification for advice given a year ago. The difference is that a year ago they emphasized the first part and now they emphasize the second part.
If that's the official line, why is Dr. Fauci still double masking after receiving both vaccine doses?
The ultra risk aversion is what many people are souring on, especially considering the risks are low to begin with for the vast majority. My opinion is that if you are fully vaccinated, you don't need a mask. If you are vulnerable then by all means continue social distancing and masking and bunkering down in social isolation even after receiving the vaccination if you so desire, but stop forcing it upon me.
> The ultra risk aversion is what many people are souring on, especially considering the risks are low to begin with for the vast majority.
Yea but...they are not low for a significant portion of the population, which should matter? And those people are affected when people don't wear masks because many of them are not able to completely isolate. I don't really understand this line of reasoning -- wearing a mask helps people, so why not do it? Is it really that debilitating? I don't like wearing a mask either but if wearing one helps, why not wear it?
You say this as if it's a fact, but as of 2 days ago, we still don't know the answer to that question. Unless you have a source I'm unaware of?
> Yea but...they are not low for a significant portion of the population
Heart disease is a large risk for an even more significant portion of the population, yet McDonalds is still open and people can still choose to eat there?
Once the vaccine is widely available (and it already is for the at-risk groups), it's up to those who are at-risk to get themselves vaccinated. If they choose not to, well, that's their prerogative to assume extra risk and I no longer have any obligation to protect them (at least, not any more than I protect my obese friends from heart disease).
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac... <- that's the advice from public health authorities. I myself am not a public health expert, and so I don't pretend to know more than public health authorities, though maybe that is not the case for you?
> Heart disease is a large risk for an even more significant portion of the population, yet McDonalds is still open and people can still choose to eat there?
Right, because you going to mcdonald's can't give someone else heart disease.
> Once the vaccine is widely available (and it already is for the at-risk groups), it's up to those who are at-risk to get themselves vaccinated. If they choose not to, well, that's their prerogative to assume extra risk and I no longer have any obligation to protect them (at least, not any more than I protect my obese friends from heart disease).
It is already widely available to people with high risk, yet it is still almost impossible to find appointments in some states (including my own). It may very well open up to the majority of the population before everyone at high risk is able to get vaccinated. Also, people with compromised immune systems cannot get vaccinated.
If someone chooses not to get the vaccine when they otherwise should and have no health conditions that preclude them getting it, sure I agree they are taking on that risk themselves, but there are plenty of people that should get the vaccine that aren't able to for whatever reason.
Also....protecting your obese friends from heart disease is absolutely not the same thing and is not a good analogy.
The link says: "We’re still learning how well COVID-19 vaccines keep people from spreading the disease", so don't make authoritative statements about post-vaccination spread unless you have a real source.
> Right, because you going to mcdonald's can't give someone else heart disease.
What if I'm a parent of 4 kids and I bring my 4 kids with me? In fact, me going to McDonalds can and does spread heart disease to my progeny, which is a big reason obesity and heart disease are inter-generational problems. Kids learn bad eating habits from their parents.
You know what, that's fair, I should say you "could" still, but again, I didn't make this up, here's the Mayo Clinic giving the same exact advice
> Keep in mind that if you're fully vaccinated, your risk of getting COVID-19 might be low. But if you become infected, you might spread the disease to others even if you don’t have signs or symptoms of COVID-19. This could be dangerous for people who are unvaccinated and at increased risk of severe illness from COVID-19. -- https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/e...
It seems like you feel that if there's any uncertainty, you should do the thing that makes you most comfortable? Again, I just ask why? Is wearing a mask that debilitating?
> What if I'm a parent of 4 kids and I bring my 4 kids with me? In fact, me going to McDonalds can and does spread heart disease to my progeny, which is a big reason obesity and heart disease are inter-generational problems. Kids learn bad eating habits from their parents.
I am genuinely confused by this example and how much you think this relates to a communicable disease: if you cause people to eat McDonalds, um....I guess yes you are spreading heart disease to them? How is that similar to someone being in the same physical space as you, who does not want to eat your proverbial McDonald's, but has to anyway because they have to breathe?
There are so many problems with this that I can’t even list. What would’ve happened if the government would’ve made a call at that time for mass PPE manufacturing?
Anyone trying to start up a PPE factory would literally be going against CDC guidance, and the CDC would have to double down against it to maintain the lie.
Is it morally or utilitarian-correct to lie in that case?
And there is something to be said about it. If public health experts are willing to lie, to mislead the public for the greater good, well, the greater good can kiss my ass if my life is in the balance.
We recognize the intent of Fauci's lie was noble, but then others may think the economy is really important and say "no it doesn't spread inside much at all! Just turn on the A/C or open a window". Once government gets into the habit of lying to the masses like that, trust can be eroded permanently.
I would straight up rather have had government go into stores and factories to confiscate (with compensation) masks from suppliers rather than lie to the public for little benefit. Even better, I'd like my government to be competent enough to prepare adequately for certain disaster scenarios like an airborne disease, by keeping a _real_ stockpile of masks on hand, or encouraging every healthcare worker to keep a month's supply of N95 on hand for their job, etc.
tl;dr we need bigger, smarter government, not one that lies. This goes for the economy, too: Free trade is government-supported redistribution of wealth toward the top of the economy. Government needs to enforce that care is given to the losers of our economic model.
pick one
The first lie is a straight lie, although perhaps for noble reasons. The idea was to make believe an untruth, because that would help mitigate PPE shortage at the time.
The second one, "hesitance to admit that the first dose of the vaccine gives you very strong protection against Covid" is not the same thing. This one is about interpreting data, defining adequate protection? It's about weighting pre-approval experimental data, more recent data, more anecdotal information, etc.
There really is a big difference between the two. There is no world without "lies" of the second kind. There is no simple truth here. All we have is a complicated distribution of probabilities and definitions that changes rapidly.
> “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”
> “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”
> “We need to have some humility here,” he added. “We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”
> Doing so might be discouraging to Americans, he said, because he is not sure there will be enough voluntary acceptance of vaccines to reach that goal. Although sentiments about vaccines in polls have bounced up and down this year, several current ones suggest that about 20 percent of Americans say they are unwilling to accept any vaccine.
> Also, Dr. Fauci noted, a herd-immunity figure at 90 percent or above is in the range of the infectiousness of measles.
> “I’d bet my house that Covid isn’t as contagious as measles,” he said.
Any change to the number is by definition a lie. Now he is just trying to find a rationale / excuse for the lie, but a lie is a lie.
An expert is someone whose statements are valued because they are trusted to offer valuable insight and expertise.
A liar is someone whose statements have no value because they cannot be trusted.
A person with expertise (useful domain knowledge) cannot be considered an expert if they are not trusted.
Their expertise can still be acknowledged, but once they have lied, their statements cannot be trusted and the listener has to be concerned about the motivation behind the statement rather than reassured by the expertise of the person making the statement.
It does not matter how brilliant a car mechanic is if my first thought after him telling me "your car needs new brakes" is "does my car really need new brakes or does my mechanic have a boat payment he needs to make this week?"
That's a bit of a silly answer, isn't it? Lies necessarily undermine confidence in what someone is saying. It would be _foolish_ to continue to put the _same_ trust in that person as if nothing happened, at least until they've regained that trust. I'm not saying you wouldn't hear that person out if practical reasons made that sensible, but you'd do so with a greater skepticism than before. People in positions of authority must be especially careful as they are like the city on a hill. They are under the greatest scrutiny and their actions are also most capable of producing scandal and rotting the proverbial fish from head to tail
"Which brings me to the reason experts should be more reluctant to lie to the public: They aren’t experts on the topic of when to lie."
There is no appropriate scenario when lies are morally acceptable. I realize the author is operating according to some utilitarian calculus, but utilitarianism is a bankrupt and morally pernicious moral theory. Lying is not just wrong because it has bad effects, which it most certainly does and some of which have been described by the author, but also because it is intrinsically wrong. It perverts speech which is intrinsically ordered toward telling the truth (lies couldn't work otherwise). It is an act of power and domination. You don't always have to. or even must not, tell the truth, or you may in some cases engage in mental reservation, but never lie. And in the case of Fauci & Friends, I am not convinced that he could not have achieved the same thing without lying.
And frankly, Fauci would not be responsible for how people reacted anyway if he acted rightly. That's another thing that needs to be stated. Authorities shouldn't be totalitarian and coercive overlords. If an authority makes a sound recommendation, and people choose to ignore it and this leads to bad results, that's on those people, not the authority. If you take your ego down a notch, acknowledge your own limited power and the limits -- epistemic, practical, and moral -- of your authority, then you'll understand that society isn't "run" by its leaders. Society exists on its own and leaders play more a guidance role. You job isn't to secure some end result at all costs. That's dehumanizing and treats citizens as if they lacked personhood and personal responsibility.
"the same mistake so many smart people make — that because they’re smart about one thing, they’re smart about everything."
A general truth. People well-versed in one area are easily tempted into thinking they're competent in all areas.
"Think of them as an overprotective parent, not as an enemy."
An overprotective parent thus becomes an enemy, as in, their good intentions do not bless their actions and their infantilizing treatment is itself harmful. Besides, when people find out they're being infantilized, they cease to trust you and begin to suspect evil motives. So if you're going to frame lying as a practical matter, then at least be consistent and accept the consequences of your actions.
It becomes disturbing to me when the authorities lie about something but everyone knows it, those authorities soon openly admit to lying, and people just accept it because of something akin to "they must know what they're doing".
Yes, I would rather that authorities lie and keep their trap shut about it. If we know that they are lying, and we just accept the "it's for our own good" reasoning every time, then we are at the stage where we're being primed to accept enough absurdities that we'll allow greater atrocities.
Just not in a democracy with the full meaning of the term. In which politicians are not elected to make decisions for us, or because they can make better decisions than us. They're merely elected as delegates, to keep us informed, and act on our behalf.
It should not be their choice to act as if they "know better", and in actual democracies it couldn't be (they were taken out of duty and/or punished for such acts).
Besides, more often than not it's not about them "knowing better" but about giving in to this or that private interest of theirs, or lobby, or deep state, or military, or big donors, or under the table or "barely legal" deals ("Do this, and you'll come working for my company on a sinecure with good money after your term") and so on.
Which is why this 180-turn doesn't happen just on some newly emergent situations that the politician supossedly "has better information", but also for things the politician themselves and the party itself promised to do in its pre-election program.
They were all lying to the public about masks to cover for the fact that there weren't enough for healthcare workers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/health/coronavirus-n95-fa...
> the result is eroded trust that health advice being given is in your immediate best interest.
I would argue that they are making health advice that minimizes the population-wide risk; I don't expect them to tell me the optimal thing for me to do to protect myself if that advice means that the population-wide payoff is worse (i.e. "hey everybody the best thing you can do is to grab an N95 mask" might be optimal for everyone who is able to do that but that is not the optimal thing to do for the population). I kind of understand people's frustration but I just don't personally feel that this was that controversial.
The chain of events leading up to what they said makes sense to me, but it puts people in an odd position where we have to trust guidance not because it's accurate but because the organization issuing it thinks saying such will have the best outcome. If for example the PPE situation worsened again and masks became unadvised for similar reasons I think more people would be skeptical as a result.
The discussion here is as follows:
1. The statement that masks are ineffective at stopping coronavirus is not true.
2. Those false statements are partly to blame for America's anti-masker problem (although the lion's share of the blame lies with Trump/GOP policy)
3. One lesson we might take away from this is, when authority figures knowingly make false statements during a crisis, that squanders credibility they may need later on. Perhaps leaders in future crises should think twice before repeating this mistake.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/health/coronavirus-n95-fa...
But I think this "they lied to us, we shouldn't trust them" rhetoric is silly and dangerous. Again, I agree, it's definitely a lesson to learn. Public health professionals are human beings too and I think it's fair to say they are doing their jobs to the best of their ability.
Only one of the videos was actually from that time and did say something different. One was just some newsreaders saying some stuff about their take on it.
> When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things - being right, and keeping power. If she doesn't optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does. That means she's trying to solve a harder problem than Zvi is, and it makes sense that sometimes, despite having more resources than Zvi, she does worse at it.
Sigh.
If you read detective novels, you will often come across a suspect that knows he is being tracked or followed. So they will deliberately make moves to throw the detective off track. They employ tactics to misdirect, confuse, and use all kinds of subversion to point the finger in the wrong direction. And the often practiced one, is to accuse others of what you just did. So watch for confessions through accusations. If an individual can accomplish this, what makes you think a government doesn't.