When you expect an institution to always be impartial and tell the truth, those sorts of white lies can quickly erode trust.
Does it matter that they lied? This is the proposition that can be debated sensibly and rationally - but will likely be overwhelmed with emotion.
In my own observation there seems to be rather a lot of people who have almost no faith in their fellow humans and believe the only way "people" believe a thing and will act is because they have been told to believe it by someone. Misinformation takes all the blame in this paradigm. The populations is dominated by people who have outsourced their critical thinking.
It may be true, I don't know. But it seems to me to be really quite worrying if a population has to be told lies to get them to do the right thing or lies have to be censored because people will not be able to assess competing evidence and reject bullshit. Does it have to be this way? Was it always? Is it fixable? Is it really a thing at all? I have no answers there.
It's my observation that even in the service of "good", the debt to the truth always comes due and the interest rate is super steep. Many will disagree.
[1] Lack of PPE for medical professionals in the front line of pandemic response is the justification. This may well be a very good justification.
The reality is that the knowledge about Covid changed significantly in march/April last year. In particular the understanding about unsymptomatic spread lead to a significant change of thinking. That makes sense, if the virus only spreads from sick people, the advice for everyone to wear a mask is not good health policy especially if there is a shortage. You want to prioritise people who get in contact with sick people and prevent sick people to go out. However, if unsymptomatic people spread the virus, you want everyone to wear masks, because you can't prevent spreaders to go out. But the masks are different, you want cloth masks more than n95, because it is about protecting others.
The below article is one which elaborates on the whole discussion
https://eu.statesman.com/story/news/politics/2020/12/29/did-...
And Fauci said at one point (2/14/2020):
“There is no reason for anyone right now in the United States, with regard to coronavirus, to wear a mask” [1]
And at another point (6/15/2020):
"[...] we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N-95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply." [1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYyH4N8VXvA
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dr-fauci-made-the-coronavi...
In defense of Dr. Fauci's statement, saying "there is no reason right now to wear a mask" is quite different from "masks are ineffective", as it keeps getting paraphrased. The latter is obviously absurd, as there were numerous studies on the effectiveness of masks against various viruses prior to 2020, just not against SARS-CoV-2 specifically, since as far as we know it didn't exist yet.
A lot medical professionals were claiming the average person wearing a mask will make things worse by putting it on ineffectively.
I heard one doctor say, "All it takes is one virus particle to become infected. I haven't heard any doctor talk about Viral Loads, even now.
My point is our medical professionals seemed as much in the "I just don't know?" catagory as the rest of us with this virus.
I'm still shocked researchers found a vaccine.
https://www.theinsight.org/p/the-few-sentences-that-explain-...
It's still true that if you are covid suceptible, and if a covid-shedding person is walking around, you should try to be as far as possible from the covid. But, a brief close pass e.g. on the sidewalk, isn't as risky as sharing a 20'x10' office for hours, even if you stay >6ft the entire time.
We were lied to because america did not stockpile enough masks for first responders
If the Wired article, which was downvoted to oblivion, is accurate then the WHO and the CDC (who parroted the WHO) bear a great deal of responsibility.
They shutdown scientists who were telling them that Covid was spreading as an aerosol, way back in early 2020.
The WHO now want MORE power, yet they’re not accepting accountability nor cleaning house.
Journalists should give advanced information in digestible form about topics you didn't need to know about, but which are currently relevant. Instead, we get sixth grade hand waving in propaganda form.
Things like adaptive immune response, T-cells, immune escape, antibody dependent enhancement, viral loads, and lots of other things could be explained well but simply. It's a tragedy of modernity that we have so much information and so little understanding.
But there are simple things that can be explained visually. See, for instance, this video of Japanese scientists illuminating airborne droplets with green lasers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyZm6dx9Hss
Now, the contention here isn't that there are important concepts that should be explained to layman; the contention here is that there are important concepts that actual scientists need to explain to the decision-makers at the CDC.
If masks are effective, that would be a compelling reason for someone to wear a mask. Saying there is no reason to wear a mask, strongly implies that they aren't beneficial to the individual wearing them. Fauci must have known that this is how people would have interpreted his statements. He should have said "there are very compelling reasons not to wear a mask", which is very different from "there is no reason to wear a mask".
I understand that Fauci had good intentions behind his statement. But it's very hard to regain trust after making misleading statements like the above.
Sometimes, certain people being told not to trust you is a sign you're doing the right thing.
I’m a Democrat; my circle is mostly Democrats. We also knew last year in February and March that we wanted masks.
So trust that Fauci meant well? Yes. He was in an extremely difficult position and in a position of policy advisor.
But trudt that masks were ineffective for the average person? Absolutely not.
It’s a contradiction that masks are effective for frontlines, yet somehow without reason or usefulness for everyone else.
So if it didn’t decline, perphaps it’s more accurate to say that there was only ever a certain type of trust to begin with.
And the past 12 months have borne out that suspicion.
For example: https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/health/2021/04/26/poll-...
Despite Fauci assuring that the J&J is safe, people are still very hesitant.
Which means the trust extended to Fauci only goes so far.
So while you want to paint a broad stroke of “Democrats trust” vs “Republicans don’t”, the reality is far more nuanced.
No, yeah it did tremendous damage. While there'd certainly be anti maskers without anti-mask hysteria by authorities, the scale would not be the same. It's hard to quantify but likely many tens of thousands of excess deaths globally are on WHO lies.
People were having difficulty providing evidence that Fauci admitted to telling a white lie elsewhere in these comments, yet it's widely believed by certain people that he did so.
There's a link to a factcheck in the comments that quotes what he actually said and it's not at all what many people in this thread seem to sincerely, but mistakenly, think he said.
So allow me to doubt that "anti-mask hysteria" was ever coming from the medical and scientific community unless I see exactly what you're talking about and evaluate it with my own eyes.
But I guess if we disagree on the facts, that helps explain why we draw different conclusions.
However back in spring 2020 when the official position amounted to "a mask is a facehugger", arguing for using masks (including by medical professionals) was effectively impossible.
Well I guess it would be fruitless to ask for a source on this.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article240...
"Masks may actually increase your coronavirus risk if worn improperly, surgeon general warns"
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/02/health/surgeon-general-co...
It was literally everywhere until correction in april 2020.
Don't let that facehugger insert a parasite embryo down your throat! Why not? Well overall it would be more beneficial to society if frontline medical staff were wearing that facehugger while treating patients with confirmed or suspected cases of the virus. Oh okay, that seems sensible.
“Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!” he wrote. “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
Is he saying that N95 masks don't work at all? That they only magically work for healthcare professionals?
Or is he very, very, clearly, even within the limited confines of a tweet, explaining that N95 masks are better allocated to frontline medical staff than being randomly worn by low risk people in low risk locations doing low risk tasks? That using those resources more effectively will save more lives and that people in those lowee risk situations can easily get protection by keeping a safe distance and following other sensible precautions that they list.
I can see how someone could intentionally misrepresent what he says, but I don't see an honest way to make that mistake.
The masks ARE effective in prevention COVID (both ways), and there is no demonstrated risk in wearing masks wrong. They lied on both accounts providing fuel to anti-masker movement. And yes the logical inconsistency of insisting masks are ineffective yet are necessary to frontline workers were pointed out year ago - you're not breaking any fresh ground here.
It takes time for knowledge to get formulated, broadly accepted, and turn into actual policy. It has to be like that. Most of the time, being prepared but doing nothing is the best thing to.
SARS, H1N1, Ebola + probably many others all burned out before they reached the west.
If scientists are looking at the same data and the same set of facts, then they cannot disagree.
Back when Hong Kong health authorities were warning about 14 days of asymptomatic spread, Chinese authorities had already placed multiple cities under martial law and set up concentration camps for infected people. It's absurd that the West was still in a "wait-and-see" mindset.
Lots of assumptions went wrong on this one
Isn’t this defensible if it was indeed true that there was a temporary shortage of masks for health care workers?
The same thing was done in other countries, including mine (Finland). Result: covid deniers are still using the year-old statements from national health agency to downplay the significance of masks.
"Masks are useless; the officials themselves say so", they quote.
Big mistake not to be honest, even if it leads to criticism against the government for inadequate preparation.
There's your issue. Saying masks are in short supply begs the question of why. Whether it's reasonable or not, no politician wants to defend their unpreparedness.
There seems to be a lot of post hoc rationalization for what appears to simply be a mistake. This is why accountability is so difficult. People decide ahead of time that certain organizations or individuals are right. If it looks like they made a mistake, then there must be some good reason that justifies their actions that we just don't see.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/22/coronavirus-why-a-ppe-shorta...
The wording here is good because we _should_ be skeptical towards any organization that is supposed to protect our citizenry, but unflinchingly lied to the entire population/world. Government has powers so that that it can control society. Why did the CDC need to lie and mislead people instead of finding a way to restrict the flow and supply of masks? The sad thing is that it would even be more forgivable if they were just completely incompetent and made a wildly incorrect guess. But they knowingly and deliberately lied in possibly the worst scenario to lie during.
We have a lot of research into mask use, both to protect the wearer and to protect people around the wearer.
Can you point to any that you think CDC should have been using to support mask wearing in the general public?
You can argue about the level of evidence required (organisations like CDC strongly prefer well run meta analyses or a bunch of RCTs), but to say "it's always been known" simply isn't true.
The virus spreads via droplets exhaled or emitted from nose and mouth. What happens when something obstructs that flow - the % of droplets going in & out & velocity decreases and likelihood of transmission reduces. Why do you think surgeons wear masks - it's both to protect the patient and the surgeon from droplet borne infections.
What was unknown was whether it was economical to wear masks widely and whether there were supplies, not that it would work.
The Street: "So, why weren't we told to wear masks in the beginning?"
Fauci: "Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."
https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...
If mask initial recommendation actually was a white lie a case can be made that they are unfit for communicating their results to the masses as they think their peers to be petulant children unfit for handling truths, and they should be stripped of that function
The other cases just convert into variations of them politicising a pandemic to unknown ends
As for the WHO, these organisations shouldn't have an easy way out of their responsibilities
Look at the gas crisis in the south. It's obvious that enough of America truly _are_ "petulant children" as you say that they cannot be trusted with such information. Given an opportunity, the American people will choose to make the national situation worse, to improve their personal one.
I think the main disconnect here is that the CDC communicated like it's job was to say what was needed for the best possible outcome (and still made mistakes and miscalculations) while (some of) the people believe the CDCs job is to communicate the whole truth 100% of the time. We can see from looking back at literally any war or the 1918 flu pandemic that the populace is routinely lied to for the 'benefit' of the country. What is happening now is that we can instantly fact check and communicate to millions of people our opinions on what was said. I am not saying they were right to do it, but attempting to provide the framework in which is becomes believable that _they_ believed it was right to do it.
People tell me that I should trust those those who lie to me because at least their goals are honorable. I disagree. While it might be possible to lie to someone you trying to help or even someone you dearly love, it's pretty much by definition not something you do to someone you respect. I generally am wary of help from people who don't respect me.
Perhaps it would be helpful to have separate news channels for petulant children who need to be lied to so that they don't destroy civilization. Everyone else could watch the real news. Of course, nobody wants to be told they're a petulant child.
And droplet basically translates to: "yes, masks would help, but simply keeping a few feet of distance will be just as good". Unfortunately, distance does to aerosol transmission what soda cans do to a wildfire.
"Not to value and employ men of superior ability is the way to keep the people from rivalry among themselves; not to prize articles which are difficult to procure is the way to keep them from becoming thieves; not to show them what is likely to excite their desires is the way to keep their minds from disorder. Therefore the sage, in the exercise of his government, empties their minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills, and strengthens their bones. He constantly (tries to) keep them without knowledge and without desire, and where there are those who have knowledge, to keep them from presuming to act (on it). When there is this abstinence from action, good order is universal."
- Dao De Jing, Chapter 3, The Chinese Text Project
I feel we are at the end result of "keeping those who have knowledge from acting on it". Misinformation is spread by people with the knowledge of how to control people and they tell people they are smart and they need to act.
I do not agree with Fauci's decision, but there was no other choice.
Look at what happened with the gas panic this week, it is the same thing was written about here:
https://songofthedao.substack.com/p/panic-at-the-gas-station
My personal feeling is that it was hard to know if masks worked for the general populace before Covid-19.
There are so many confounding variables that it very difficult to study masks from a public health side.
The best approximation was studies of health professionals in hospitals or clinics which doesn't exactly translate for a multitude of reasons.
It's totally worth it to bend an exponential function. But the individual benefit from mask wearing in any given interaction is negligible.
Common sense seems to say that masks make s difference, but if that is the strongest argument, then why not let people decide for themselves using common sense.
The wearing of masks to combat airborne disease spread is a decidedly not a new thing. That was never a novel concept, at least since the early part of the 20th century.
Coronaviruses in general aren't a novel concept either; we have a pretty good idea how they're spread.
So, when confronted with a new coronavirus, it's a little bit stronger than "common sense" to surmise that masks will be effective to some extent. The burden of proof would be on anybody suggesting that this virus is somehow so different than other airborne disease that the wearing of masks had no benefit.
then why not let people decide for themselves using common sense.
If masks are effective to some degree, the downside to not wearing masks was that millions of additional people would suffer and die worldwide, and we would incur a financial and human cost orders of magnitude greater than the modest cost of masks.
* Various studies of droplet propagation, which show well-fitting masks reduce droplets significantly. In theory, this should reduce spread.
* Many confounded observational and cohort studies tied to voluntary compliance with mask guidelines that show a lower risk of infection or secondary transmission. They are confounded because voluntary compliance with this measure increases the likelihood of general caution. Many show somewhat large effect sizes.
* Many population based trend-line studies/other ecological studies that show post requiring it as a public health measure in various environments, that daily case counts began to decline by .4% to 2.0% per day.
The studies in the second category showing larger effects are generally inconsistent with the third category, because the results in the third would be much bigger if the effect was real. And even the third category isn't great, because the mask requirement measures weren't instituted in a vacuum independent of other controls.
I wonder if we’re splitting hairs, so what if mask wearing is confounded with other voluntary measures of general caution?
For me the take away is that some people take precaution, and some don’t.
Another measured case growth in a hospital community where there was a very strictly enforced mandate for patients compared to the rate of case growth before, so compliance is a small factor.
It's very likely that masks help. It's also very likely that the effect is relatively small. But even a tiny effect can become a big one when raised to a big power-- 1.1^20 is 6.7x growth in cases, and 1.07^20 is 3.8x.
I'd have liked this guidance change in masks to come a week or two later. Keeping another couple weeks of somewhat sharper decline in cases means a lot fewer people affected through the rest of the pandemic.
Not sure why you feel like this is a worthy hair to split.
This kind of attitude is why the western response could have been better. Western medicine is hews rigorously close to the “do no harm” ideal and interpret it that you need to have conclusive evidence before recommending a treatment, even something as harmless as mask wearing.
In Asian countries they just do it and so what if it hasn’t been demonstrated as a causal factor in a dozen studies.
Lay people see the indecision, the hemming and hawing, the hand wringing.
The cdc says shit like people shouldn’t wear masks.
This shit is actively harmful and thousands of people have died because of it.
I think it's worthwhile to have doubt and be skeptical.
I'll note that, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was saying that masks may or may not work, but they should still be recommended at a time that the CDC was implying that they might even be harmful.
This is all completely consistent with what I originally said: "To be honest, we still don't really know if masks work. They look like they probably do something, but the evidence is weak and the effect size small."
In this case, the combination of masks and vaccines might have been required for a long time.
(hacker news analogy: "just in case Rust doesn't remove all defects, we are still going to need to debug"
seemingly because Trump supported vaccines but
not masks.
First I must strongly state that the idea itself makes no sense: one can wear a mask and be vaccinated; they're not competing ideas in any meaningful way.
However, at the outset of COVID-19, we certainly were not sure that there would be effective vaccines, or how long they might take to develop, or what their supply levels would be.
Therefore it made sense to take whatever (effective) measures we could, while waiting for a vaccine that was never guaranteed to exist. Nobody argues that a fire extinguisher is better than a squad of professional firefighters, but fire extinguishers can have important utility, especially while you're waiting for help to arrive.
As far as the Trump angle, perhaps you can show us a counter example, but I have seen zero evidence that anti-Trump folks have rejected vaccines because Trump favored them. It's a non-factor.
One, the liberal/progressive/whatever crowd is overwhelmingly pro-vaccination (in general) to begin with. Two, and perhaps more importantly, they're just not competing with masks in any way. Masks are imperfect; vaccines are more effective but also imperfect and not approved for all people even today. That is how you deal with many if not most threats in the real world: multiple layers of imperfect defences.
Though in this particular case, I don't really remember him being all that positive about vaccines for Covid or in general.
Here's a publication worrying about him undermining vaccines before Covid was a thing: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5678397/
Which is another data point to support the general principle.
Everyone seems to also forget that a lot of this took place when they wrongly thought surface transmission was the main vector. The bigger problem was the delay in recognizing aerosol transmission, Chinese scientists cottoned on to this very early but the CDC and WHO dragged their feet.
We also saw everything play out and get politicized in real time in a way that's never happened before. There are lags between data and science, further lags between science and science communication and then even more from science communication to government policy. On one end of this lag you've got scientist warning of aerosol transmission, on the other side you've got Fauci still operating under the surface transmission advice leading to some very mixed messaging. Reducing this lag will be important in future.
China didn't even admit human to human transmission until mid January.
They haven't even admitted when the outbreak started, which almost certainly wasn't November 2019 since there are suspect cases in Europe already at the beginning of December, of people that had never been in Wuhan.
If this is true, then it's not a given that COVID-19 even originated in China.
This new study of scanners identified two cases of suspected coronavirus, on November 16 and 17
[0]: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/sante/maladie/coronavirus/corona...
China’s first confirmed Covid-19 case traced back to November 17
[1]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro...
The outbreak of pneumonia was recorded in the Orenburg region
(Turn on captions, then select Captions -> Automatic translation -> English)
Because it was even newer and more unknown at that point. Wuhan was in lockdown on the 23rd of January, so they had a pretty good idea by then. Meanwhile the rest of the world twiddled their thumbs and lost the opportunity to contain it.
> They haven't even admitted when the outbreak started, which almost certainly wasn't November 2019
How do you "admit" something unknown? Either way we know it couldn't have been too much before November/December, considering everything we know about how fast it spreads.
Actually, this is not so clear. The evidence of community cases in November/December in e.g. France were not picked up at the time either. There is a phase were a new disease can fly completely under the radar, because we are still in a very slow growth and only see a few isolated cases, which often don't even get seen by the same health professionals. This is particularly true in the case of covid were there is evidence that spreading is disproportionately from "superspreaders" (unless some of that information changed now?). So unless there was a superspreader, you only have few isolated cases.
People are a lot more critical about the other rules, the curfews, the ban on outdoor dining and bars and the closure of sports facilities. And the ‘you can’t have more than one person over’ rule is generally ignored.
By the way the official Dutch position still is that surface transmission is significant and one of the three ‘main rules’ is to wash your hands a lot.
Because Donald Trump wanted to downplay the potential scale of the pandemic, believing it distracted from his narrative of economic success playing into his re-election, so he attributed reporting on the pandemic to a "Democratic hoax," feeding into right-wing mistrust of the motives behind both mainstream media reportage and legal measures like lockdowns, which many considered unconstitutional and a pretext for installing a leftist police state.
Also because Trump refused to wear a mask publicly, considering it a display of weakness in front of the "liberal media" which he considered to be the enemy, and would often ridicule people who did wear a mask.
As a result, among Trump supporting Republicans, wearing a mask became associated with sheep-like submission to "leftist' (read: Democratic) authoritarianism, and not wearing a mask became a display of defiance along with the MAGA caps.
It is impossible to consider the phenomenon of the way masks are perceived in the US today outside of the context of the atmosphere of deep paranoia, polarization, mistrust of the press and "international" organizations created by the Trump administration, or the effect of conspiracy theories and misinformation spread across social media by QAnon and Trump supporters.
Seriously. I have explained this many times to my European friends. It is difficult to appreciate how people here will always want to push their own personal freedom of choice out as far as they can no matter how much someone else suffers.
Everyone else in the hotel was sick, there was a tensor of coughing, all I could do was sit in my hotel room and watch politicians go back and forth about how we should all patronize stores in Chinatown and not be horrible racists.
All I can say is the is that the CDC performed extremely poorly in their response to this, over and over again. Mishandling tests, allowing the FDA to actively block testing. Even the pausing of the J&J vaccine was an extreme CYA blunder.
NASA had Challenger, NIST had Dual_EC_DRBG and the CDC had COVID. Not the same in scope, but the systemic dysfunction was similar in its structure.
Plus, it also makes sense, if their and the government’s interests are for the greater good. E.g. being cautious about promoting early use of masks when supplies were scarce/preserving them for the front line medical workers.
Theoretically it would also make sense for current guidance to incentivize vaccines when the remaining unvaccinated population is hesitant.
To be clear, I’m not saying I have certainly that this is what’s happening. But the theories aren’t unreasonable, and CDC’s past reversal on guidance doesn’t help the confidence others have in their guidance.
So the uncertainty isn’t completely unreasonable.
In reality, the usual suspects were pushing conspiracy theories about the CDC even before they determined masks were useful. A famous conspiracy peddler famously claimed the CDC was downplaying how bad the virus was and 'it was over for humanity, it'll only be lone survivors' when we only had a handful of cases in the US.
In other words: the CDC could've nailed every single guideline and we'd still have half of the population making up conspiracy theories about it. It's just too politically convenient.
So is the post-facto realization of "we knew masks work, we just didn't want the people to grab all the supply".
* N95 masks
* Everything else
We knew N95 masks worked because that's what professionals use in hospitals. Unfortunately, there was a shortage of PPE so telling people to buy them would put them in direct competition with professionals treating very sick patients. In April 2020 we were looking at a really bleak scenario so there was a very strong incentive to keep professionals alive even if it came at the expense of some citizens (think: doomsday scenario).
We also had no idea whether 'everything else' helped at all. Recommending non-N95 use might have given people a false sense of security that might have played against more effective measures such as extreme social distancing and self-quarantining of people with symptoms.
As knowledge improved, guidance changed. Nothing crazy to see here.
Recommending people use masks could've given people a false sense of security in people and probably acted against more effective measures such as social distancing and self-quarantining of people with symptoms matching those of Covid-19 ('well, I know I have a cough, but I'll just wear a mask and it'll be fine').
Recommending people use the only masks we knew to somewhat work - N95s - would've created a huge problem for hospitals that already were having issues procuring PPE to protect the professionals who were dealing with Covid-19 patients.
Basically, there was no reason for the CDC to recommend masks. Again, there's no need for some nefarious explanation.
The exact same thing is happening with the mask discussion. The people who say the CDC lied about masks and it was obvious that they help, are the same who strongly refuse to wear them because it's a security theatre. It's completely dishonest argumentation.
* The virus is lethal and the government is hiding it
* The virus is just the common cold and tests are a conspiracy to make Trump look bad
* The virus is lethal and a conspiracy by dark forces to kill people
* The virus doesn't exist and people wearing masks are idiots
* The virus is lethal (again!) and a conspiracy by the Chinese to destroy the world's economy
It's no surprise that people who are marginally sucked into the conspiracy world have their brains completely fried by the constant narrative shift.