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Comment by crocodiletears | Hacker News Reader

In the US, it's more to do with the way the CDC's messaging throughout the pandemic than any rejection of the evidence concerning a mask's efficacy.

People refusing to wear masks rarely question whether or not it works, and more to do with a low estimation of the disease's threat, as well as contempt for both the technocrats who chose to mislead the public about masks early on, and leaders who they believe are overstepping their authority by mandating them.

Our leadership has been doing everything possible to burn through its perceived legitimacy, and this is the result. Childish, spiteful, somewhat understandable behavior.

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I think the CDC mis-messaging is one component of this. Another is that there is no long tradition of public medical mask-wearing in the West, unlike many parts of SE Asia. Public mask-wearing is new, exceptional, and somewhat alarming if you live in North America or Europe.

Yet another component is that trust in the press and other public institutions was at possibly an all-time low in America at the time the COVID pandemic became public knowledge, and shows no signs of pulling out of that nosedive.

If you wore a mask in public in the UK before COVID, you would have got some very strange looks. They might have thought you were a criminal trying to hide your face. It seems fairly normal now though.

It's worse than that, you'd probably had been harassed by the police, or just simply arrested.

Don't agree that that's the case at all if you wore a mask on a packed tube commute for example.

Bullshit, while rare, more than a few people wore them in train stations or airports.

It was illegal in France to cover your face. They had to change the law.

> "Hey, some government people lied to us saying we don't need masks, hence why we won't use masks now"

> Great logic there. But hey, cutting your nose to spite your face is nice, no?

Stupid people are gonna stupid, but you can't lie to people and then expect them to then automatically trust you when you're telling the truth. Those people are objectively and factually wrong, but they are right to be distrustful. If the issue wasn't one of science that we could otherwise objectively evaluate, their position would be perfectly rational and reasonable.

How about the complete lack of correlation between mask mandates and infection rates? But yeah, i must be stupid for looking at those.

Wasn’t it more a result of tribalism? Even before the masks were really a topic it became quite important politically for the pandemic to be real or not, depending on which group you hoped benefitted politically or not. From the outside it looked like everything more or less flowed from that starting point, and then everyone picked their positions and favorite realities from there.

No. And I say that due to my experience here in Sweden, with the same message spread around about masks. I understand why the government did it in the beginning of the pandemic, to save PPE from shortages, to avoid people using masks and getting a false sense of security, etc.

Still, it created a lot of distrust when the message changed a few months ago, it wasn't a tribalist issue and I can completely understand how people ended up with this distrust. They are still wrong and I completely agree with this comment [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27231688

Interesting, thanks for sharing. How do you get to a high correlation between mask usage and political party in that scenario, though? If the underlying factor is truly inconsistency from the CDC rather than tribalism then (I think) you wouldn’t expect that.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3664779

As someone who worked the public for the entire pandemic, id say it was about 50-50 between people who thought covid wasnt a threat and people who thought masks werent effective

who _has_ or who _did_? I take one of these as “the pandemic is over” which seems far from the case, generally...

> to mislead the public about masks early on,

"Hey, some government people lied to us saying we don't need masks, hence why we won't use masks now"

Great logic there. But hey, cutting your nose to spite your face feels good, no?

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