The way I remember it was more like, the CDC said:
- They don't know yet if surgical (and in general, non-N95) masks are effective against COVID-19 spread. They never denied this for N95.
- Hospitals are running out of surgical (and N95...) masks, and given the above, people should stop hoarding them.
That seemed... pretty reasonable to me?
In fact here's a link [1] where Fauci literally said:
> When we get in a situation when we have enough masks, there will be serious consideration about more broadening this recommendation of using masks.
> "Seriously people - STOP BUYING MASKS! 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!"
There was absolutely quite a bit of false messaging on the point from authority figures.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200229123317/https://twitter.c...
"Stop buying masks. There is a shortage and if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk! Since we live in a very capitalistic society we cannot reserve masks for healthcare use and instead we have to rely on all of you to do the right thing. Keep in mind that masks may not offer the kind of protection you think they do, i.e. they do not make you invincible, you're still advised to stay at home and keep social distancing. When supply of masks will be restored we will likely encourage people to wear them as to reduce community (probabilistic) spread, which works even if the masks are not 100% effective."
Unfortunately nobody would read things that don't fit in a tweet.
It’s really not that hard.
This may be true or not; all I'm saying is that the sentence is not an accurate summary of what I wrote.
(b) A tweet only has so much room to explain things. There's a reason websites in general, official CDC recommendations in particular, and the news media exist. If the only source of information you get your news from for several weeks amidst a pandemic is Twitter, and the tweet turns out to be lacking some info, the problem isn't the source you're reading.
(c) Even if you establish there was "false messaging from the surgeon general on Twitter" (which you haven't due to the reasons above), it's quite a goalpost move from "the CDC was being deceptive/manipulative". Especially when the the surgeon general was picked by the president and specifically not the NIH authority figure that the nation was looking up to 24/7.
They should have instead said "We don't know whether they're effective yet, so don't hoard them, because doing so could cause X."
There's nothing wrong with admitting you don't know something yet.
Instead, they make commands without supporting evidence. That implies total disregard for the peoples' intelligence. Upon realizing this, trust is lost and dissenting actions increase.
So far the only link I've seen is a tweet (not an official recommendation) from the surgeon general (not the CDC).
> "Seriously people - STOP BUYING MASKS! 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!"
This could very easily have been reworded to an honest "we do not know if they are effective" instead of a definitive "they are not". You cannot in good conscience call yourself a good leader and/or scientist if you do not acknowledge the limits of your understanding.
People may not understand the science, but they understand trust. And given that no individual has the time and/or intelligence to understand the science, breaches of trust should be the end of a leader's career. They're failing in their most important duty.
"There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face."
Second, if you're going to accuse cherry-picking, look at the very crucial quotes you omitted from your own clip:
- Right before your quote he had added very critical qualifiers that you skipped: He specifically said, "Right now, in the United States, there's no reason to be walking around with a mask." Mind you, this was on March 8, pre-lockdown. He explicitly made it clear this guidance could change as the situation evolves (or, as you wrote, "change his mind" should he get more data or see circumstances change... how horrifying!), and he specifically said in the United States, likely because the epidemic was much less severe than it became in the following weeks (it wasn't even declared a pandemic yet!), so they thought it could be better handled without telling everyone to wear masks. He clearly genuinely believed at the time that the protection they would be likely to provide would be small compared to the benefits of saving them for hospitals.
- Also note that he continued to provide context: "When you think masks, you should think of healthcare providers needing them, and people who are ill." Again, he's explaining his concerns. You can't ignore that.
- Also note that he even specifically explained: "When you look at the films of foreign countries and you see 85% of people wearing masks, that's fine, that's fine. I'm not against it. But that's when it can lead to a shortage of masks for people who need it." i.e.: If he wasn't worried about a shortage, he wouldn't be telling people not to wear masks.
You can't honestly hear all that and accuse him (or me...) of dishonesty with that clip.
And when he did decide we should be walking around with masks he didn't cite any evidence. He said it was because surgical and N95s masks were in short supply.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XHC5Kxxv_w&t=94s
When I was trying to find this video, I came across another video where he speaks in absolute terms that all we need to do is wears masks, social distance and practice good hygiene we would turn around the pandemic. I understand that things change over time, but whenever he speaks, he speaks as if what he is saying is fact. Now we even have vaccines and we clearly haven't turned it around. This is why people don't trust this guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P6QrVRJJzU&t=128s
I honestly don't see how you can watch all these videos and still trust this guy. I get that things change, but that's why you don't speak in absolute terms. Words matter.
I linked you to evidence that shows he lied. In the first video he said masks don't work. It clearly wasn't an "honest mistake".
> I highly doubt you would've been a better NIH director
Nice strawman. I never said I would be, but I know one thing for sure: I wouldn't deliberately lie to the American public about something so important.
> But don't cut into his character without evidence
There is plenty of evidence that he's a liar. I don't know what else you need.
> Not only does it take a lot of audacity to suggest you would've foreseen things better
Yet another strawman. I never said that. Are you replying to the right comment?
> hurling unfounded accusations like that at everyone whose judgment you don't like is just infuriating, insulting, and unproductive
The accusation that Fauci deliberately lied? It's pretty founded if you ask me. It's infuriating, insulting, and unproductive to protect someone so obsessively and thinking he can do no wrong.
No, you most definitely did not. You ignored most of the video and started quoting him mid-sentence. As I already explained to you. You've shown zero evidence that his genuine belief was anything different than he communicated in that interview. At best, all you've showed is that he gave poor advice, and even that itself is highly questionable given how you still can't be bothered to even quote him properly and depict the interview accurately. It's not exactly hard to make someone look like a monster when you cut their quotes in half and ignore all the surrounding context.
This conversation clearly isn't going anywhere so I'm not going to continue responding.
That was always true and will always be true. Even if COVID flows right through masks, there will still always be a plausible reason to wear them.
Not that the CDC is incentivized much to care. The bigger the crisis the bigger the funding.
I don't see a lie in this example.
This should be a lesson to all those corporate-like structures in public sector where they use common enterprise tactics of middle management to say things in the non-specific way so that later down the road they can cover their asses.
They had to be very specific, don’t lie, simply say about things they are not sure about “we don’t know” (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin etc.) and do tests, never say “vaccines are safe”, but say they are 100000 times less dangerous than disease etc.
And then we could trust every word they just say as we know that they are very aware of what they are saying and they haven’t lied to us in a lot of situations before.
They should govern, but instead they play politics… wtf really.
No, that doesn't follow. Do you have any evidence the CDC knew this was false, and was consistently messaging to the contrary (aka not a pointer to things like 280-char tweets where everyone understands bandwidth would be limited)?
A lie requires intent to deceive, i.e. dishonesty. Not something where they're forced to summarize and strip out details, but provide the details elsewhere when they have the chance. And certainly not a genuine, honest mistake. I have yet to see evidence the CDC knew that masks are effective and yet lied about it. And nobody here has been willing to provide any evidence of that either. Just because they might have been inaccurate in their assessment of the situation, doesn't mean they were lying. Just like how, just because you say "we ran out of ketchup, can you buy some from the store?" and then discover you had some in the back of your fridge, that doesn't mean you're lying.
And btw, I don't even know what example you're talking about. If you're talking about my example like I said, at 1:32, the reporter clearly communicates "surgical masks are not that effective". And it wasn't the CDC talking either. You should really link whatever you're talking about because it doesn't seem to be this example.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/21/opinion/sway-kara-swisher...
The problem is that the media doesn't do nuance, they write big bold headlines that are outrage bait to drive engagement. And more than a few people never read anything but the headline.
At this point, I feel like headlines themselves are harmful.
As a health official you are weighing the question: do we advocate a sub-optimal approach on the grounds that it is better than nothing, when we know a large segment of the population will be militantly non-compliant anyway? There were anti-mask protests back in the Spanish Flu days too.
Point being, it’s not a binary thing, and there’s some consensus that has to be built in the early stages.
But why do they therefore inherently trust the other people saying to take hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and these other solutions? Aren't these people also salesmen?
Isn't some trust required most of the time?