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A lot of doctors jumped on the anti-mask bandwagon. It wasn’t just pundits and media figures.

What kinds of doctors, that you interacted with: Your GP? Those seen on TV who work in media roles? None of those are the researchers.

You are starting to run into No True Scotsman fallacy territory at this point. Everyone from the Surgeon General of the United States to random GPs on Twitter were vilifying masks.

There are a lot of Scotsmen in Scotland, and in my experience they are diverse: I have met socialists and internationalist Europhiles there, and also ethnonationalist racists. Point is, monolithic assertions about "we" or "they" aren't ever completely true.

I'm not in the USA, I got onto masks quite early. But I think that we still lag badly in anti-covid ventilation systems, while still over-emphasising hand-washing.

Some of the best people on the topic (of our evolving understanding of COVID, not of Scotsmen) have in fact been relative outsiders (i.e. neither medical researchers nor crazed conspiracists). I'm thinking particularly of Zeynep Tufekci on Airborne transmission, e.g.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/why-arent... https://sils.unc.edu/news/2021/tufekci-lancet

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