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.
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