Yes it was lying. Yes it was false information. No, that's not outside the scope of their role at times.
> ... and not for your own good. Quite the contrary, that misinformation would actually harm you if you believed it.
No, it was for the individual good. Hoarding of masks by randos in the middle of nowhere leading to no supply for the first responders in hospital puts you, the individual, at greater risk.
If all the hospital staff have COVID and no ability to stop transmission within hospital because Bob the Prepper has filled his underground HEPA filtered bunker with masks, yes, that puts you at risk.
You can weigh the trade-offs but your statement that there was no other way of viewing the situation is simply wrong.
> Do you really not see how destructive this was? Do you really expect people to not only forgive but most importantly forget this lie, just because they "made it clear after the fact"? How were you supposed to know they're not lying, again, about the vaccines and their safety?
Again, a crap situation, but one that the CDC wasn't responsible for. It was their job to mitigate to the best of their abilities. Tough times call for tough decisions. We know how groups react, we knew what people would have done.
I'm pissed the stockpiles were allowed to run low, and I'm happy the first-responders were prioritized as I believe this gave everyone the best chance.
> It really baffles me when now government officials whine about people not trusting them, anymore.
It doesn't surprise me, but that doesn't mean it was the wrong choice at the time given what we knew.
[edit] They had an optimization problem: basically nobody in the population had COVID at the time, but those who did were likely to end up in hospital. Spreading out the limited masks over a population where almost nobody had it put far more people at risk than concentrating the supply in hospitals where far more people had it. This isn't rocket science. People were hoarding pasta at the time, and you think people were going to make good decisions about masks? The first casualty of War is Truth as they say.