> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. The job of the government is to make tough decisions like this in times of crisis. You can agree or disagree but this was neither malicious nor in my opinion outside the scope of the role.

I feel like just outright telling people "hey, we don't have enough, please give it to most vulnerable people first" would be better approach than "lie and hope idiots believe it", thus producing whole swathes of idiots repeating the lie