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Comment by BryantD | Hacker News Reader

It’s wild how we’ve completely forgotten the fomite hypothesis that was assumed for the first couple of months of the pandemic. Remember the guy who wanted us to bleach our vegetables? Remember all the distilleries making hand sanitizer because touch was the only thing that mattered?

You don’t have to assume the CDC was full of lies if you remember that they were working from an inaccurate hypothesis at a time when reducing transmission rates seemed like it might be the most important thing in the world.

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It wasn't a bad thesis, that would be giving them credit they don't deserve: https://www.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_e58c20c6-8...

Dr Fauci feared the rising costs of masks and whether the medical system would have enough. That wasn't his decision to make, but he made it. He later started using a new line, which is that they weren't aware that 40-50% of people were asymptomatic which was irrelevant for the problem at hand.

That’s a great read! Fauci explains what facts he didn’t have at the time and why learning those facts changed his mind.

If Covid was only transmissible by people with symptoms, you could control spread by asking those people to stay home and everyone else is clear — no masks needed. If it’s impossible to know if you’re infectious without testing, masks make more of a difference. More effective ones are obviously better.

I certainly knew at the time that I was triaging masks because health care workers were more important than me. I still have a note on my fridge from February thanking me for donating some N95s I had from wildfire season. The trade off was pretty clear.

That's a narrative change, not a changing thesis. He knew at the time masks were needed by the general public but lied to the American public so that healthcare workers would have an adequate supply. He admits to that much. Again, a decision that was not his to make. He then realized that the lie was worse than he'd anticipated and started encouraging masks. Couple that with that Dr Fauci has been tied to being knowledgeable on gain of function research and most people can read between the lines.

They/he lied, because they wanted to make things look under control and if everyone starts wearing masks, then it would cause panic and it will looks like a global pandemic. The shortage of the masks would have happened anyway, as it wasn’t purely driven by local US demand, but also by overseas supply chain issues. And the US has means to restrict sale of strategic goods to the population in case of emergency. So there was really no good reason to tell people not to wear masks.

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