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Comment by aaron695 | Hacker News Reader

> Wu refused to go along with China's huge policy shift

She was also heavily attacked by people in the West as she also refused to go along with the Wests 'masks don't matter policy'

She created Google Docs early on with evidence masks would work contravening the Western governments and the 'trust the science' crowd.

Lets not pretend it's just China here, it maybe offtopic to this incident, but at the time you could see it was wearing her down.

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People in the West typically do not have the ability to arrest people in Shenzhen.

The “trust the science” crowd were the ones advocating for masks, no?

There was a pivot. At the beginning of the pandemic there were a number of American institutions saying masks were ineffective and unnecessary[1]

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/02/17/nih-di...

Not at the beginning. There is evidence to suggest that some institutions intentionally lied about the effectiveness of masks at the beginning of the pandemic in an attempt to prevent a mask shortage, and the "trust the science" crowd ate it up. Hilariously/despairingly enough, many of those masking at the beginning of the pandemic when it was "unscientific" to do so would later become anti-maskers. Likewise, those "trust the science" folks were quick to put on masks when "the science" changed.

Throughout the pandemic, political preferences were a far more reliable predictor of human behavior than anything else.

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