Also Fauci saying that there's "no reason" for anyone to be going around in a mask. (Not, "we don't know if it will help", not "there are more effective measures you could take", but "no reason".)

(Edit: This is from March, just to be clear that he's not saying that now.)

>Fauci: Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks.

>LaPook: You’re sure of it? Because people are listening really closely to this.

>Fauci: …There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/outdated-fauci-video-on-fa...

To be fair, wasn’t that right before the first big wave hit?

Sure, and what I think you have here is a bunch of people not being exact in their terminology and not explaining themselves, which makes their statements seem wrong out of context.

Consider, the situation is that people think if they get a mask, they are protected, and can go about their lives as they were. Also, there's a shortage of masks. Given the option of "stay away from large groups of people and public events" or "wear a mask and feel protected", saying "stop buying masks" might mean something slightly different then than it does now.

At the same time, I acknowledge that's a particularly egregious example. To that I say that the Surgeon General is a political appointee, and our government and the politicians that make it up (all of them) have failed us to various degrees. That interacts with what and how the health professionals have communicated with the public, but in a much less straightforward way (if there's different messaging coming from government health services and the general health community, and the government sources are counterproductive, who did you trust, and who do you blame?).

It is not an excuse. Those early wrong statements have cause irreparable harm that's still ongoing. If all they wanted was to ensure health professionals get it first they should have SAID so (lots of responsible people in this country, even if there are plenty of bad apples) and should have gone to the supply chain sources to ensure health professionals get it before regular citizens do. What they SHOULD NOT have done is to straight lie to the population that masks are not useful at all and now turn around. Trust has been lost and good luck rebuilding this before the pandemic infects everyone.

You can hold people liable for making the best guess at the time with the information they have, but you can't expect them to keep giving you advice then. All the professionals were saying "given what we know now" with all their statements, and revising them as they went along. The problem isn't that they were wrong, it's that when correcting themselves, that was immediately used as evidence that they were incompetent, which means people are then forced to choose between the new messaging of the professionals and the counter-messaging of the politicians (and media, since they carry that signal).

You can read Fauci's statements on what he said and why here[1], but the main things to thing about are:

- What did we know about transmission at the time those statements were made?

- Where was the outbreak at those times? Localized to specific areas, or nation-wide?

- Was it responsible to report to the whole nation that they should be wearing masks given those facts? What if we know there's not enough masks, and that means masks go to areas that don't need them?

The bottom line is, should we have expected anyone to act differently given those conditions and that knowledge at that time? You can note someone made a wrong decision in the past, but if they made the correct decision given the information they have, you can't rationally hold them accountable for the outcome (and if we're not speaking rationally, then we're not actually discussing anything, just airing grievances).

1: https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-doesnt-regret-advising...

> The bottom line is, should we have expected anyone to act differently given those conditions and that knowledge at that time?

Yes? This isn't a school classroom. It's okay to cheat on the test. You know who's best at handling this because you know they handled it last time. You ask your boss to ask his boss to get on the line with Chou Jih-Haw and ask for some of his best people. They're an allied nation with close ties who want even closer ties. They will gladly help.

And this isn't news. People were saying this in February, in March, in April. People whose full time job is other things knew this.

The real problem is that American public health institutions have NIH (haha, a pun!) syndrome.

> You know who's best at handling this because you know they handled it last time. You ask your boss to ask his boss to get on the line with Chou Jih-Haw and ask for some of his best people. They're an allied nation with close ties who want even closer ties. They will gladly help.

You think that's Fauci's call? That's Trump's call. You're blaming healthcare professional's for doing what was best given the knowledge and resource they had available. I've made it pretty clear that the politicians failed us, and you've just pointed out another way.

> And this isn't news. People were saying this in February, in March, in April. People whose full time job is other things knew this.

All this does presuppose they have any actual help they could provide. It's unlikely they were willing to ship us a few tens (or hundreds!) of millions of N95 masks.

> The real problem is that American public health institutions have NIH (haha, a pun!) syndrome.

The problem is that they are beholden to the politicians, and even more so now, where appointees that speak out using their experience but contradict the party line are replaced.

There's been a lot of talk about how Trump is eroding people's faith in government and institutions, and here we have a prime example of that, where the institutions were clearly dysfunctional for obvious reasons that have to do with the executive branch, and we still have people shooting the messengers.