To properly calibrate how we treat their recommendations.
I'm most sympathetic to the CDC, because everyone spreading their message are con men. In the most classic of senses, literal con men. They tell me they have the must-be-believed scoop, up until they're found out. Then they have an excuse for why I was wrong for coming away from our interaction with the perception that their preliminary statements should be taken as seriously as I did. But now, this time, today, the have the real must-be-believed scoop that I can trust.
How is this political or economic? It was purely public health.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we thought we could trace and contain anybody with covid, thus ELIMINATING the virus. In this view, only healthcare workers need masks! If healthcare workers go without masks because every ordinary joe stocked up on masks and toilet paper, that means that healthcare workers get infected and become the spreaders, which is the opposite of "containing".
The original PR was something like "masks don't work unless it's an N95 mask and you wear it in a very specific way, and healthcare workers need those anyways so don't buy 'em". Yeah, I can agree it feels misleading now.
But in a world where we're trying to literally ELIMINATE the virus, it makes sense: Wearing a cloth mask near someone with the virus COULD get you infected, so you're better off not being in that situation in the first place.
Once it became clear that we couldn't just have everybody stay at home until the virus is gone, the CDC changed their recommendation to wearing cloth masks. This was about 2 weeks into "lockdowns", at the very very beginning of april.
I fail to see whats so bad about the CDC's recommendations. From the point of view of public health (again, that's what the CDC is. A public health agency), these recommendations make sense in context.
Healthcare workers aren't getting masks through the same supply chains as regular people; they are getting them through hospitals. If it truly was the case that hospitals were being outbid for supplies by private entities, that is a commerce regulatory problem arguably out of scope of the CDC. The government should have bitten the bullet and passed a law to forcibly route material to hospitals and / or eminent domained existing stockpiles for sale by companies or individuals and given them to hospitals. It is not the CDC's job to handle supply chain management in these contexts. If the CDC would like to get involved, it should be encouraging people to give masks to health care workers because they work and because health care workers should take priority. This preserves their credibility and shifts the responsibility to act onto the entities that should be bearing it: the president and congress.
The CDC (and frankly every major government in the world) believed that covid-19 could be contained, and that no major outbreak would happen inside their country. This was incorrect. But if you hold this assumption, the CDC made the correct recommendation: N95 masks, properly worn, are the masks that protect against covid-19, and average people don't need them.
>The CDC (and frankly every major government in the world) believed that covid-19 could be contained
There's plenty of photos from asian countries where mask use was immediate, wide spread, and effective.
New York went to the federal government to get masks and was told to pound sand. They then ordered them from Canada and were once again impeded by the federal government[1]. So now you are in a situation where your the hospital supply chain is now gone, and you are forced to buy masks for medical workers in the marketplace, and you are now facing the real possibility that the general public may buy up all the masks before they can contain and eliminate the virus.
The CDC may have been acting in it's own best interest in the face of a federal branch who refused to believe that the virus was a big issue. If the CDC truly believed they had time to contain and eliminate the virus, I can see how telling people to not stock up on masks may have been a good idea at the time.
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-fbi-redirects...
Can you point to the studies that they would have used to confirm this belief?
> If they didn't believe that masks worked, why would they do that?
Because a healthcare professional stuck in a room with symptomatic people is a different situation to a member of the public walking around.
Especially because HCPs are trained to use masks, they use them in combination with other PPE and routine handwashing; their PPE is made to standards and tested to make sure it complies with those standards; HCPs are audited on their use of handwashing and PPE.
This is debatable, but in any case, is it excusable for the CDC to hold beliefs that are so badly wrong in the first place? Especially in the face of evidence from the rest of the world?
You say
> admitting they don't know (which is the only acceptable scientific answer when you can't back up a claim with reproducible experiments).
But what kind of response is that really, when there's an infectious disease and the center for disease control tells the public "We have no clue what the appropriate response is, we're going to tell you in a couple months after we've done some reproducible experiments"?
On the contrary, the ONLY ethical way for the CDC to act in the face of an emerging (potential) crisis is recommendations based on the current beliefs of the organization (which may be incorrect as they are, as you say, "based on their guts") and updating them the moment more evidence comes available (Which they did. Repeatedly.)
So in fact, I would not say I've had a loss of trust but a gain of trust by an institution acting in a very rational manner throughout the pandemic.