> When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things - being right, and keeping power. If she doesn't optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does. That means she's trying to solve a harder problem than Zvi is, and it makes sense that sometimes, despite having more resources than Zvi, she does worse at it.
They were all lying to the public about masks to cover for the fact that there weren't enough for healthcare workers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/health/coronavirus-n95-fa...
> the result is eroded trust that health advice being given is in your immediate best interest.
I would argue that they are making health advice that minimizes the population-wide risk; I don't expect them to tell me the optimal thing for me to do to protect myself if that advice means that the population-wide payoff is worse (i.e. "hey everybody the best thing you can do is to grab an N95 mask" might be optimal for everyone who is able to do that but that is not the optimal thing to do for the population). I kind of understand people's frustration but I just don't personally feel that this was that controversial.
The chain of events leading up to what they said makes sense to me, but it puts people in an odd position where we have to trust guidance not because it's accurate but because the organization issuing it thinks saying such will have the best outcome. If for example the PPE situation worsened again and masks became unadvised for similar reasons I think more people would be skeptical as a result.
The discussion here is as follows:
1. The statement that masks are ineffective at stopping coronavirus is not true.
2. Those false statements are partly to blame for America's anti-masker problem (although the lion's share of the blame lies with Trump/GOP policy)
3. One lesson we might take away from this is, when authority figures knowingly make false statements during a crisis, that squanders credibility they may need later on. Perhaps leaders in future crises should think twice before repeating this mistake.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/health/coronavirus-n95-fa...
But I think this "they lied to us, we shouldn't trust them" rhetoric is silly and dangerous. Again, I agree, it's definitely a lesson to learn. Public health professionals are human beings too and I think it's fair to say they are doing their jobs to the best of their ability.
Sigh.
Only one of the videos was actually from that time and did say something different. One was just some newsreaders saying some stuff about their take on it.