- They didn't say: "we need to prioritize medics", they said "masks have no effect" and sometimes "masks are BAD for you".
- They have doctors in Japan/Taiwan/China too, but they said from the beginning there to wear masks.
Tough to do that if they're dead.
I also saw blog posts from people in public health departments at respectable universities about how masks on laymen have no effect because we can't wear them right/will touch our face too much to adjust them. Whether they believed that at the time is unclear to me, but that was the theory being pushed by a bunch of experts to explain the CDC guidance.
I think we were overestimating the transmission risk from surfaces/face touching at that time. I also think we underestimated the effectiveness of basic cloth masks thinking that only filters would be useful. COVID is more likely to spread via larger droplets than some other viruses. However a closer look at literature from Asia on the previous SARS pandemic should have suggested that masks are more likely than not worth promoting.
So I have to wonder if they considered what would happen if/when they had to flip the story once masks became more available. I doubt they expected it to become such a critical part of the pandemic response, otherwise they probably would have been more careful with messaging. Of course these decisions were made under a lot of pressure with not much time to strategize - I just hope they learn from this and reconsider a bit how they communicate. Because I do think this exacerbated the anti-mask issue. IMO they could have even avoided Trump making it political if one of the day 0 rallying cries was to ramp up mask production.
This is even more hilariously stupid than it sounds, as the same studies showed that only 10% higher a proportion of medical personnel than the general public can properly fit their masks. And yet it would be insane to claim that it's useless for medical personnel to wear PPE.
But yes, there are plenty of fields full of intelligent, quantitative people that are better at basic scientific literacy and modeling uncertainty than our public health infrastructure has shown themselves to be. This isn't just theoretical; every single "heterodox" conclusion I was exposed to that was based on the science instead of whatever the fuck goes on at the CDC/FDA ended up becoming CDC/FDA policy, several months later.
Medical culture's innumeracy[1], religious adherence to omission bias, and refusal to model reality outside of the exact parameters of an RCT is potentially adaptive for the normal clinical context. But it's an extremely poor fit for a pandemic, and has cost thousand and thousands of lives over the course of this one.
It's a travesty that the CDC, FDA and WHO couldn't collectively manage to provide information a fraction as useful as accurate as (eg) Alex Tabarrok's freaking Twitter account.
For someone of your, uh, limitations, it's probably better to slavishly follow public health advice, in the absence of the ability to do any critical thinking. For anyone with a median IQ, understanding when political/bureaucratic/cultural failures are cause for skepticism of public health conclusions is a must.
[1] Famously, studies show 80% of doctors unable to do the most basic of statistics relevant to their job, like being able to interpret the chances of breast cancer given a positive mammogram. Over half of the doctors surveyed were off by a factor of NINE in their estimate (90% vs 10%). This isn't a random medical-themed math game with no clinical relevance; one's risk of breast cancer is influenced by multiple factors and false positives mean invasive procedures like biopsies that themselves are not riskless.
If it was a mistake due to incomplete information, then it happens, but discussion about what went wrong should be encouraged and there should be transparency (perhaps at a later date) about what could be done differently in the future. Experts are going to be right more often than laypeople, but they are still sometimes wrong, and if that can't be acknowledged it's a systemic problem.
Ironically, blasting the US for pausing the J&J vaccine was highly upvoted on HN, even though that was also expert decision making, and it was actually in the midst of the issue without the benefit of hindsight. I wonder why the topic of early pandemic mask messaging seems to attract downvotes on HN.
I suppose for the same reason that so many consider mask requirements an unacceptable intrusion on their most sacred freedoms: it's become heavily politicized, most people only "care" about issues to the extent that they're able to signal tribal membership, and moral indignation isnt any less addictive when it's detached from reality.
I don't think anti-mask is a popular sentiment on HN, so I doubt that is driving the vote. But this isn't the first time I've seen downvotes on this topic. And it's not like HN loves authority or the biomedical research establishment in general.
This is exactly it. Anti-maskers/anti-restrictionists seized on the stupidity of our early mask policy (and subsequent flip-flop to sanity) as evidence that restriction policy isn't in the interests of public health, but just a power grab by elites. Denying that this ever happened lets their simpleton counterparts stick to a simple narrative, where masks have always and obviously been a good idea and any deviation from the maximalist consensus needs to be crushed without any equivocation or weakness.[1]
By contrast, the "war" right now is against vaccine hesitancy[2]. There are no Trumpists or other hated subcultures that are gung-ho on vaccines, so the J&J pause is interpreted simply as "scaring people away from vaccines" during a time when we need vaccines (this is unfortunately correct[3])
For a person infected with tribal-brain, consistency with reality is more or less irrelevant. HN is heavily-populated or at least influenced by subcultures (Bay Area, tech) that have been religiously adherent to the appearance of compliance and performative self-abnegation as a response to the pandemic (like a milder version of the Flagellants during the Black Death).
[1] Hence also the ritualistic obsession with masking in places where it isn't necessary. My girlfriend gets uncomfortable that I often take my mask off outdoors when we're walking around, despite it being clear for almost a year that there's minimal risk from doing so, especially when walking swiftly (on top of that, we're both fully-vaccinated). She acknowledges this is irrational, but it's not too difficult to try to meet her in the middle and so I keep it on more often than I'd like.
[2] Fascinatingly, US vaccine willingness now polls at ~61% while % vaccinated is 55%. We're effectively in the phase where demand is the challenge.
[3] https://mobile.twitter.com/FT__Dan/status/138753181546475110...
Spot on. Some people like following rules, and lording their compliance over others. None of this precludes the goodness of following pandemic rules, however.
Regarding 2, hopefully restrictions introduced by airlines, clubs, sporting events, theme parks, etc. will push anybody on the fence to get a vaccine over the coming months. Once things really start to open up I imagine FOMO can be a real driver.