> How about the rampant false claims from various health officials and the WHO that masks didn't work in the very beginning of the pandemic.

That... wasn't the claim.

The claim was that people shouldn't stockpile masks for use beyond the circumstances in which they were recommended, because such additional use did not provide additional protective benefit.

This was roughly contemporaneous with guidance that most people should eliminate all non-essential contact with people outside their household. Masking for essential interactions was recommended by the same people advising against buying masks more generally.

> ...and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers.

It wasn't a lie, and preserving stocks for frontline workers and their essential interactions was an overtly cited part of the rationale, alongside the lack of additional benefit from superfluous masking.

> How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist?

That didn't happen.

> How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist?

The initial US travel bans, instituted after substantial domestic community spread was known and after substantial spread in lots of other foreign places that were not targeted by the bans was also known were, if not racist per se, more political posturing than public health.

> How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US.

How is that a lie? Whether or not it (or the actual limit on testing, which was more nuanced) was the optimum way of managing limited testing resources may be a valid debate, but it's not a lie.

The WHO claims/guidances could absolutely be interpreted as such. Here's from 2020-04 when WHO changed their stance.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/10/8298906...

Sweden may be seen as a bit of an oddball but either way the head of the national public health agency was consistent in saying masks did not provide any benefits for individuals pretty far into the pandemic.

https://www.bild.de/bild-plus/politik/ausland/politik-auslan... (paywall)

https://nyheter24.se/nyheter/944114-tegnell-om-varfor-munsky...

Not mentioned by the GP, but what was up with anything resembling a lab-leak theory getting the "unquestionably fake news" treatment for months?

I have not done any extensive digging into the vaccines myself and can't with good conscience say I'm well-informed. It still seems to me that the risk-trade-off is strongly in favor for getting vaccinated. Even so, I have full understanding for people who now have 0 trust in the public narrative. It's clear that there has been (still ongoing, I assume) a strong propaganda campaign that has at times been using misinformation and censorship (if you count deleting/shadowbanning social media content as censorship), involving governments, traditional news-media and social media. If the narrative around the effectiveness and risks of the vaccine holds, why do this?

The WHO, CDC, RKI, etc were all telling people not to wear medical masks and the press was happily parroting this information while the Korean and Chinese CDC were recommending the exact opposite. Not only were they doing that, they were also gaslighting those that pointed to e.g. the Chinese wearing masks and additionally made those that had the foresight to buy FFP2+ masks feel guilty for taking away the supplies of medical professionals. Never mind the immense failure of Western governments of outsourcing most of their mask production to China (which promptly banned exports) and not stockpiling PPI.

Some European countries were so stupid, that they donated hundreds of thousands of masks from their own supplies at the beginning of the pandemic and then ran out of masks for their own medical personnel.

The actions of all those organisation advising against masks were evil and stupid. People saw through their excuses and bought all the quality masks anyway. The rest was bought by the Chinese and sent back home, resulting in an almost completely empty market for quality masks last year.

I hope the likes of the CDC are never able to fix their reputation. Nobody ever apologised, nobody lost their jobs over this.

The claim that masks don’t help was absolutely an early claim spread widely throughout US media.

The motivation may have been to prevent stockpiling, but the messaging was that masks don’t help. I remember it clearly.

> The claim was that people shouldn't stockpile masks for use beyond the circumstances in which they were recommended, because such additional use did not provide additional protective benefit.

That is simply and verifiably false. This is a direct quote from an executive director of the WHO health emergencies program:

> There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-r...

Literally the first google result for "WHO masks don't work". There are plenty more after that. From the WHO's guidance published on April 6, 2020:

> there is currently no evidence that wearing a mask (whether medical or other types) by healthy persons in the wider community setting [...] can prevent them from infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19

You can speculate or demonstrate that the motives behind the claim did not match the claim itself. But to say that it wasn't the claim is flatly wrong.

> That... wasn't the claim.

That did appear to be the claim in Fauci's 60 Minutes interview. It was a pretty colossal messaging fuckup and damaged Fauci's credibility and trustworthiness early in the game.

You are right, many epidemiologists and related experts did assert that masks would not be useful to fight coronavirus. And they were wrong.

On the other hand, if it's a "colossal messaging fuckup" and damages "credibility and trustworthiness", then you pretty much have to give up on the whole 'science' thing entirely.

They were under the mistaken impression that coronaviruses were spread by large droplets produced by symptomatic individiuals---in which case social distancing and washing your hands would be as effective as masks, and the previous history (and current experience) says that convincing people to use masks correctly and consistently is very difficult. Further, having people stock up on masks like they were stocking up on toilet paper would mean that those who couldn't get along without them would be SOL.

Then it turned out that coronavirus could be transmitted as an aerosol, asymptomatically, meaning that social distancing and handwashing, while useful, were a lot less useful. Hence, masks.

But if you are expecting science to produce a single, correct, consistent TRUTH on demand, you are going to be disappointed. In fact, you're probably better off sticking with The_Donald memes, since they're all of the same quality.

i will begin this by saying that i am vaccinated and wear a mask. the CDC misled americans about the efficacy of masks specifically to reduce demand so that medical pros could get them. it's one thing to ask and another to straight up lie[1]. when an institution literally admits it is not truthful, that it is operating on some level where you must parse their motivations and countervailing evidence to determine whether they will give you correct advice, why should it be a surprise that people don't trust them?

this doesn't even get into the fact that fauci personally approved funding for GoF coronavirus research at the WIV, a fact which he has still not even acknowledged. there are many, many other reasons to distrust the CDC, but these are the ones that i found most personally flagrant.

[1] https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...

The fuckup wasn't that we didn't know as much about the virus a year ago than we do today, but that by Fauci's admission the messaging to discourage mask use was adopted to avoid PPE shortages for healthcare workers. That's not "the whole 'science' thing" that's just bad comms.

To be clear I was fine with saving masks for healthcare workers and maybe there wasn't a better way to do that against the backdrop of people going apeshit in the paper goods aisle, but the point still stands.

Also don't forget that not too long back suggesting that COVID-19 might have escaped from a Chinese lab was considered "lunatic conspiracy theory mongering".

It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to use this as an excuse not to get vaccinated against a disease that's killed over 600,000 US citizens.

It's not an excuse to not get vaccinated, that you read it that way says a lot about the whole problem really. It's a reply to the GP's question about what "lies" (I personally would not use as strong a word) were spread by quite a few people and media who should know better.

The parent thread to mine actually did claim that various lies were their mother's reason not to get vaccinated:

> My mother only got vaccinated last month [...] Her main hangup was the lies [...]

> and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers.

Do you have any evidence that this was the reason for the claims?

> How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist?

What censorship? I heard about it quite early.

> How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist?

Did the news media label it, or were they reporting on people who were labeling it?

> How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US.

AFAIK, there were lack of resources to test. Once the resources became available, testing was widespread.

> Do you have any evidence that this was the reason for the claims?

I did a search on youtube to find these sources ("fauci 60 minutes americans dont need to wear masks") I don't vouch for the channels, these are just the first place I found the relevant clips.

original statement (pretty hard to find):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ5oCxP6TUc

his explanation of that statement:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2MmX2U2V3c

Here's a timeline summary:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/10/20/is-trum...

> Do you have any evidence that this was the reason for the claims?

This was said by all health officials around January-March 2020. After the stock issue got solved masks suddenly magically became effective for everyone around the summer time. As a "regular person" who took both vaccine shots and is casually observing these developments without reading news or whatever, that single event showed me that governments don't give a shit about telling us the truth in a crisis.

"After the stock issue got solved masks suddenly magically became effective for everyone around the summer time."

Technically, it was roughly the end of March and April, when evidence of asymptomatic and aerosol transmission began to appear.

On the second point, to claim you do not know about this story is... surprising: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27388587 Just because you heard about it, doesn't mean there weren't attempts to censor these discussions.

The claim was that the fact there was an outbreak was censored - not about the origin.

In the first 15s or so of this Washington Post interview clip he explains that priority was being given to healthcare workers, and then also that asymptomatic spread was underestimated.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/washington-post-live/fa...

And here we go again...

Up through roughly April-May 2020, many, if not most, epidemiologists and virologists believed that masks would not help the situation: they thought respiratory viruses were spread through large droplets produced by symptomatic individuals and that physical separation, sanitation, and behavior would work as well as trying to convince people to were useful masks consistently and correctly.

After that time, reports began to appear showing coronavirus could be spread asymptomatically, by normal breathing and speech, in an aerosol form that could stay airborne for long times. Under those situations, masks are the only solution.

The "ensure that enough protective equipment was available for frontline health workers" thing was mostly a response to "but it couldn't hurt" thinking.

"Then there is the infamous mask issue. Epidemiologists have taken a lot of heat on this question in particular. Until well into March 2020, I was skeptical about the benefit of everyone wearing face masks. That skepticism was based on previous scientific research as well as hypotheses about how covid was transmitted that turned out to be wrong. Mask-wearing has been a common practice in Asia for decades, to protect against air pollution and to prevent transmitting infection to others when sick. Mask-wearing for protection against catching an infection became widespread in Asia following the 2003 SARS outbreak, but scientific evidence on the effectiveness of this strategy was limited.

"Before the coronavirus pandemic, most research on face masks for respiratory diseases came from two types of studies: clinical settings with very sick patients, and community settings during normal flu seasons. In clinical settings, it was clear that well-fitting, high-quality face masks, such as the N95 variety, were important protective equipment for doctors and nurses against viruses that can be transmitted via droplets or smaller aerosol particles. But these studies also suggested careful training was required to ensure that masks didn’t get contaminated when surface transmission was possible, as is the case with SARS. Community-level evidence about mask-wearing was much less compelling. Most studies showed little to no benefit to mask-wearing in the case of the flu, for instance. Studies that have suggested a benefit of mask-wearing were generally those in which people with symptoms wore masks — so that was the advice I embraced for the coronavirus, too.

"I also, like many other epidemiologists, overestimated how readily the novel coronavirus would spread on surfaces — and this affected our view of masks. Early data showed that, like SARS, the coronavirus could persist on surfaces for hours to days, and so I was initially concerned that face masks, especially ill-fitting, homemade or carelessly worn coverings could become contaminated with transmissible virus. In fact, I worried that this might mean wearing face masks could be worse than not wearing them. This was wrong. Surface transmission, it emerged, is not that big a problem for covid, but transmission through air via aerosols is a big source of transmission. And so it turns out that face masks do work in this case.

"I changed my mind on masks in March 2020, as testing capacity increased and it became clear how common asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infection were (since aerosols were the likely vector). I wish that I and others had caught on sooner — and better testing early on might have caused an earlier revision of views — but there was no bad faith involved."

"I’m an epidemiologist. Here’s what I got wrong about covid."(https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo...)

In March 2020 the official recommendations coming from Hong Kong, China or Korea were the complete opposite to what the US, UK, Germany or the WHO were recommending.

While the former were pragmatic and -very importantly- had enough masks, the latter were actively discouraging people from using any kind of masks and especially the quality masks such as FFP3 (or even FFP2) which are designed to protect among other things against respiratory viruses.

Asian countries had mask stockpiles and could manufacture them, had the experience of SARS and were apparently quite content with the scientific evidence, limited as it was. Naturally, if one can't tell a pandemic from their own ass, doesn't have local mask production capacity and donated a huge chunk of their masks the limitations of the scientific evidence become very critical indeed.

Let's take a moment to remember how US and European politicians and medical professionals were confidently claiming at the beginning of 2020 that the virus would not reach the West and how there's nothing to worry about.

Yes, absolutely. They were demonstrably engaged in a conspiracy attempt to kill everyone.

I highly doubt this explaination. Masks have been known for a very long time to be a good way to prevent the transmission of an airborne disease, especially like Covid, which involves generally a lot of coughing.

Here, a picture taken 100 years ago, about people wearing masks during the spanish flu. Mind the sign "wear a mask or go to jail!" https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/may/03/the-big...

"...to be a good way to prevent the transmission of an airborne disease, especially like Covid, which involves generally a lot of coughing."

But that's the point! COVID can be spread by asymptomatic individuals! No coughing! And it's spread by aerosol particles, not large droplets that would be stopped by the gauze masks from 1919. Or if you stay a few feet away from other people and washed your hands before you touched your face.

I've posted links before from pre-2019 about the effectiveness of masks and the difficulties in getting people to wear them consistently and correctly. I've posted links before to papers from May and June, 2020, discussing asymptomatic transmission. This (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo...) is an article by an actual, honest-to-gosh epidemiologist saying, "I changed my mind on masks in March 2020, as testing capacity increased and it became clear how common asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infection were (since aerosols were the likely vector)."

You can doubt anything you want. You can believe Dr. Murray is lying. You can believe I'm lying. You can believe everyone is lying to you. But you are going to have a difficult time convincing rational people with no better evidence than your opinion.

None of your examples are about the vaccine as far as I can tell. Are you suggesting that because some experts allegedly lied about some things in the past, no experts ought to ever be trusted again about any medical or public health matters?

Trust is acquired on the logn run, and can be broken easily. Would you mind if Union Carbide openned a chemical facility near your house? Well, they had the Bhopal disasted[0], but they can be trusted again, right? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

And trained pilots cause most plane crashes. Perhaps it’s time to place our trust elsewhere and randomly assign 2 passengers to the cockpit on every commercial flight!