And what happens when the scientist and politician is in a hybrid role, like Fauci? Folks don’t trust Fauci because credibility, in general, has been harmed. Q conspiracy theorists thrive in a world of distrust. Chronic distrust of politicians is too high a price to pay to justify the use of the occasional manipulation.
Whether it would have actually been worse or better I can't really guess, but I do see your point that it might have worked and definitely wouldn't have weakened public trust the way the dishonest approach did, so yeah, I'll concede that was probably a bad call.
It’s very common to see “super cuts“ of the media pulling a complete 180 on positions. Those are super compelling to the public, who are generally in alignment in hating hypocrisy.
Plenty of people own scarves and handkerchiefs, and for a while people were making their own masks at home. So the initial message could have been that any face covering helps and that N95 masks need to be reserved for healthcare workers and responders.
A politician manipulating the public is an attack on democracy, since democracy relies on having an informed demos. Condoning such behaviour shows how much faith a person has in (true) democracy.
I do have faith in representative democracy to do _approximately_ the right thing most of the time, or at least minimise how bad the bad results will be.
In other words, I think people are better at deciding who to trust to run the country than they are at actually running the country. Given that, it should be no surprise that I also think there will be situations where the person trusted to run the country will realise that telling the public the whole truth will be a bad idea, because they are better at interpretting that truth than the public is.
Lying to the public is not (imo) a slippery slope that inevitably makes anyone who goes down it a monster. Polititians can be something other than perfectly honest and actually satan, and in fact they must be. I think a perfectly honest polititian would be a bad thing overall, even beyond the fact that their career wouldn't last very long.
Where on that scale they should be is in the end in the hands of the public, via our democratic vote. Certainly I don't support constant lies and hiding of things the public needs to know. But that isn't what we're discussing here, we're discussing a single lie used for a good cause (though I admit it was probably not the best solution to the problem, it was at least a logical concept: convince people who need masks less to not panic buy masks, leading to more masks for people who need them more).
I am _much_ less comfortable by similar behaviour in scientists. Science is built on trust and a pursuit of truth, lying is anathema. This is true both within scientific debate, and from the outside, when scientists share their perspective it should be a counter balance to the more flexible interpretation of truth provided elsewhere.
Tldr: Polititians can and should play politics (politics _is_ mostly white lies, or just lies, depending on your cynicism level). Scientists should not, it hurts the reputation of science as a whole.