I don't think so. There seemed to be genuine uncertainty early on in the pandemic about whether masks would be helpful. We didn't know if the virus was airborne and there was a question about whether the masks would actually be helpful. For example, the masks could have had very low benefit but encouraged people to touch their face more.

Whitty in March 2020: "In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that. The only people we do sometimes use masks for are people who have got an infection and that is to help them to stop it spreading around."

I think this was a mistake: common sense suggests that they should have had some effect (and the evidence ended up supporting this). But I don't see any evidence for it being deliberate misinformation to avoid pressure on mask sourcing.

I also think that this one mistake should not be held up as the key problem in the pandemic. Public health information in the UK has generally been very good. Most of the missteps in the pandemic were from poor governmental decisions.

> no talk of this in the media

This is absolutely not true. I've seen this issue discussed ad nauseum.

Among the civilian population, perhaps. Not among politicians and health officials. At least Fauci, WHO, and Finnish health authorities HAVE come out afterwards and admitted that they lied about masks to conserve them for health personnel.

This is not true. I think Fauci etc. admitted that a reason masks weren't recommended early on was partly to conserve masks. That's quite different from the claim that they actively lied about them.

- Surgeon General, Feb 29, 2020

Please stop spreading misinformation.

Previous Surgeon General Jerome Adams is not the same person as Fauci.

I'm not in the USA, but looks like your surgeon general in Feb 2020 was not an ideal choice for the post. He sounds like a political Trump appointee.

Even so, the full tweet read:

"Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!

They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can't get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!"

...so it sounds like he was quite upfront about the idea that mask use was partly being discouraged to avoid pressure on sourcing masks for medical professionals.

In grandparent post you stated "There seemed to be genuine uncertainty early on in the pandemic about whether masks would be helpful".

In this post you are stating "mask use was partly being discouraged to avoid pressure on sourcing masks for medical professionals".

So which is it? Were they recommending against mask use because masks are not helpful, or were they recommending against mask use because masks are so helpful that we actually need to conserve them for medical professionals? Which is it?

If you're going to lie, at least make up a consistent story.

Masks are clearly going to be more effective when used by trained personnel in a clinical setting. For example, removing masks using gloves and disinfecting hands before touching faces. There isn't necessarily a contradiction here in thinking masks could be effective for medical personnel but not the public. Although, as I have already said, I think they made a mistake.

> If you're going to lie

If you don't have the wit or politeness to enter a discussion without throwing insults around please find another forum to argue on.

The inability of public health officials to simply say “we got X wrong” when they pivot massively erodes trust; ironically admitting “we were wrong; we know better now” would have done the opposite: it would have increased trust.

You state that masks "weren't recommended" which indeed would be different from "recommending not to wear masks". However, Fauci didn't merely abstain from recommending masks, he actively recommended people not to wear masks. Yes, he actively lied about it, and he has openly admitted that he has lied about it. Now please stop spreading misinformation.

Pandemics are such a common trope that Hollywood has made multiple (bad) movies revolving around them. Yet it appears we were unprepared for the basics.

What Fauci said or why isn't important. The question we should be asking is: Why were in that position to begin with? We were warned - time and again - and each time that warning was ignored.

& what happened to the Pandemic Playbook created by the 44th presidential administration? It was completely discarded by the 45th presidential administration.

What proceeded to happen during the 45th presidential administration? A somewhat predicted pandemic. It’s too bad they didn’t have a playbook that told them step by step how to properly handle it…

Where were the stockpiles of appropriate equipment? Or did the playbook say such things would fall out of the sky, like manna from heaven?

Fact: The 45th didn't discard them. In fact, the gov bought masks from Facebook and (I think) Google who did have a stockpile (but evidently not for pandemic purposes).

You're loving the playbook but missing the fact that some basic and necessary execution never happened.

Feel free to use the search engine of your choice to search “US PPE Stockpile” & read any of the multiple credible articles that come up as the first results of the search. As it was known nearly immediately after COVID started, the stockpiles were mostly depleted - and what wasn’t depleted was mostly expired. This is why you saw pictures and videos of nurses demonstrating their supplied smocks disintegrating into dust as they put them on.

The 45th administration had the responsibility to refresh the stockpiles, and they purposely chose not to. If you’re unaware of this, your snark is a bit funny as you appear to be the one suckered.

Secondly: As for what the government bought after they remembered the stockpile is screwed, also for the small bit of it that was still useable.

“The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use,” - Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor, 45th Admin

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2020/4/3/21207140/jared-kus...

So much to the point that at least one state had to buy shipments of PPE in secrecy & then guard the distribution of said shipments with their National Guard. Everything not done in secrecy or guarded was being “appropriated” by the Feds, for reasons not hard to imagine given the statement of the aforementioned advisor.

There’s a lot more to it, but I digress.

Somebody here is indeed a sucker - but I do not believe it is I.

I won't dispute Trump exaggerated. That's a given.

On the other hand, all I can find are articles on the stockpile being depleted and that even if full there were numerous warning about full not being enough.

So again, a simple question: Why? And why isn't anyone willing to ask why?

We knew this was coming. We even got a warning. And still not even close. But no accountability??

Google “Trump administration stockpile budget cuts”

and stop attempting to discuss in good faith with you, who apparently really wants to be right on the internet when they’re completely wrong.

We were clearly - and across multiple administrations - under prepared...why? And why is no one (read: media) seriously asking why?

That is, again for example, even an undepleted stockpile wasn't going to be enough.

Dear Uncle Sam - Where were the stockpiles of appropriate supplies?

That's it. We can move on to other discussions but let's start with the basics first.

And at least in the US, their are 1000s of people receiving good money to take that warning seriously. And they still failed.

Trust is what our entire society is built upon and the foundation of science.

They also have the dual jobs of keep people alive and keeping society functioning.

The logical flaw then was that telling people to just wear masks if they're infected doesn't work very well if highly contagious people don't know they're infected, which turned out to be the case. I can see where it might have taken awhile to figure that out, but still the lack of transparency about how these decisions were made and the resulting credibility deficit is a problem.

They're actually no good at anything. You can compare places that were right next to each other and which differed only in mask mandates, or look at the times mask mandates were introduced and removed. Cases don't shift.

See the graphs here, where the numbers from different nearby regions are overlayed on the same graph with the times of mask mandate rule changes:

https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a...

That's why when you dig into the citations of a paper claiming masks work, you invariably find some invalid evidence, like they'll be citing model outputs as evidence of real-world effects, or they'll cite a study whose CI includes zero, etc.

For example, mask mandates tend to get imposed when cases are rising, and removed when they fall. To say they have no effect on cases is to confuse cause and effect.

The conspiracy site you link to has no interest in looking at the data dispassionately. There's a reason why we have data science and peer review to investigate these things.

There are lots of cases where mask mandates were not added and removed at the times you claim, which were geographically next to each other, and in which there was no observed difference. There are lots of cases where mask mandates were added and the trend of the case graph didn't change at all. These are evidence against the hypothesis that masks work which was, note, the standard belief prior to mid-2020. That's why public health officials all said mass masking doesn't work. It's because it doesn't.

Those aren't mutually exclusive. Anyone can throw some graphs together on a blog. Why should we trust him over papers that have been peer reviewed by experts in their fields?

It's a series of cherry-picked comparisons. Why is he comparing Germany to Sweden? They don't even share a border. Why not UK to France or Peru to Ecuador? Did he pick those countries because it happens to support his theory?

We don't have to wonder, because he admits it: "Perhaps the clearest example of the delusional political obsession with pretending masks matter is found in Southern California." Oh, great. So why are you showing us the "clearest examples"? Why not a comparison of the other places which aren't as "clear"? How can we determine if it's statistically significant if it's not a systematic study?

There are lots of other problems with that page. He's a crank.

Why compare Germany and Sweden - because their case curves are virtually the same despite wildly different levels of masking. Because providing counter-examples is how you disprove a hypothesis.

Remember that he doesn't actually need to do lots of statistical analysis of this because mask theory is a total one. It doesn't come with caveats like "sometimes in some countries it works and others it doesn't for <reasons>", it doesn't even come with effectiveness numbers. It's just masks=less COVID. To disprove a theory this simple you only need one counter example. But this guy shows lots. He makes a big pile of graphs not because it's actually necessary to prove the point, but to try and ram it home to people who are in denial about it. There isn't just one counter example, there are a huge number of counter examples, and any one of them is sufficient to invalidate "masks = universal and effective COVID countermeasure" as a belief. That actually is science!

If mask mandate proponents were proposing a very subtle and complex effect where it was expected that sometimes there'd be no impact etc, then yes, the counter-argument would need to be correspondingly complex in return. That isn't the case here though.

I remember this, at the time we knew people who were infected (and infectious) could take more than 10 days to show symptoms, and if they didn't wear a mask they could infect hundreds. We also knew that anything less than an N95 wasn't designed to protect the wearer anyway (though as it turns out it does), but rather everyone else from the wearer. So it was really disingenuous of them to suggest your mask doesn't protect you, as they knew its everyone else's mask than protects you..

By the time it hit Italy we knew it was airborne, even if not by official measure, out government and the WHO kept this BS up for months after that.

Maybe we watch different media, as i have seen nothing about this issue. A few articles online, hidden away, nothing proportional to the seriousness of the issue.

Just like anything, reality is a bit more complicated. I don't think there was any genuine uncertainty about whether masks were helpful or effective, as we already knew that at minimum COVID-19 was droplet spread due to it being so similar to SARS. The issue was whether or not the public could correctly and effectively use masks, because wearing them properly is important as improper wear can actually /increase/ exposure to capture viral particles on the mask material.

But rather than just be honest and tell people the truth, they chose to spread simple lies.

Is there solid evidence anywhere that masks are important one way or the other? While it is plausible that a mask could prevent an infection in an encounter, I've not yet seen anyone waving something conclusive around that masks prevent infections over the course of a pandemic.

I've managed to avoid the coronavirus for 2 years now and as far as I can tell the future still has me getting COVID in it. I'm still not clear what role the mask is meant to play in that forecast.

They knew this after sars. It's not hard to find the evidence from after then.

It's just a nice visual way to make people feel safer against the thing they're told to fear.

So if wearing masks pushes your infection date out to when vaccines are available (and you get vaccinated), it is not unreasonable to assume the inverse (that not wearing masks led to earlier infections and thus worse outcomes, and death)

Unfortunately many parts of this paper are beyond me, but this study does appear to find that community level masking has an impact, but it is a study that used actual communities and tracked compliance (and impact of different interventions on encouraging making)

> We used high-quality surgical masks that had had a filtration efficiency of 95% [standard deviation (SD) = 1%]; this is substantially higher than the filtration efficiency of the cloth masks we designed, which had a filtration efficiency of 37% (SD = 6%). These cloth masks had substantially higher filtration than common commercial 3-ply cotton masks, but lower than hybrid masks that use materials not commonly available for community members in low-resource settings (54).

The key result:

> We find clear evidence that surgical masks lead to a relative reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence of 11.1% (aPR = 0.89 [0.78,1.00]; control prevalence = 0.81%; treatment prevalence = 0.72%). Although the point estimates for cloth masks suggests that they reduce risk, the confidence limits include both an effect size similar to surgical masks and no effect at all. (aPR = 0.94 [0.78,1.10]; control: 0.67%; treatment: 0.61%).

It's a shame that even with such a large study, the phenomenon is so noisy that we can't get a strong signal here. But i think the takeaway is that masking has an effect, but it is rather small.

There's a lot more detail in the paper. Including this gem:

> We find no evidence that any of our village-level or household-level treatments, other than mask color, impacted mask-wearing. For mask-color, we see marginally significant differences, small in magnitude. In surgical mask villages, blue masks were more likely to be observed than green (adjusted percentage point difference = 0.03, [-0.00,0.06]), and in cloth mask villages, red more likely than purple (adjusted percentage point difference = -0.02, [-0.04,-0.00]). Text message reminders, incentives for village-leaders, or explicit commitment signals explain little of the observed increase in mask-wearing. Compared to self-protection messaging alone, altruistic messaging had no greater impact on mask-wearing, and twice-weekly text messages and a verbal commitment had no significant effects.

I think a key target was spreading out the infections so that hospitals weren't overwhelmed. And delaying infections until vaccines were available. Imagine if everyone in the country had gotten covid over the first half of 2020.

I attended FOSDEM in Brussels in 2020 right at the beginning of February, after COVID was identified, but before the big push of lockdowns in March. I had to transit through Atlanta to get to EU, and had a long layover so left the airport to visit a friend. While I was in the airport and flying, I wore a P100 rated half-mask respirator with cartridge filters the entire time. Recently the TSA and airlines had been experimenting (and now fully implemented) facial recognition for identity verification in US airports rather than handing the TSA your ID. It's supposed to be optional, but I got delayed 20 minutes in an otherwise empty line re-entering Atlanta because the TSA agent on duty wanted to argue with me to take my mask off and how masks were ineffective, and that's what the doctors/CDC (based in Atlanta) said, and how arrogant I was that I thought I knew more than the CDC. I kept my mask on. I didn't get COVID, and in fact still haven't had it at this point (although I'll likely get Omicron) by following common sense precautions and being vaccinated.

The telling people not to wear masks or buy masks was one of the biggest things for me that immediately let me know that the public was being lied to and manipulated. I've made a point of keeping up on the latest research and sharing what I know with family and friends directly, including preparatory advice. I already had a "pandemic prep kit" in my prep supplies, which had plenty of respirators, and I shared them with family and friends early on when they were hard to get. To me, it's utterly obscene how often even /basic/ easily verifiable facts were lied about to the public, masks especially.

Now that this has been politicized as an issue in the US, it's just made it harder. Here I am knowing the government lied consistently throughout the pandemic to everyone and that many of the "precautions" were nonsense, but the entire time advocating masks and vaccines... nobody on any political aisle likes truthful information since their selection of "truth" cannot match with reality.