That's still lying. They gave you, the individual, false information, and not for your own good. Quite the contrary, that misinformation would actually harm you if you believed it.
Do you really not see how destructive this was? Do you really expect people to not only forgive but most importantly forget this lie, just because they "made it clear after the fact"? How were you supposed to know they're not lying, again, about the vaccines and their safety?
I'm no American but it was the exactly the same here in Germany, with exactly the same consequences. It really baffles me when now government officials whine about people not trusting them, anymore.
Yes it was lying. Yes it was false information. No, that's not outside the scope of their role at times.
> ... and not for your own good. Quite the contrary, that misinformation would actually harm you if you believed it.
No, it was for the individual good. Hoarding of masks by randos in the middle of nowhere leading to no supply for the first responders in hospital puts you, the individual, at greater risk.
If all the hospital staff have COVID and no ability to stop transmission within hospital because Bob the Prepper has filled his underground HEPA filtered bunker with masks, yes, that puts you at risk.
You can weigh the trade-offs but your statement that there was no other way of viewing the situation is simply wrong.
> Do you really not see how destructive this was? Do you really expect people to not only forgive but most importantly forget this lie, just because they "made it clear after the fact"? How were you supposed to know they're not lying, again, about the vaccines and their safety?
Again, a crap situation, but one that the CDC wasn't responsible for. It was their job to mitigate to the best of their abilities. Tough times call for tough decisions. We know how groups react, we knew what people would have done.
I'm pissed the stockpiles were allowed to run low, and I'm happy the first-responders were prioritized as I believe this gave everyone the best chance.
> It really baffles me when now government officials whine about people not trusting them, anymore.
It doesn't surprise me, but that doesn't mean it was the wrong choice at the time given what we knew.
[edit] They had an optimization problem: basically nobody in the population had COVID at the time, but those who did were likely to end up in hospital. Spreading out the limited masks over a population where almost nobody had it put far more people at risk than concentrating the supply in hospitals where far more people had it. This isn't rocket science. People were hoarding pasta at the time, and you think people were going to make good decisions about masks? The first casualty of War is Truth as they say.
Lying to people about their personal health for the greater good of society gets you the Tuskegee Experiment.
And that's the thing. The CDC didn't come out and say "we lied to you but the ends justified the means; killing some of you was worth saving more of you". They just tried to pretend it never happened, or alternatively that nobody could possibly have any idea that face masks could help you not infect your neighbors.
Primum non nocere
No, it is not. The parallels are there so strikingly.
Shades of grey exist and context matters. The world is not black and white and that isn't comfortable. However the point of delegating authority is to make difficult decisions with imperfect information in challenging circumstances that don't make sense at an individual level.
>As early as November 2020, Dr. Robert Karas, the jail’s doctor, told inmates who had contracted COVID that he was giving them a cocktail of vitamins, antibiotics, and steroids when in fact he was administering dangerously high doses of the dewormer.
>“At no point were Plaintiffs informed that the medications they were consuming included Ivermectin,” the lawsuit says. “Further, Plaintiffs were not informed of the side effects of the drug administered to them or that any results would be used for research purposes.”
>As a result, these men experienced diarrhea, bloody stools, stomach cramps, and vision problems, the lawsuit says, all of which suggest ivermectin poisoning.
Since this was in the middle of a public heath crisis, that behavior is acceptable and the doctor in question should not have lost his license, right?
Also, once you know you have been lied to, the trust is shattered, whatever the excuses. How people is going to trust again the CDC, knowing that it lied before?
Look at toilet paper - one rumour that it would run out, despite shops, the government, everyone, saying there is more than enough and the rabble went out and hoarded.
Masks could have been handled in the same way: from the manufacturer/retailer end. Masks could have been pulled off shelves and diverted to healthcare workers until they could be sold in limited numbers to consumers.
To be clear “handling” here meant that there were extensive and pervasive country-wide shortages, and many people went without toilet paper for weeks, including myself. People who needed toilet paper went without, while others hoarded more than they’d need for a year.
That’s the problem people were trying to avoid with masks. First responders and doctors needed them most, but we had people out there literally willing to buy as many as they could for their own personal supply. You can’t wait for the invisible hand of the market to just sort this kind of thing out.
https://www.today.com/news/brothers-who-hoarded-17-700-bottl...
Get a bidet, and buy a newspaper (no need to read it; it's already covered in shit).
Buying toilet paper when there is a toilet paper "bank run" is rational just as it is rational to take out your money from a failing bank.
Were I lived we had toilet paper but were all out of yeast. One person could buy all the store's 300 yeast bags for like 30USD. And as soon as people realized the yeast were gone they seemed to always buy yeast when available, making a shortage for a long time.
A way to prevent this is some soft limit on the amount people can buy. But it need to be in place before the shelves are empty.
So you are saying, the authorities should have send out a public messaging: "Don't buy toilet paper, toilet paper doesn't work", and that would have solved the situation?
You are coming up against a confirmation bias.
They simply messed up. All they had to do was say nothing and reach out to the manufacturers making N95 masks and their retailers. Just going to Walmart and Amazon and getting them to pull their stock would have prevented the vast majority of people from getting their hands on them. A non-trivial number of Americans at the time had already been wrongly and loudly bleating about how masks were useless and about "controlling the population".
The CDC lying to the public was plain wrong. However well-intentioned, it was a terrible shortsighted error in judgement that cost them all credibility. The CDC is perhaps the one agency we most need people to trust and they proved themselves to be untrustworthy.
Why isn't this being asked and discussed?
The bigger issue is the sheer cost of preparation against an exponentially-reproducing threat.
All other disasters can be prepared for with state of the art gear because they are, by nature, limited. Ergo, a limit amount of gear can be rapidly transported to location and will suffice.
In contrast, a pandemic requires "multiple for every single person" levels of stock. Which is outside most capitalist supply bohnds (i.e. no one can even produce that much stock).
N95s are used in many industries, and it’s a liquid market. Not hard to call up a big industrial distributor and say “hey, we have these masks that expire in 1yr, want to have a sale?”
Too many people were buying up shops of marks and sending them back to China. That hurts us even more.
If the goal is pandemic preparedness, it would probably be most efficient to just build and mothball production lines, doing limited runs yearly to exercise the machinery.
The government has more than enough land and warehouse space.
As far as I understand, none of the components (or machinery to produce them) are particularly cutting edge... just limited because they were sized for pre-pandemic sales volume.
The only responsible excuse is incompetence or negligence. We, the USA, were completely unprepared.
“Shelf-life” on non-perishable goods is highly conservative and often regulated by profit motive. Millions of N95 and P95 respirators were destroyed shortly before the pandemic due to “shelf life” and yet would have been a god send compared to having nothing or treating active COVID cases with a t-shirt or bandana over your face as happened in many US hospitals.
Proper planning could have rotated stock to maintain shelf life, slightly less proper planning could have realized the sheer stupidity of destroying working strategic materials due to an arbitrary and made up number.
This is Respiratory Pandemic 101. It's a threshold no expert should be tolerant of and/or should fail. Any other excuse is propaganda.
At the federal and provincial levels.
And no, they didn’t replace the stock.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2020/03/25/p...
If someone could produce even one document implying that this was discussed at all it would’ve been catastrophic.
They screwed up a bunch of things during COVID, but not many really trustworthy organizations actually just straight-up lied. Having something concrete to point to can’t help.
If they really wanted to save PPE for the hospitals, they could have made some calls to Walmart, Home Depot, and friends to pull it from the shelves. If it were an attempt at manipulation it would have been executed more smoothly.
Why? that sounds like a pretty reasonable measure to me. The government has every right to ask companies to limit supply or pull stock off shelves in a crisis. Hell, it could force them to if needed and bring back rationing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_States
In these circumstances capitalism directs us to the cheapest solution. Not the most robust solution. The solution is basically government as a guaranteed buyer. Yet this factory never had that and went out of business and even in Covid times didn’t come back afaik.
Finally remember that mask-nationalism was popping up in 2020. China was restricting exports of masks and so was the U.S. and Europe. The difficulty of acquiring masks was not to be underestimated. There were additional sordid details of government sponsored programs being used to personally enrich certain (relatives of potus) people.
And during the alpha strain of Covid it turns out the relatively low infectiveness combined with droplet control via cloth masks actually did the trick and reduced spread. Pediatric flu deaths went from ~150 to 1 in the 2020 season. One! All thanks to distancing and masks. We literally made a strain of the flu extinct via masks.
https://news.3m.com/3M-Aberdeen-workers-make-1-billion-N95s-...
I guess 95 million a month isn't enough for everyone in the country to put a new one on weekly, but it probably covers a significant portion of institutional need.
It's amazing how quickly human fallibility is forgotten when the motivations align with ideologically.
The achilles heel of every conspiracy is the idea that everything that happens is 100% planned and intended.
The open-world answer is to tell people the correct information, use government mandates to mitigate the immediate shortages for healthcare workers, and use government economic power to spin up production asafp, and make politicians actually do their job of leading people through the crisis.
As a bit of a prepper, being a prepper is about being prepared. Being prepared means you don’t need to buy essential PPE in the midst of a crisis.
What I observed were people hoarding to intentionally cause supply shortages so they could price gouge on the secondary market. Scalpers in other words. Preppers and Scalpers are not the same thing and the continuous insinuations that they are is as offensive as it is stupid.
Preppers are the only reason many communities had PPE for medical staff. I donated respirators and P95 masks to my local hospital during COVID, exactly zero of which were purchased during the pandemic. In fact I didn’t buy any masks during the pandemic except a cloth mask later on.
Given that a situation like COVID was pretty much bound to happen sooner rather than later, most preppers consider biohazards as one of the primary things they prepare for.
Was it pragmatic? Sure. Morally right? Probably no, if ends don't justify means.
Doesn't mean the pragmatic answer also wasn't a conspriacy.
It reminds me of a time where multiple governments were really sure that Irak had WMDs.
Then the Korean government instituted limits on exports and rationing of what was on the market. I worked in a hospital in Seoul, and we (non-caregivers) got two N95s per week.
This is what the US government should have done: used the defense production act to provide a guaranteed purchaser with 2 or 3-year contracts for whoever could manufacture masks or mask components domestically ASAP, instead of ruining their credibility to calm panic, and then coordinated the states in temporarily controlling rationing until supplies stabilized.
The idiocy that is a national stockpile is another thing. If the stockpile is of persihables what you really need is a nationally mandated buffer, with the govt paying suppliers to rotate through X days of stock on hand.
The WHO guidelines are to assume an atypical pneumonia is airborne until it’s proven not to be.
The WHO didn’t follow its guidelines and instead parroted the CCP propaganda.
(We knew it was airborne in December 2019)
I understand how dangerous it is for the government to lie, but what do people think would have been the proper approach here? Do we not remember what it was like during the early pandemic and all the hoarding that was going on? Did we forget how hospitals and retirement homes were using garbage bags and scuba equipment as PPE? Sometimes all the choices are bad. The choice to put the safety of medical professionals fighting the pandemic head on above the safety of the general citizenry seems like the least bad option. Because if the medical system collapsed, which seemed like a real possibility at the time, that would put the general citizenry in even more danger.
And yes, I think that between lying to literally everybody, and confiscating the property of some companies, the latter is much preferable from a democratic perspective. Indeed, it's just eminent domain, for which there's explicit provisions in constitution and/or laws of most (all?) democratic countries. And since it's done openly, if citizens are unhappy about it, they can always punish the politicians who did so in the next elections; but you can't do that to unelected bureaucrats and private actors, and especially not if they conceal what they're doing.
Quality of life is also important, and her experience sounds unpleasant, so your concern is justified regardless.
It is the difference between action and speech. Action is generally more dangerous. It is a little weird to me that in this discussion of the dangers of the government limiting speech, some people are more fearful of the government's speech than the government's action. It is a lot easier to simply ignore what the government says than try to hold on to my property when the men with guns come knocking at my door.
And as for the difference between "speech" and "action", what the released emails show is that the government didn't stop at speech - it used Twitter as a proxy for censorship, and censorship is an action.
I don't know why you think that's more dystopian.
Tell us the truth. "N95s should be reserved for medical personnel but surgical masks provide nominal protection for yourself and significant protection for others you might infect."
People realizing the CDC can and will lie to them has already been and will be far into the future responsible for countless deaths. Not only that, it makes us question what else the CDC has just decided is worth lying to us about. Do they manipulate statistics to "save people"? Do they falsify treatment data? If they'll lie to us about one thing they'll lie to us about another. Every single effort they make for the next decade or more is irreversibly tainted.
Maybe it is just that I started this ordeal in a more cynical place than others, but this one example of the CDC not telling the full truth is not some earth-shattering revelation to me. The government has lied to us countless times. I assume they will continue to lie to us in the future. At least this example shows that the people at the CDC were trying to think strategically about the best approach to save the most lives. That is their mission and they are probably in a better position to make the right decision on matters like this than either of us.
Prior to COVID, the CDC and vaccination programs in general had a sterling reputation for helping you a an individual. So much so that Amish and Hassidic communities would sometimes get vaccines at their recommendation. That reputation is now out the window, at tremendous damage to our public health.
For instance, absolutely nobody follows the CDC’s cooking recommendations and they say women should never drink alcohol because they might be unknowingly pregnant.
I can tell you with 100% certainty that not everyone was as cynical as yourself, trusted the government, and as a result of these lies will be more cynical than you originally were. The lies did immeasurable damage to people's trust.
I don't understand how you can say hoarding might not have been any worse if the CDC revealed how important masks were to safety unless you believe that no one was listening to the CDC anyway which invalidates your entire point.
I can say it because it wasn't tried. They went straight to lying and like you said, the hoarding still happened. If it was going to happen anyway why lie!?
I do honestly believe if they made a distinction between N95 and surgical masks, and their appropriateness in each setting, maybe it could have been different because I believe the world is full of good people but we'll never know. When another pandemic comes we still won't know. These lies that were told will never be forgotten and I believe the damage they caused in the long run is far greater than the problems they solved in the short run.
You seem to think that we've been living in a dystopia where governments have been lying to us forever, there's none you can trust, and everyone everywhere believes and knows this as if it were fact. I don't think that was anywhere close to true before the pandemic but I'm more likely to believe it today because of how many more people distrust their governments and the WHO because of their lies.
That kind of logic also invalidates this conversation because you don't know if your suggested approach would be better because we didn't try it either. I guess there is no point discussing any hypotheticals because it is all unknown.
>You seem to think that we've been living in a dystopia where governments have been lying to us forever, there's none you can trust, and everyone everywhere believes and knows this as if it were fact. I don't think that was anywhere close to true before the pandemic but I'm more likely to believe it today because of how many more people distrust their governments and the WHO because of their lies.
No, I do not think we live in a dystopia because I don't think "the government lied to us" is enough to merit this type of hyperbole. I also don't see how something like "the CDC lied to us in an attempt to save lives" is somehow more threatening than "the government lied about WMDs to start a war with Iraq" or "the government is not telling us about their borderline unconstitutional mass surveillance of American citizens". I just don't see how this is the lie that caused anyone distrust the US government. There are countless more nefarious examples of the government lying. This one at least has a very easy to understand altruistic motivation behind it.
Lying losing credibility permanently! There is no going back, that trust is lost. Just letting covid rip though those nursing homes would be way less damaging in the long term.
I feel like just outright telling people "hey, we don't have enough, please give it to most vulnerable people first" would be better approach than "lie and hope idiots believe it", thus producing whole swathes of idiots repeating the lie
People were fighting each other over toilet paper.
So make your own mask. Lots of people did, and there were loads of instructables. Sure, an N95 is better than a surgical mask, which is better than a homemade mask, which is better than a scarf or bank-robber bandana.
I wore a mask to protect others, not myself. I'm not confident that a mask protects me from the effusions of others; but I'm pretty confident that wearing a mask reduces my own effusions.
If you remove an N95 in a smokey environment, you’ll immediately smell the smoke, while you didn’t before you removed it.
Exception: if someone is close enough to hit you with droplets when they speak (a foot or so), then a procedure mask is better than nothing.
The last time I "gave up" smoking, I said to the doctor that I was expecting to get less winter colds. She said I was completely wrong, and that I should expect to get everything that was going around; that tobacco smokers maintain a lung environment that is hostile to anything living, including microbes, and that quitters can expect to catch everything that's going.
I have no idea whether that was true. But I'm still standing - yeah, yeah, yeah.
I haven't started smoking again, despite the potential health benefits associated with smoking.
I have known asthmatics that told me that smoking tobacco relieved their symptoms. But please don't take these remarks as advice to take up (or maintain) smoking! My comments were supposed to be taken as ironic.
I admire your optimism but people (en masse) don't work like that.
I wouldn't ever be able to trust a govt org again if it was revealed they'd made the decision to deliberately lie to their populace. There are few things that a government can do which is unforgivable, and brazenly lying to the faces of its citizens is one of them.
That's a pretty naive position and by its definition one shouldn't trust any government on earth.
Government exists to provide glue for societies when individual motivation is insufficient or harmful.
These situations are generally pretty serious (national health crisis, economic failures, intelligence, war) and thus require triage.
"The first casualty when war comes is truth" isn't actually pointing to an absolute devaluing of truth: it's noting that suddenly there are many other goals that people perceive as more important than truth. E.g. preservation of national sovereignty, prevention of casualties, maintaining civil morale, etc.
Most wars would not be fought if governments were trustworthy. And those that remain could be fought with full transparency.
Trust is everything in society. When you start making exceptions everything falls apart.
Tough decisions? Yes, lies - with a straight face? No. Now what? How can you do public health without public trust?* How can you govern effectively when the record showed you lied?
The irony? I still see people wearing masks; the kind of mask that are proven to be ineffective.
* On top of it we were assured these people were "the experts." However, this wasn't our first respiratory pandemic. Yet we were completely unprepared? What is their area of expertise? Lies?
Publib health and government based on lies isn't sustainable. Yet anyone who questioned that was marginalized? It get worse and worse.
But they didn't do that either. They could have requisitioned the masks from private retailers, or just gone and bought them, but instead retailers continued selling them and the Surgeon General just tweeted at individuals telling them to stop buying them.
Partly..
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,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday.
“There also is the issue that we have a massive global shortage,” Ryan said about masks and other medical supplies
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-r...
I hear this a lot. Do you have a citation?
My impression is that nobody knew what was going on, underprepared officials jumped the gun with premature statements, and after the fact some people tried to rationalize the incompetence.
This Fauci interview in early March has him saying that he thinks masks aren't necessary at the time but also saying that he isn't against people wearing them (both things together at ~1 minute if you are impatient):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI
This CDC transcript doesn't talk a lot about PPE, but it talks about directing it to healthcare workers that are at higher risk:
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/t0303-COVID-19-updat...
I'm sure there's stuff that looks worse if you go back through the 6 weeks previous to that, but early March is when things started to really happen in the US (I remember making a relatively large shopping trip that felt like it put me on the cautious side of things, and then the next week I started working from home).
There's a lot of people saying that the government was saying not to wear masks, which is subtly different from saying that people don't need to wear masks, or that masks won't benefit most people. The surgeon general was out there saying they weren't effective for the general public, which is bad but still different from saying not to wear them. And I'm not sure it's entirely fair to attribute his comms failures to the CDC (they might have had a hand in it, who knows, but they don't control the surgeon general).
Given how well people do with their masks (I still regularly see people wearing low quality masks incorrectly!), it seems true enough that they should be secondary to things like social distancing. I was sort of pleased and surprised a few weeks ago when my hospital was handing out N95s. Of course, it didn't matter much when half the patients had them under their nose (one confused lady had it sideways with the straps around her ears). They started self screening the next week, with only procedure masks available.
My push is that people are characterizing statements made by government officials as lies, but they are more or less misunderstanding them to do so. There were a lot of statements that look bad in hindsight, but they were about the limited effectiveness of masks much more than they were about masks not working.
I'm also claiming that talk of the shortages was pretty much from the beginning, there was no attempt to hide the idea that they wanted to prioritize use of masks for healthcare providers.
It's not unreasonable for someone to talk about N95 masks not providing a lot of benefit for naive users when the full benefit of the mask only comes if it is worn properly and fits well. That people choose to a wear a mask when it is voluntary and then do a horrible job of it sort of backs up the reasoning. There's literally no reason to wear a procedure mask over your mouth and not your nose, and yet I regularly see it in my small town (which is probably net anti-mask in sentiment).
That claim is what I've been disagreeing with in all my text above. I don't think there's been any rational explanation, let alone apology, for what were at best unsubstantiated claims early in the pandemic, and at worst, lies to the public. Probably somewhere in between.
Jerome Adams is perhaps the worst culprit, but he was not alone in saying that masks don't work, and the CDC never offered a lucid explanation.
Really? If an infected person standing in front of you in a crowded room sneezes, you believe the risks would be unaffected by whether or not they were wearing a cloth mask? Whether their sneeze were blocked or droplets of spittle and mucus went spewing throughout the room, your exposure and that of people standing in distant parts of the room would be identical?
In general I hate the “citation needed” forum response, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
> A better option, he says? Start with a two-layered cloth mask that has been washed, which gives it the capacity to filter better. If you want to go one step further in protection, use a KN95 mask, he says.
So it isn’t like the suggested option is some esoteric thing that you need a 3M factory to make. “Single layers cloth masks don’t work” isn’t technically a lie but it omits that there was an alternative solution that was within the means of like… anybody with a sewing machine and a washing machine to make.
I can’t see the logic of telling the public that masks don’t help, if it is possible for people to actually increase the supply of masks by making them at home. In this case it isn’t a small manipulation that doesn’t hurt anyone, but harmful misinformation.
They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. The job of the government is to make tough decisions like this in times of crisis. You can agree or disagree but this was neither malicious nor in my opinion outside the scope of the role.
We also knew a lot less about what was going on at that time, and once again, that means we need to extend some degree of leniency to folks making conservative if difficult choices like this. If it came down to it yeah of course we need to secure the supply for first responders first.
Now we never should have been in that position in the first place but that was the fault of past administrations, not the CDC in the moment and didn't change what needed to be done.
> It was obvious to everyone and their dog that masks help stop the spread of respiratory infections.
Some masks, but not all masks. Single layer cloth masks do nothing. [1] N95s sure, but even at peak COVID most people weren't wearing N95s, they were wearing non-medical surgical-style masks, which only block between 30 and 70% of particles.
Even still while less effective than N95s, those surgical masks do help. [2]
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/8460528/masks-effectiveness-omicr...
[2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg6296