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.
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.