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.
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.