Yep, agreed with all of this which is why I think when it became the case that the general population wearing masks would not have negative impacts on supply for medical workers, it made sense to default to “wear masks.” When the gen pop wearing masks would have a negative impact on supply, it seems defensible at least to advocate against the population buying masks.

Note that what confuses people here is not that the consensus on whether masks work or not changed, but that it didn’t change. “We don’t know if masks work, don’t get them” turned to “we don’t know if masks work, start wearing them.”

I agree it would’ve helped the credibility issue a lot if they were more open about the supply calculus behind the scenes, but I’m personally pretty confident this would’ve yielded worse outcomes. No chance that the population wouldn’t have scrambled for masks and therefore no chance that the people who did actually in reality need them most would’ve gotten them.

Of course there’s a lot, a lot of room for criticism of the mask/PPE shortage existing at all, but obviously the solution to that looks different than the solution to “CDC said masks don’t work.”

But they weren’t advising the public not to wear masks based on genuine skepticism, but on a confused belief that it would have the narrow effect of relieving the supply crunch, with no long term effect on mask compliance in the future, even given the loss of trust from having told the public BS reasons not to wear them. (Like the Fauci quotes and assertions of ineffectiveness.)

That was stupid, and foreseeably so.

I think even now it's very hard to establish whether it was stupid, never mind foreseeably so. Do you have evidence to suggest either 1) there was no supply crunch, 2) the supply crunch wasn't alleviated by this guidance, or 3) the supply crunch wouldn't have affected the medical system's capacity?

It's completely believable to me that future mask compliance among the general population is way less valuable than ensuring that medical professionals had N95s in the first half or first quarter of 2020. Also seems believable that that guidance reduced N95 consumption among the general public.

Do you have evidence that the earlier advice wasn’t responsible for mask reluctance later? Because when you tell people masks are ineffective, that’s a very very hard bell to unring, and indeed, many mask rejecters were citing those very same health officials. And why wouldn’t they? Those are the trusted authorities!

Of course there was a mask shortage. But like the others said, the correct way to fight a toilet paper shortage is not to tell people that it’s ineffective at removing feces from your anus. It’s to a) throttle sales at retail, b) give guidance on alternatives (here, how to turn a shirt into a mask), c) coordinate on increased production.

If masking up had been a high status thing to do early on, that would have saved a lot of effort in policing later.

Yes, lying to the public and expecting them to both trust and keep up with the latest lie is foreseeably stupid. I hope you don’t need insurmountable evidence to agree with that part.

Well no I don't have evidence of that. On the contrary I know for a fact it did, but that's not a necessary premise for my position.

Again, CDC did not say masks aren't effective. They said we don't know if they are. This was and largely remains true. For your other solutions, you think instituting a nationwide rationing system was a more accessible solution than saying "we don't know if they work [true] and medical professionals need them more [true], please don't buy them?" And yes, we very obviously should've invoked the Defense Production Act pretty much immediately on testing and PPE. Quite indefensible that we didn't.

"Has foreseeable negative consequences" != "is stupid," especially in emergency scenarios where you're picking between bad options and worse ones.

>Again, CDC did not say masks aren't effective. They said we don't know if they are. This was and largely remains true.

Like I said, it was "true" only in the sense that "we don't know if parachutes work [to save you're life in freefall from an aircraft]", which is to say, it's criminally bad to communicate that as your advice, given the costs and benefits to the user. There was no great shift in evidence that caused the CDC's change in advice, only a change in which way they wanted to clumsily manipulate the public.

>"Has foreseeable negative consequences" != "is stupid," especially in emergency scenarios where you're picking between bad options and worse ones.

Correct, and the path they took foreseeably led to the worse ones rather than the mere bad ones. The few people who correctly saw through the CDC advice still hoarded masks, still made up for the non-buying of those who nobly held back (it only takes a few hoarders to exhaust the supply), and health care providers still saw the very same shortage ... it's just that now, they have to walk back the advice against mask-wearing and suddenly pretend the evidence became ultra-strong overnight, even though half the public has made the earlier statements their hill-to-die-on, and we missed a very large window in which we could have been advising people to make good-enough ad hoc masks.

In what world is that the less-bad outcome? Or somehow not foreseeable that the public might actually believe you when you lie about your position on masks?

> In what world is that the less-bad outcome?

The completely plausible world in which our healthcare providers wouldn't have been able to get any effective PPE during the initial wave and died, became seriously ill, or refused to work en masse in the first month of the pandemic?

Explain why that was not a believable risk in Jan/Feb 2020?

Right, you’re continuing with the assumption that the hoarding problem was noticeably different between the two worlds. But any one hoarder can cancel out the restraint of 10,000 people. The scaling doesn’t work in your favor there. What you saw is what it would look like without the restraint, because that’s how hoarders work: they buy out all available supply. You’d need to be able to point to healthcare workers who procured masks solely because they didn’t get bought because everyone was thinking “yeah Fauci’s right, masks increase the spread because I’ll touch my face more”.

There was no such spared supply. It was either saved by retail throttling or state pre-emption, not because it was withering unwanted on the shelves.

> What you saw is what it would look like without the restraint, because that’s how hoarders work: they buy out all available supply.

The second part here just doesn't actually substantiate the first part. If this were strictly true then I would've never been able to observe 1) a medical professional purchasing a mask from a retailer and 2) a non-medical professional declining to purchase an available mask from a retailer.

In fact I observed both.

Of course it's an open question as to at what scale this occurred and how it nets out in the end against the credibility hit, it very well could've been minor and not worth it, but that's the thing that remains not obvious even now, never mind in early 2020.