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?
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.
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.
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?