They/he lied, because they wanted to make things look under control and if everyone starts wearing masks, then it would cause panic and it will looks like a global pandemic. The shortage of the masks would have happened anyway, as it wasn’t purely driven by local US demand, but also by overseas supply chain issues. And the US has means to restrict sale of strategic goods to the population in case of emergency. So there was really no good reason to tell people not to wear masks.