No one at the CDC (at least no career bureaucrat) ever denied masks were effective, though. It's true that there was concern early on that a public run on masks would put health care workers in jeopardy, so people were absolutely told not to try to procure them. And it's also true that the WHO's messaging on this subject was terribly confusing.
But the idea that "Hah! The elites were WRONG about masks!" is just... weird. And doubly so because it's almost always promulgated by a demographic known for... not wearing masks.
I mean, seriously: if ("finally!") we're being told to wear masks, I'd expect a genuine mask evangelist to be happy, and to use this to encourage others to wear their masks. But that's not what I hear. It's like it's all a game of political gotcha.
It's not. Masks save lives. Wear your mask when you can't stay home.
I’m based in Tokyo and one of the most frustrating things for me personally is that ~90% of foreigners (or people who are visibly foreigners) are not wearing masks when out and about. This despite the fact that the Japanese are almost uniformly wearing them. We are, after all, in the middle of a pandemic.
Is this down to the WHO’s early messaging fumbles, misplaced machismo, ignorance, or what? When foreigners here don’t wear masks, they should know that the door is then open for Japanese people to lump all of us in together and say: “look, foreigners don’t give a fuck.”
> No one at the CDC (at least no career bureaucrat) ever denied masks were effective, though.
Not the CDC, but the U.S. surgeon general, Feb 29th: "Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus"
Once more data came in proving the effectiveness of masks, he acknowledged in a later tweet that this is incorrect, and encouraged mask usage. But that doesn't change the fact that there was a high-level denial of mask effectiveness.
P.S. I am in fact a mask evangelist, and I don't understand why anyone would avoid them given the data.
"They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus"
This statement (my emphasis) is, as far as I know, still correct, because masks are only effective if fitted properly and people are trained to use them correctly (like absolutely no touching of the mask.)
What's changed (at least in the US) is that early on the focus was on people hoarding surgical masks because they thought it would prevent them from getting infected, in the presence of a widespread shortage.
Lately, the focus has been on the benefit of mask use as a means of reducing transmission of the virus, where the evidence points to mask use being uniformly beneficial and the concerns about mask touching etc don't apply since the assumption is that you may already be infected.
This is also what the "mask protesters" don't seem to understand (or ignore.) They talk about wearing a mask or not as a personal risk decision, when it's actually about whether you expose others to the virus.
Read an article on Mongolia of all places. Instead of insanely lying that masks weren't effective they just out and out told people that they needed to reserve N95 masks for hospitals and then deployed an army of (likely mostly) women to sew standard cloth masks.
> subways, nursing homes, masks, the relative safety of being outdoors, etc.
OK... go through that then? All that stuff seems like areas that have been broadly agreed upon for months. You're going all the way back to March for a bunch of recriminations (some of which I don't understand -- nursing homes were early hot spots and have always been seen so). No one doubts that people got stuff wrong. But that's not a reason to argue against the same people now that they've corrected themselves.
