That isn't at all true. If you took 5 minutes to actually read the detailed rationale published by CDC, you would see why they opposed masks.
People tend to use mask wearing as a replacement for social distancing. They aren't. They are a risk mitigation method for cases where social distance is unavoidable. CDC opposed mask wearing specifically because people would interpret it as a less-effective security blanket. They only reversed their stance when it became apparent that the US public weren't willing to use social distancing effectively.
Western governments recommending against masks is one of the biggest government fuck-ups I've ever witnessed and now there's no lack of people trying to cover it up and find excuses for it.
The quote below is from "Professional and Home-Made Face Masks Reduce Exposure to Respiratory Infections among the General Population". There's enough studies looking at this for SARS and influenza- including for the general population - that it is highly irresponsible to err on the side of not using masks even if there's no clear evidence for population usage for SARS-2.
"Opportunistic data collected
during the SARS epidemic in Asia suggested that population-wide use of face masks may significantly decrease transmission of not only SARS but also influenza [3,4,5,6,7]. As part of pandemic preparedness, many are contemplating the contribution wide-spread use of masks could have [8,9]."
3. Lau JTF, Tsui H, Lau M, Yang X (2004) SARS transmission, risk factors and prevention in Hong Kong. Emerging Infectious Diseases 10: 587–92.
4. Lo JYC, Tsang THF, Leung Y, Yeung EYH, Wu T, et al. (2005) Respiratory infections during SARS outbreak, Hong Kong, 2003. Emerging Infectious Diseases 15: 1738–41.
5. Wilder-Smith A, Low JGH (2005) Risk of respiratory infections in health care workers: lesson on infection control emerge from the SARS outbreak. Southeast Asian Journal of Tropical Medicine and Public Health 36: 481–488.
6. Wu J, Xu F, Zhou W, Feikin DR, Lin C-Y, et al. (2004) Risk factors for SARS among persons without known contact with SARS patients, Beijing, China. Emerging Infectious Diseases 10: 210–16.
7. Tang CS, Wong CY (2004) Factors influencing the wearing of facemasks to prevent the severe acute respiratory syndrome among adult Chinese in Hong Kong. Preventive Medicine 39: 1187–93.
8. World Health Organisation Writing Group (2006) Nonpharmaceutical Inter- ventions for Pandemic Influenza, International Measures. Emerging Infectious Diseases 12: 81–87.
9. World Health Organisation Writing Group (2006) Non-pharmaceutical Interventions for Pandemic Influenza, National and Community Measures. Emerging Infectious Diseases 12: 88–94.
Most of the people in the USA denying mask use are right wingers who choose to listen to politicians rather than scientists, that's the 90% problem, not what you're pointing out. Their leaders tell them masks don't work and they listen. Others listened to scientists and we're better for it but if half the country is ignoring it, it greatly reduces the effectiveness of masks. The CDC backtracked within a month or two that masks could be a good idea even homemade ones to limit the aerosols. To say anything else is nitpicking, we've have 6 months and people still deny it. Nothing you pointed out would have changed it since Trump double downed on not wearing a mask and his luddites followed behind him.
It's absolutely insane (or a transparent deception) to make the argument that CDC in March saying "don't wear masks" is the problem here for eroding trust, when the right political wing was opposed to scientific voices even before that, and 9 months later so many people are opposing mask wearing now? How can one say out of one side of their mouth that the CDC was wrong then, and out the other side day that the CDC advice is wrong now?
If CDC was wrong about masks in March, why are people who say that still opposed to wearing masks?
It's insane to hold the people who claim to be scientists to a higher standard than the people who don't?
With regards to our lovely two-party system, both sides (yes I know) typically only cite "science" when it suits them. In the defense of "the left" (sorry I hate talking about politics as if it's one-dimensional), it does seem like data supports their policies more often than it does the right, but again, a false dichotomy is the wrong way of looking at this.
Remove politics from the discussion and science is still facing a crisis: reproducibility crisis, proposing unfalsifiable theories, spending more time worrying about positive results than finding the truth, politics influencing science (not just the other way around as it should be), the profit-driven concerns of higher learning institutions, etc, etc.
The CDC is not the man on the street. The man on the street can distrust an institution that suggests something unscientific when they are requesting trust from the public.
Doesn't matter if said man on the street thinks the earth is flat, has a mental disorder or likes tennis more than soccer.
An institution should not be judged on the merits of the people judging them.
Also, people not wanting the government to force them what to do with their bodies is not quite the same as them not believing that there is a health risk when not wearing masks. Stop conflating the two. Engage the argument instead of the strawmen (or don't, but be honest about it.)
>CDC opposed mask wearing specifically because people would interpret it as a less-effective security blanket.
At the very least, they did a poor job of communicating this in the public sphere. The sound bites many Americans got was to not wear masks, which is quite different than "wearing masks is not a suitable substitute for social distancing". For better or worse, most Americans probably aren't going to search out CDC publications as their primary source for detailed information.
He has indicated PPE was part of the rationale:
"I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs,"
To be fair, he's been in a very difficult situation and I can only imagine the number of verbal miscues I would have made if placed in a similar scenario.
>At the very least, they did a poor job of communicating this in the public sphere. The sound bites many Americans got was to not wear masks, which is quite different than "wearing masks is not a suitable substitute for social distancing".
CDC isn't to blame for this. At this point there was a TON of political interference and bureaucratic restrictions on what they were allowed to say, and they were reined in very early. There were lots of entire careers and stuff some people call "my life's work" held in the lurch there.
A very good point. It was what I was dancing around in my statement about Fauci being in a difficult situation.
I may be being too critical, but I think certain professions of public trust need to be held to higher standards in this regard. Meaning, while I can commiserate with the idea that careers hang in the balance, they owe it to the public to be honest. It's why certain roles are "professions" and not "jobs" (there is generally a professed oath to serve the public good). This is where I would hold them deficient in their communication and, unfortunately, a threat to a career isn't sufficient to avoid one's professed ethics. Misspeaking is one thing, misleading is another.
How many public appearances has Dr. Fauci made since January? So much shade being thrown in this thread for a few missteps during a complicated situation. Meanwhile the President of the United States, with access to the world’s best intelligence and expert recommendations on the subject, denied the severity of the pandemic for months after it became an international crisis. He did it for his own perceived political benefit.
I've tried to give the benefit of the doubt in my higher comments about how difficult the situation was/is.
What I don't think is excusable is lying to the public as a public health official. The PPE part seems to show "We can't trust the public, so we should lie to them." It's an ends-justify-the-means position, which is a dangerous mindset in someone who influences public policy.
If it were just "a few missteps" that's one thing. Making the wrong call under uncertainty in a dynamically changing situation is excusable. Having the (lack of) ethics to think the appropriate response is to lie to the public is much less so.
> I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs
I don't trust Fauci because of this. He lied, he doesn't see it that way, he he doesn't seem to acknowledge how it undermined trust.
I also don't like his approach. It's very preachy. That's not what we need right now. We need someone saying "please stay home, but we know some of you are going to see loved ones for the holidays, so we added testing capacity and locations so it's super easy to get tested."
Getting tested prior to gatherings isn't enough to stop the spread.
You need tests and periods of isolation, with the periods of isolation being the more important component (that many people don't have much ability to choose right now).
What happens a lot is that people get tested, think they are safe, then after becoming infectious spend a bunch of time with people.
So advertising expanded testing isn't really a viable public health message.
I need to see a citation for that. My gut tells be that if people had mostly accurate at-home tests they took ~daily, it would actually reduce spread massively, especially when it can be asymptomatic.
I'm sure that would have impact, but it isn't what you described above, you described advertising more locations and capacity to make people feel better about visits and gatherings.
I also expect that compliance wouldn't be all that high for at home testing (people skipping tests, deciding they still feel good enough, etc). It doesn't mean we shouldn't try to establish that access for people that would use it well though.
Also, there's a difference between working to increase testing so that more people do get tested before a holiday and making that the center of your message. They need to be careful to not mislead or give the impression that they are misleading, but they could limit the messaging to a statement about working to expand testing.
We can’t just spin up testing capability, though. Normalizing violations of social distancing, then claiming that we will have a safety net for all the people who will hear that and think “oh, staying home? That’s for other people to do” when we can’t actually support everyone doing that is not helpful at all.
> We can’t just spin up testing capability, though.
Back in March and April, I'd agree. It's December now, so there's no excuses for this. There's also no excuses for the problems with the vaccine rollout.
The real solution would have been to tell people to wear masks and invoke the Defense Production Act with 3M and other manufacturers so that medical-grade masks were directed to the right place. People were screaming at the administration to do this at the time (Jan/Feb).
What made them believe the US public was willing to socially distance in the first place? Was that backed up with data or was it another baseless assumption?
Stating your rationale doesn't mean your rationale is backed up with evidence.
Again, top public health officials need to be held to a higher standard. That means understanding how populations behave, not just understanding the medicine. That means consistent messaging. The message throughout should've been:
> This is a dangerous virus, and the best way not to get it is to avoid contact with any other people at all. However, if you absolutely need to come into contact with other individuals, risk can be reduced if everyone is wearing a mask. Masks are not anywhere near 100% effective, but they do help, which is why you should be avoiding human contact and only be going out with a mask if absolutely necessary.
In the early months of the outbreak there was almost no evidence, and yet we reasonably expected the experts to give their best shot at an answer. They looked at the probabilities as best they could estimate them from the characteristics of similar diseases, that's all the evidence they had at the time, and updated their guidance as they got more data.
The problem has always been that this disease is very unusual in many different ways. This has quite understandably caused many best efforts at estimating it's behaviour to turn out to be wrong.
It's really not enough though. Populations (and arguably esp. the American population) are not automatons that you can just direct and they will follow orders when you first tell them to go left and then soon after tell "oops, actually you should've gone right".
Messaging needs to be consistent and err on the side of caution... this was the exact opposite of both of those things.
SARS-CoV-2 is actually not that unusual – the mRNA COVID vaccines that have been developed are based on the spike protein that is common to all "coronaviruses" (hence the name) and was previously isolated from SARS-CoV-1 (i.e. SARS). At the very least we knew it was a coronavirus early on, so there is no reason you wouldn't assume it was respiratory in nature, just like SARS was.
We knew it was respiratory right from the start, but that doesn’t mean the virus load on small droplets is enough to cause transmission. There’s an awful lot more to it than that. As for credibility, suppose they had recommended everyone wear masks and it turned out to have no appreciable effect. What consequences would that have had, especially amongst those claiming the whole thing was a scare?
> This is a coronavirus, just as SARS was before it. This one seems both more lethal and more contagious than SARS, so we are recommending everyone wears a face-mask (even one you've made yourself) when you go to any public place until we understand more about the virus.
Is slicing the context off his statements honest? Fauci did not just say there was no need. He was very specific and clear that he didn't have enough evidence to recommend it.
No, masks were mandated for health personnel dealing with COVID from day one. It was simply a lot of bad faith/ascientific messaging by WHO and national authorities early on.
This also to a large extent fuelled the anti-makser movement you have trouble reigning in now. Absolutely moronic.
It would have certainly happened. It could also never have reached such a magnitude had health authorities not proclaimed for 3 months that masks are the new facehuggers.
And most anti-maskers are against it because of government overreach. Unrelated to science.
A third party has emerged. The "we'll believe and parrot anything because it's what we're told".
They act in the following realm (whether they are aware or not):
Cotton/cloth masks don't work. But it qualifies as a mask so checkbox! Moral superiority is on my side whether science is or not doesn't matter.
PPE was recommended for people dealing with Covid positive.
Fauci lied (and admitted to it) that masks weren't effective and suggested that the average person should not wear them.
To be fair, I heard the whole medical community here (I'm in one of the largest medical centers in the world) laugh and scoff at normal people wearing masks (because they weren't trained and it isn't effective).
And now we have no N95 for the general public and idiotic cloth masks (that don't work).
So it turns out they weren't far off I their scoffing... But for the wrong reasons.
Now we see them (and other anto-science) normals flip and ignore the data on bad masks. "Something is better than nothing". False sense of security and just more lies and moral superiority.
> What made them believe the US public was willing to socially distance in the first place? Was that backed up with data or was it another baseless assumption?
Maybe all of the other examples of Americans coming together against a common threat from the last couple of centuries?
The messaging wasn't consistent. The POTUS ranted and raved on Twitter ad nausium about how its all a hoax.
Everyone was saying that except Trump and the people in the Administration whose mouths he taped shut, next thought he'd look bad if a pandemic existed so he said things like "there's a dozen cases now, they'll be none soon; this will be over by Easter". Then when he was briefly reined in, we had a belated national effort to lockdown with "30 days to stop the spread".
> They only reversed their stance when it became apparent that the US public weren't willing to use social distancing effectively.
Do you have citations for any of this stuff? Because I have seen places where Fauci and the CDC admitted that their main reason for discouraging masks was to prevent a run on PPE, and I've never seen one where they have explained that it was part of some broader strategy like this. In fact, my memory of the time where they were advising against masks is that social distancing was much less emphasized in the public health messaging than hand washing and avoiding face touching.
People tend to use mask wearing as a replacement for social distancing. They aren't. They are a risk mitigation method for cases where social distance is unavoidable. CDC opposed mask wearing specifically because people would interpret it as a less-effective security blanket. They only reversed their stance when it became apparent that the US public weren't willing to use social distancing effectively.