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The problem with Fauci saying we shouldn't wear masks is that there was not some initial data which indicated that this was the right choice, it was just an inc

The problem with Fauci saying we shouldn't wear masks is that there was not some initial data which indicated that this was the right choice, it was just an incorrect assumption based on nothing (or worse an outright lie based on a desire to "preserve supply", as this was known to be a respiratory virus well before his statement). Saying nothing when you have no data is fine, asserting / prescribing something ("you don't need to wear masks") when you have no data is not. Err on the side of caution, hedge against risk. This is basic stuff and top public health officials need to be held to a (much) better standard.

late2part 6y ago
^- this +1
brandmeyer 6y ago
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.
- fastball 6y ago
  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.
  - brandmeyer 6y ago
    > 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.
    - meroes 6y ago
      Like the 3 waves of the Spanish Flu?
  - simonh 6y ago
    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.
    - tertius 6y ago
      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.
    - fastball 6y ago
- bumby 6y ago
  >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.
  - rhizome 6y ago
    >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.
    - bumby 6y ago
      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.
      - 6y ago
- AndrewBissell 6y ago
  > 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.
- blub 6y ago
  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.
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    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?
simonh 6y ago
I don't think that's a reasonable expectation of someone in Fauci's position. Wearing a mask or not is a binary decision, when people ask if they should wear masks of someone in that role they reasonably expect a binary answer of what they should do and at any given time he took his best shot at answering that question. What he said in March was that he didn't believe there was any reason for most fo the public to wear a mask, that's because he didn't have any evidence that it was effective at that time. Evidence is a reason, absence of evidence is not a reason for action. This is very simple. I happen to have thought even at the time that we should be wearing masks, but that was just an opinion and at that time the opposite opinion was also reasonable. We were still working things out. Accusing him of lying in service of some conspiracy theory really is going too far.
- whiddershins 6y ago
  He literally said in a later interview that he lied. It doesn’t require a conspiracy for someone to lie. People sometimes just lie.
- ummonk 6y ago
  We knew all along how viral respiratory diseases including corona viruses are transmitted, and that masks have some effectiveness in preventing spread for such viruses. In the absence of direct evidence one way or another for masking effectiveness COVID itself, the reasonable assumption would have been that masks are indeed effective until proven otherwise.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  This reasoning is nonsense. The early days of the pandemic aren't going to have a high-N RCT, so reasoning from higher-uncertainty sources of knowledge is important. An obvious prior for a fucking _respiratory_ disease is that masks reduce population spread, and the no-cost recommendation to wear masks in the early pandemic is one of the few policy levers that would have actually saved lives.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
Substitute "crystal healing", or "hydroxychloroquin" for "population-wide mask usage to contain a viral disease". To the medical sciences, these three are (were) more alike than they are different: they all are interventions that may or may not achieve a desired outcome, and may or may not have some unwanted side effects. In January/February 2020, there was about as much evidence for either of those propositions. The evidence on masks was thin, and limited to use by professionals in a medical setting. Existing studies of their use as practiced in parts of Asia were inconclusive. Yes, I know: Masks seem like a really good idea. The whole concept makes sense. There's a theory as to how they work. But medicine stopped believing any theory as to what may or may not be useful around a hundred years ago, after killing countless people with bloodletting, mercury, vapour-vaping, whatever... All those interventions may seem ridiculous to you, but they all followed some entirely believable logic that accounted for all the known facts as long as one did not actually run a double-blind trial. It's instructive to look at the fate of two of those interventions: masks and that quinine. We now know the former works and the latter does not. And I'll be immodest and mention that I considered masks to be effective from day one, while spending only about a week drinking Gin Tonics for health reasons, until the full extend of the seediness of that French doctor pushing it became public (and I had to go back to a different set of reasons for the drinks). But at about the same time along each treatment's timeline, there really was more actual, or at least claimed to be factual, evidence for the Malaria-malarky than there was for masks. And while I'm supremely excellent at predictioneering, I utterly fail when trying to distill some set of specific rules to follow. Maybe there's wisdom in numbers? Do a survey in the US right now, and you'll probably get 55 % to advocate for masks, 42 % believing in the insect-repellant. And that's about four months after the science on those questions has been settled.
- drtillberg 6y ago
  Actually, there's no reasonable pathway for crystal healing to help here. On the other hand, it's entirely plausible and there's real-world experience to support (1) masks filtering harmful particles and (2) hydroxychloroquin being useful against an immune system run amuck, which is the way 'flu' often injures patients. So, no, only two of the three were similar. Zero credit to those who would equate all three or who would dismiss either of the latter two without diligent, unbiased investigation and solid empirical evidence.
screye 6y ago
I think your analogy perfectly captures why we must criticize it. Both Fauci and the Times made an elementary mistake/miscalculations that reflects terribly on trust people place with them. The media then lambasts anyone who uses this to sow scepticism about these institutions, calling them conspiracy theorists instead.(which is true for certain cohorts, but wielded as a blanket statement) My trust in various academic institutions has gone down by orders of magnitude since the UCL/NE Journal and many of the other covid fiascos. The statistical and scientific rigor employed by experts and epidemiologist seems to be massively lacking. Similarly, a series of missteps by the NYT has led me to (a much larger degree than the previous analogy) lose trust in its reporting. Sadly, there do not seem to be any alternative sources outside of either reading the papers directly or finding specific individuals I place high amount of trust in. Both are all too time consuming for someone with a full time job.
- Technically 6y ago
  > Both Fauci and the Times made an elementary mistake/miscalculations that reflects terribly on trust people place with them. Well, that's your mistake. Never trust a single editorial board. I don't personally think Fauci advocating people leave N95 masks to front line health workers reduced trust in him.
seventytwo 6y ago
This isn’t accurate. The reason Fauci (and others) said not to wear masks early on is because there was a shortage and they wanted to be sure medical professionals could have access to masks. Medical professionals have known for a century that masks help prevent the spread of disease - particularly an airborne or aerosolized.
- rtx 6y ago
  Yes,they misled. Even a scarf over the face would have helped. Fauci should be tried at Hague.
  - tertius 6y ago
    No, scarfs don't work.
    - fastball 6y ago
      Literally anything works to an extent. If the virus is in microdroplets in your breath, something in front of your face when you breathe out is going to slow some of those droplets down, making them less likely to be inhaled by others nearby. This is just physics. If it can fog your glasses its helping. If it makes you smell your own breath its helping. A scarf is better than nothing, just like a homemade mask is better than a scarf, just like a purpose built mask is better than a homemade one.
      - tertius 6y ago
        Mitigating risk by using methods approaching zero efficacy is useless. "This is just physics". No this is just your intuition. Scarfs don't protect you or others. Neither do gaiters. This has been tested. They may work mildly for UV protection... But there you can be fooled as well. They just don't work. N95s provide a level of protection but they are not full proof. The further away you move from N95 the more useless they get. Cotton etc. don't protect. They are overcome by physics.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
wolverine876 6y ago
> it was just an incorrect assumption based on nothing (or worse an outright lie based on a desire to "preserve supply", as this was known to be a respiratory virus well before his statement) Do you have have any evidence of this?
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  Fauci was obviously lying. Masks are and were well understood to be useful in mitigating the spread of airborne contagions. There is lots of public research confirming this. Here are a couple examples: 1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24229526/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24229526/ - this is a paper from 2013 testing the efficacy of homemade masks versus surgical masks finding that both have some effect but surgical masks are better. If you look under "similar articles" you'll find 4 there about masks reducing the spread of airborne viruses from before 2020. 2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20584862/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20584862/ - demonstrates 2010 study showing the strong effect of N95s against small particles in the breath (on which the virus is borne) and comparing it to homemade masks. Concludes homemade masks would offer marginal protection. Again, in similar articles you'll see another three from before 2020 on the efficacy of masks. Masks were well and widely known to be useful at slowing the spread of airborne contagions - especially N95 masks. People knew homemade masks had some effect too. There was probably good reason to want to save N95's for medical professionals. There was no reason to say masks weren't helpful for the general public though, that was an absolute lie. Fauci and others had all the information they needed at the start of the pandemic and could have said "Masks are useful, that's why we need the best masks for our medical workers. We've put together information on how you can make homemade masks that are X% effective and what you can buy and use."
  - wolverine876 6y ago
    > Fauci was obviously lying. That's not evidence, but a claim that you provide no evidence for. Even if he was wrong, you don't have evidence that he made a mistake or that he lied. > Masks are and were well understood to be useful in mitigating the spread of airborne contagions. IIRC, most medical experts agreed with Fauci at the time. The analysis of someone on the Internet doesn't mean much.
tertius 6y ago
I am appalled that he lied and owned up to it later. But from his perspective (and it may have been not just his choice) what were the alternatives if his goal was to preserve frontline medical workers? (Regardless if this policy actually saved anyone). I can see why it was done and at the same time feel lied to and that that is wrong.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  I don't think he "lied", he just weighed the pros and cons and gave an advice, which may not have been the best. Later as the pros and cons changed, he updated his advice. Did he even claim that "masks don't help stop the virus"? That would've been a lie but I don't think he said anything like that.
  - tertius 6y ago
    https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-directive-coronavirus https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire... Discussion: https://youtu.be/_2MmX2U2V3c https://youtu.be/_2MmX2U2V3c He did lie. He gave advice with ulterior motives.
    - ehsankia 6y ago
      You can call it "ulterior motives", I called it "weighing the pros and cons". While the host in your video claims "he lied to us", again he only said "you don't need to wear masks for now", he never claimed they don't work or that they wouldn't help, just that you don't need them yet.
      - tertius 6y ago
        His reason for recommending not wearing masks was "to save PPE capacity for frontline medical workers". Not any of reasons he gave at the time. This is a definition of ulterior motive. I'm not making a judgement whether he was right/wrong by giving that advice (which the WHO did as well for the same reasons). Just pointing out that he did lie. I personally don't like being lied to by people that represent a lot of power (doesn't matter what they're motives are. Lying is used to deceive for ulterior motives). That is just an indicator that I can't trust public facing scientists because the truth is not a priority, rather only the outcome that they desire (whether personally or as a group.) But that's not new.

late2part 6y ago

^- this +1

brandmeyer 6y ago

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.

fastball 6y ago
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.
- brandmeyer 6y ago
  > 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.
  - meroes 6y ago
    Like the 3 waves of the Spanish Flu?
- simonh 6y ago
  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.
  - tertius 6y ago
    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.
  - fastball 6y ago
bumby 6y ago
>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.
- rhizome 6y ago
  >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.
  - bumby 6y ago
    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.
    - 6y ago
AndrewBissell 6y ago
> 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.
blub 6y ago
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.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  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?

simonh 6y ago

I don't think that's a reasonable expectation of someone in Fauci's position. Wearing a mask or not is a binary decision, when people ask if they should wear masks of someone in that role they reasonably expect a binary answer of what they should do and at any given time he took his best shot at answering that question. What he said in March was that he didn't believe there was any reason for most fo the public to wear a mask, that's because he didn't have any evidence that it was effective at that time. Evidence is a reason, absence of evidence is not a reason for action. This is very simple. I happen to have thought even at the time that we should be wearing masks, but that was just an opinion and at that time the opposite opinion was also reasonable. We were still working things out. Accusing him of lying in service of some conspiracy theory really is going too far.

whiddershins 6y ago
He literally said in a later interview that he lied. It doesn’t require a conspiracy for someone to lie. People sometimes just lie.
ummonk 6y ago
We knew all along how viral respiratory diseases including corona viruses are transmitted, and that masks have some effectiveness in preventing spread for such viruses. In the absence of direct evidence one way or another for masking effectiveness COVID itself, the reasonable assumption would have been that masks are indeed effective until proven otherwise.
wutbrodo 6y ago
This reasoning is nonsense. The early days of the pandemic aren't going to have a high-N RCT, so reasoning from higher-uncertainty sources of knowledge is important. An obvious prior for a fucking _respiratory_ disease is that masks reduce population spread, and the no-cost recommendation to wear masks in the early pandemic is one of the few policy levers that would have actually saved lives.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago

Substitute "crystal healing", or "hydroxychloroquin" for "population-wide mask usage to contain a viral disease". To the medical sciences, these three are (were) more alike than they are different: they all are interventions that may or may not achieve a desired outcome, and may or may not have some unwanted side effects. In January/February 2020, there was about as much evidence for either of those propositions. The evidence on masks was thin, and limited to use by professionals in a medical setting. Existing studies of their use as practiced in parts of Asia were inconclusive. Yes, I know: Masks seem like a really good idea. The whole concept makes sense. There's a theory as to how they work. But medicine stopped believing any theory as to what may or may not be useful around a hundred years ago, after killing countless people with bloodletting, mercury, vapour-vaping, whatever... All those interventions may seem ridiculous to you, but they all followed some entirely believable logic that accounted for all the known facts as long as one did not actually run a double-blind trial. It's instructive to look at the fate of two of those interventions: masks and that quinine. We now know the former works and the latter does not. And I'll be immodest and mention that I considered masks to be effective from day one, while spending only about a week drinking Gin Tonics for health reasons, until the full extend of the seediness of that French doctor pushing it became public (and I had to go back to a different set of reasons for the drinks). But at about the same time along each treatment's timeline, there really was more actual, or at least claimed to be factual, evidence for the Malaria-malarky than there was for masks. And while I'm supremely excellent at predictioneering, I utterly fail when trying to distill some set of specific rules to follow. Maybe there's wisdom in numbers? Do a survey in the US right now, and you'll probably get 55 % to advocate for masks, 42 % believing in the insect-repellant. And that's about four months after the science on those questions has been settled.

drtillberg 6y ago
Actually, there's no reasonable pathway for crystal healing to help here. On the other hand, it's entirely plausible and there's real-world experience to support (1) masks filtering harmful particles and (2) hydroxychloroquin being useful against an immune system run amuck, which is the way 'flu' often injures patients. So, no, only two of the three were similar. Zero credit to those who would equate all three or who would dismiss either of the latter two without diligent, unbiased investigation and solid empirical evidence.

screye 6y ago

I think your analogy perfectly captures why we must criticize it. Both Fauci and the Times made an elementary mistake/miscalculations that reflects terribly on trust people place with them. The media then lambasts anyone who uses this to sow scepticism about these institutions, calling them conspiracy theorists instead.(which is true for certain cohorts, but wielded as a blanket statement) My trust in various academic institutions has gone down by orders of magnitude since the UCL/NE Journal and many of the other covid fiascos. The statistical and scientific rigor employed by experts and epidemiologist seems to be massively lacking. Similarly, a series of missteps by the NYT has led me to (a much larger degree than the previous analogy) lose trust in its reporting. Sadly, there do not seem to be any alternative sources outside of either reading the papers directly or finding specific individuals I place high amount of trust in. Both are all too time consuming for someone with a full time job.

Technically 6y ago
> Both Fauci and the Times made an elementary mistake/miscalculations that reflects terribly on trust people place with them. Well, that's your mistake. Never trust a single editorial board. I don't personally think Fauci advocating people leave N95 masks to front line health workers reduced trust in him.

seventytwo 6y ago

This isn’t accurate. The reason Fauci (and others) said not to wear masks early on is because there was a shortage and they wanted to be sure medical professionals could have access to masks. Medical professionals have known for a century that masks help prevent the spread of disease - particularly an airborne or aerosolized.

rtx 6y ago
Yes,they misled. Even a scarf over the face would have helped. Fauci should be tried at Hague.
- tertius 6y ago
  No, scarfs don't work.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Literally anything works to an extent. If the virus is in microdroplets in your breath, something in front of your face when you breathe out is going to slow some of those droplets down, making them less likely to be inhaled by others nearby. This is just physics. If it can fog your glasses its helping. If it makes you smell your own breath its helping. A scarf is better than nothing, just like a homemade mask is better than a scarf, just like a purpose built mask is better than a homemade one.
    - tertius 6y ago
      Mitigating risk by using methods approaching zero efficacy is useless. "This is just physics". No this is just your intuition. Scarfs don't protect you or others. Neither do gaiters. This has been tested. They may work mildly for UV protection... But there you can be fooled as well. They just don't work. N95s provide a level of protection but they are not full proof. The further away you move from N95 the more useless they get. Cotton etc. don't protect. They are overcome by physics.
wutbrodo 6y ago

wolverine876 6y ago

> it was just an incorrect assumption based on nothing (or worse an outright lie based on a desire to "preserve supply", as this was known to be a respiratory virus well before his statement) Do you have have any evidence of this?

ALittleLight 6y ago
Fauci was obviously lying. Masks are and were well understood to be useful in mitigating the spread of airborne contagions. There is lots of public research confirming this. Here are a couple examples: 1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24229526/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24229526/ - this is a paper from 2013 testing the efficacy of homemade masks versus surgical masks finding that both have some effect but surgical masks are better. If you look under "similar articles" you'll find 4 there about masks reducing the spread of airborne viruses from before 2020. 2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20584862/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20584862/ - demonstrates 2010 study showing the strong effect of N95s against small particles in the breath (on which the virus is borne) and comparing it to homemade masks. Concludes homemade masks would offer marginal protection. Again, in similar articles you'll see another three from before 2020 on the efficacy of masks. Masks were well and widely known to be useful at slowing the spread of airborne contagions - especially N95 masks. People knew homemade masks had some effect too. There was probably good reason to want to save N95's for medical professionals. There was no reason to say masks weren't helpful for the general public though, that was an absolute lie. Fauci and others had all the information they needed at the start of the pandemic and could have said "Masks are useful, that's why we need the best masks for our medical workers. We've put together information on how you can make homemade masks that are X% effective and what you can buy and use."
- wolverine876 6y ago
  > Fauci was obviously lying. That's not evidence, but a claim that you provide no evidence for. Even if he was wrong, you don't have evidence that he made a mistake or that he lied. > Masks are and were well understood to be useful in mitigating the spread of airborne contagions. IIRC, most medical experts agreed with Fauci at the time. The analysis of someone on the Internet doesn't mean much.

tertius 6y ago

I am appalled that he lied and owned up to it later. But from his perspective (and it may have been not just his choice) what were the alternatives if his goal was to preserve frontline medical workers? (Regardless if this policy actually saved anyone). I can see why it was done and at the same time feel lied to and that that is wrong.

ehsankia 6y ago
I don't think he "lied", he just weighed the pros and cons and gave an advice, which may not have been the best. Later as the pros and cons changed, he updated his advice. Did he even claim that "masks don't help stop the virus"? That would've been a lie but I don't think he said anything like that.
- tertius 6y ago
  https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-directive-coronavirus https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire... Discussion: https://youtu.be/_2MmX2U2V3c https://youtu.be/_2MmX2U2V3c He did lie. He gave advice with ulterior motives.
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    You can call it "ulterior motives", I called it "weighing the pros and cons". While the host in your video claims "he lied to us", again he only said "you don't need to wear masks for now", he never claimed they don't work or that they wouldn't help, just that you don't need them yet.
    - tertius 6y ago
      His reason for recommending not wearing masks was "to save PPE capacity for frontline medical workers". Not any of reasons he gave at the time. This is a definition of ulterior motive. I'm not making a judgement whether he was right/wrong by giving that advice (which the WHO did as well for the same reasons). Just pointing out that he did lie. I personally don't like being lied to by people that represent a lot of power (doesn't matter what they're motives are. Lying is used to deceive for ulterior motives). That is just an indicator that I can't trust public facing scientists because the truth is not a priority, rather only the outcome that they desire (whether personally or as a group.) But that's not new.