11 ms·

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 u

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
    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.
    - simonh 6y ago
      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?
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  This was what they said! Do you not remember the March lockdowns? 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".
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?

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
  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.
  - simonh 6y ago
    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?
alisonkisk 6y ago
This was what they said! Do you not remember the March lockdowns? 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".

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?