There are two things there... the lab leak thing has always been consistent and regardless of that we didn't really need to know the origin of it at the time; i

There are two things there... the lab leak thing has always been consistent and regardless of that we didn't really need to know the origin of it at the time; it changed nothing material of how to handle a large pandemic which was killing thousands of people daily. Yeah there has always been the possibility that the lab accidentally leaked it but there wasn't much evidence of that other than coincidence. masks have been similar in general outside of a few fringe idiots speaking out of turn. they know and knew that well fitted n95 masks were effective in slowing the spread and should be used in the hospital settings. the advice was not to buy masks. they didn't know the efficacy of general cloth masks at the time and weather or not having them on would be a net detriment because it might cause people to touch their face more often while adjusting the masks and cause contaminated hands to come in contact with the face more often. the data showed that those fears were not fruitful and thus the recommendation changed. there is also the disastrous TB paper that took the conclusion from a miner's lung paper as gospel and misinterpreted the results of that and then every subsequent paper used that erroneous data in their papers. (mining paper said that the nose was very good at blocking out everything down to 5 microns and aerosolized particles could be 100 microns or smaller but since the nose was effective at blocking particles larger than 5 microns you needed to worry about masks that block the small stuff. well the TB paper used the 5 micron aerosol particles as TB only infects you if you get the particles deep in your lungs. The problem is that aerosol particles greater than 5 microns can infect you with other diseases if the receptors for those are not deep in the lungs. in the end 5 micron was chosen as a magical aerosol particle threshold when the actual threshold is 100 microns and one scientist finally got the WHO et al to understand this after doing much research and advocacy) in the end science is messy even when done with rigor.