5 ms·

How about the rampant false claims from various health officials and the WHO that masks didn't work in the very beginning of the pandemic. ...and this lie was

How about the rampant false claims from various health officials and the WHO that masks didn't work in the very beginning of the pandemic. ...and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers. How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist? How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist? How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US. Trust was destroyed in the first two months of this pandemic.

BeetleB 5y ago
> and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers. Do you have any evidence that this was the reason for the claims? > How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist? What censorship? I heard about it quite early. > How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist? Did the news media label it, or were they reporting on people who were labeling it? > How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US. AFAIK, there were lack of resources to test. Once the resources became available, testing was widespread.
- CapmCrackaWaka 5y ago
  On the second point, to claim you do not know about this story is... surprising: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27388587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27388587 Just because you heard about it, doesn't mean there weren't attempts to censor these discussions.
  - BeetleB 5y ago
    The claim was that the fact there was an outbreak was censored - not about the origin.
- vasco 5y ago
  > Do you have any evidence that this was the reason for the claims? This was said by all health officials around January-March 2020. After the stock issue got solved masks suddenly magically became effective for everyone around the summer time. As a "regular person" who took both vaccine shots and is casually observing these developments without reading news or whatever, that single event showed me that governments don't give a shit about telling us the truth in a crisis.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    "After the stock issue got solved masks suddenly magically became effective for everyone around the summer time." Technically, it was roughly the end of March and April, when evidence of asymptomatic and aerosol transmission began to appear.
- fsagx 5y ago
  > Do you have any evidence that this was the reason for the claims? I did a search on youtube to find these sources ("fauci 60 minutes americans dont need to wear masks") I don't vouch for the channels, these are just the first place I found the relevant clips. original statement (pretty hard to find): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ5oCxP6TUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ5oCxP6TUc his explanation of that statement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2MmX2U2V3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2MmX2U2V3c Here's a timeline summary: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/10/20/is-trump-right-that-fauci-discouraged-wearing-masks/?sh=2e1877be4969 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/10/20/is-trum...
- kipchak 5y ago
  In the first 15s or so of this Washington Post interview clip he explains that priority was being given to healthcare workers, and then also that asymptomatic spread was underestimated. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/washington-post-live/fauci-on-how-his-thinking-has-evolved-on-masks-asymptomatic-transmission/2020/07/24/799264e2-0f35-4862-aca2-2b4702650a8b_video.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/washington-post-live/fa...
dragonwriter 5y ago
> How about the rampant false claims from various health officials and the WHO that masks didn't work in the very beginning of the pandemic. That... wasn't the claim. The claim was that people shouldn't stockpile masks for use beyond the circumstances in which they were recommended, because such additional use did not provide additional protective benefit. This was roughly contemporaneous with guidance that most people should eliminate all non-essential contact with people outside their household. Masking for essential interactions was recommended by the same people advising against buying masks more generally. > ...and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers. It wasn't a lie, and preserving stocks for frontline workers and their essential interactions was an overtly cited part of the rationale, alongside the lack of additional benefit from superfluous masking. > How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist? That didn't happen. > How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist? The initial US travel bans, instituted after substantial domestic community spread was known and after substantial spread in lots of other foreign places that were not targeted by the bans was also known were, if not racist per se, more political posturing than public health. > How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US. How is that a lie? Whether or not it (or the actual limit on testing, which was more nuanced) was the optimum way of managing limited testing resources may be a valid debate, but it's not a lie.
- 3np 5y ago
  The WHO claims/guidances could absolutely be interpreted as such. Here's from 2020-04 when WHO changed their stance. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/10/829890635/why-there-so-many-different-guidelines-for-face-masks-for-the-public https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/10/8298906... Sweden may be seen as a bit of an oddball but either way the head of the national public health agency was consistent in saying masks did not provide any benefits for individuals pretty far into the pandemic. https://www.bild.de/bild-plus/politik/ausland/politik-ausland/schwedens-staats-epidemiologe-auf-masken-verlassen-ist-sehr-gefaehrlich-72302440,view=conversionToLogin.bild.html https://www.bild.de/bild-plus/politik/ausland/politik-auslan... (paywall) https://nyheter24.se/nyheter/944114-tegnell-om-varfor-munskydd-inte-fungerar-otrevliga https://nyheter24.se/nyheter/944114-tegnell-om-varfor-munsky... Not mentioned by the GP, but what was up with anything resembling a lab-leak theory getting the "unquestionably fake news" treatment for months? I have not done any extensive digging into the vaccines myself and can't with good conscience say I'm well-informed. It still seems to me that the risk-trade-off is strongly in favor for getting vaccinated. Even so, I have full understanding for people who now have 0 trust in the public narrative. It's clear that there has been (still ongoing, I assume) a strong propaganda campaign that has at times been using misinformation and censorship (if you count deleting/shadowbanning social media content as censorship), involving governments, traditional news-media and social media. If the narrative around the effectiveness and risks of the vaccine holds, why do this?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rajup 5y ago
Also don't forget that not too long back suggesting that COVID-19 might have escaped from a Chinese lab was considered "lunatic conspiracy theory mongering".
- teachrdan 5y ago
  It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to use this as an excuse not to get vaccinated against a disease that's killed over 600,000 US citizens.
  - rajup 5y ago
    It's not an excuse to not get vaccinated, that you read it that way says a lot about the whole problem really. It's a reply to the GP's question about what "lies" (I personally would not use as strong a word) were spread by quite a few people and media who should know better.
    - quartus 5y ago
      The parent thread to mine actually did claim that various lies were their mother's reason not to get vaccinated: > My mother only got vaccinated last month [...] Her main hangup was the lies [...]
mcguire 5y ago
And here we go again... Up through roughly April-May 2020, many, if not most, epidemiologists and virologists believed that masks would not help the situation: they thought respiratory viruses were spread through large droplets produced by symptomatic individuals and that physical separation, sanitation, and behavior would work as well as trying to convince people to were useful masks consistently and correctly. After that time, reports began to appear showing coronavirus could be spread asymptomatically, by normal breathing and speech, in an aerosol form that could stay airborne for long times. Under those situations, masks are the only solution. The "ensure that enough protective equipment was available for frontline health workers" thing was mostly a response to "but it couldn't hurt" thinking. "Then there is the infamous mask issue. Epidemiologists have taken a lot of heat on this question in particular. Until well into March 2020, I was skeptical about the benefit of everyone wearing face masks. That skepticism was based on previous scientific research as well as hypotheses about how covid was transmitted that turned out to be wrong. Mask-wearing has been a common practice in Asia for decades, to protect against air pollution and to prevent transmitting infection to others when sick. Mask-wearing for protection against catching an infection became widespread in Asia following the 2003 SARS outbreak, but scientific evidence on the effectiveness of this strategy was limited. "Before the coronavirus pandemic, most research on face masks for respiratory diseases came from two types of studies: clinical settings with very sick patients, and community settings during normal flu seasons. In clinical settings, it was clear that well-fitting, high-quality face masks, such as the N95 variety, were important protective equipment for doctors and nurses against viruses that can be transmitted via droplets or smaller aerosol particles. But these studies also suggested careful training was required to ensure that masks didn’t get contaminated when surface transmission was possible, as is the case with SARS. Community-level evidence about mask-wearing was much less compelling. Most studies showed little to no benefit to mask-wearing in the case of the flu, for instance. Studies that have suggested a benefit of mask-wearing were generally those in which people with symptoms wore masks — so that was the advice I embraced for the coronavirus, too. "I also, like many other epidemiologists, overestimated how readily the novel coronavirus would spread on surfaces — and this affected our view of masks. Early data showed that, like SARS, the coronavirus could persist on surfaces for hours to days, and so I was initially concerned that face masks, especially ill-fitting, homemade or carelessly worn coverings could become contaminated with transmissible virus. In fact, I worried that this might mean wearing face masks could be worse than not wearing them. This was wrong. Surface transmission, it emerged, is not that big a problem for covid, but transmission through air via aerosols is a big source of transmission. And so it turns out that face masks do work in this case. "I changed my mind on masks in March 2020, as testing capacity increased and it became clear how common asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infection were (since aerosols were the likely vector). I wish that I and others had caught on sooner — and better testing early on might have caused an earlier revision of views — but there was no bad faith involved." "I’m an epidemiologist. Here’s what I got wrong about covid."(https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo...)
tshaddox 5y ago
None of your examples are about the vaccine as far as I can tell. Are you suggesting that because some experts allegedly lied about some things in the past, no experts ought to ever be trusted again about any medical or public health matters?
- Kretinsky 5y ago
  Trust is acquired on the logn run, and can be broken easily. Would you mind if Union Carbide openned a chemical facility near your house? Well, they had the Bhopal disasted[0], but they can be trusted again, right? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    And trained pilots cause most plane crashes. Perhaps it’s time to place our trust elsewhere and randomly assign 2 passengers to the cockpit on every commercial flight!

BeetleB 5y ago

> and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers. Do you have any evidence that this was the reason for the claims? > How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist? What censorship? I heard about it quite early. > How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist? Did the news media label it, or were they reporting on people who were labeling it? > How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US. AFAIK, there were lack of resources to test. Once the resources became available, testing was widespread.

CapmCrackaWaka 5y ago
On the second point, to claim you do not know about this story is... surprising: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27388587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27388587 Just because you heard about it, doesn't mean there weren't attempts to censor these discussions.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  The claim was that the fact there was an outbreak was censored - not about the origin.
vasco 5y ago
> Do you have any evidence that this was the reason for the claims? This was said by all health officials around January-March 2020. After the stock issue got solved masks suddenly magically became effective for everyone around the summer time. As a "regular person" who took both vaccine shots and is casually observing these developments without reading news or whatever, that single event showed me that governments don't give a shit about telling us the truth in a crisis.
- mcguire 5y ago
  "After the stock issue got solved masks suddenly magically became effective for everyone around the summer time." Technically, it was roughly the end of March and April, when evidence of asymptomatic and aerosol transmission began to appear.
fsagx 5y ago
> Do you have any evidence that this was the reason for the claims? I did a search on youtube to find these sources ("fauci 60 minutes americans dont need to wear masks") I don't vouch for the channels, these are just the first place I found the relevant clips. original statement (pretty hard to find): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ5oCxP6TUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ5oCxP6TUc his explanation of that statement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2MmX2U2V3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2MmX2U2V3c Here's a timeline summary: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/10/20/is-trump-right-that-fauci-discouraged-wearing-masks/?sh=2e1877be4969 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/10/20/is-trum...
kipchak 5y ago
In the first 15s or so of this Washington Post interview clip he explains that priority was being given to healthcare workers, and then also that asymptomatic spread was underestimated. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/washington-post-live/fauci-on-how-his-thinking-has-evolved-on-masks-asymptomatic-transmission/2020/07/24/799264e2-0f35-4862-aca2-2b4702650a8b_video.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/washington-post-live/fa...

dragonwriter 5y ago

> How about the rampant false claims from various health officials and the WHO that masks didn't work in the very beginning of the pandemic. That... wasn't the claim. The claim was that people shouldn't stockpile masks for use beyond the circumstances in which they were recommended, because such additional use did not provide additional protective benefit. This was roughly contemporaneous with guidance that most people should eliminate all non-essential contact with people outside their household. Masking for essential interactions was recommended by the same people advising against buying masks more generally. > ...and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers. It wasn't a lie, and preserving stocks for frontline workers and their essential interactions was an overtly cited part of the rationale, alongside the lack of additional benefit from superfluous masking. > How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist? That didn't happen. > How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist? The initial US travel bans, instituted after substantial domestic community spread was known and after substantial spread in lots of other foreign places that were not targeted by the bans was also known were, if not racist per se, more political posturing than public health. > How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US. How is that a lie? Whether or not it (or the actual limit on testing, which was more nuanced) was the optimum way of managing limited testing resources may be a valid debate, but it's not a lie.

3np 5y ago
The WHO claims/guidances could absolutely be interpreted as such. Here's from 2020-04 when WHO changed their stance. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/10/829890635/why-there-so-many-different-guidelines-for-face-masks-for-the-public https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/10/8298906... Sweden may be seen as a bit of an oddball but either way the head of the national public health agency was consistent in saying masks did not provide any benefits for individuals pretty far into the pandemic. https://www.bild.de/bild-plus/politik/ausland/politik-ausland/schwedens-staats-epidemiologe-auf-masken-verlassen-ist-sehr-gefaehrlich-72302440,view=conversionToLogin.bild.html https://www.bild.de/bild-plus/politik/ausland/politik-auslan... (paywall) https://nyheter24.se/nyheter/944114-tegnell-om-varfor-munskydd-inte-fungerar-otrevliga https://nyheter24.se/nyheter/944114-tegnell-om-varfor-munsky... Not mentioned by the GP, but what was up with anything resembling a lab-leak theory getting the "unquestionably fake news" treatment for months? I have not done any extensive digging into the vaccines myself and can't with good conscience say I'm well-informed. It still seems to me that the risk-trade-off is strongly in favor for getting vaccinated. Even so, I have full understanding for people who now have 0 trust in the public narrative. It's clear that there has been (still ongoing, I assume) a strong propaganda campaign that has at times been using misinformation and censorship (if you count deleting/shadowbanning social media content as censorship), involving governments, traditional news-media and social media. If the narrative around the effectiveness and risks of the vaccine holds, why do this?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rajup 5y ago

Also don't forget that not too long back suggesting that COVID-19 might have escaped from a Chinese lab was considered "lunatic conspiracy theory mongering".

teachrdan 5y ago
It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to use this as an excuse not to get vaccinated against a disease that's killed over 600,000 US citizens.
- rajup 5y ago
  It's not an excuse to not get vaccinated, that you read it that way says a lot about the whole problem really. It's a reply to the GP's question about what "lies" (I personally would not use as strong a word) were spread by quite a few people and media who should know better.
  - quartus 5y ago
    The parent thread to mine actually did claim that various lies were their mother's reason not to get vaccinated: > My mother only got vaccinated last month [...] Her main hangup was the lies [...]

mcguire 5y ago

And here we go again... Up through roughly April-May 2020, many, if not most, epidemiologists and virologists believed that masks would not help the situation: they thought respiratory viruses were spread through large droplets produced by symptomatic individuals and that physical separation, sanitation, and behavior would work as well as trying to convince people to were useful masks consistently and correctly. After that time, reports began to appear showing coronavirus could be spread asymptomatically, by normal breathing and speech, in an aerosol form that could stay airborne for long times. Under those situations, masks are the only solution. The "ensure that enough protective equipment was available for frontline health workers" thing was mostly a response to "but it couldn't hurt" thinking. "Then there is the infamous mask issue. Epidemiologists have taken a lot of heat on this question in particular. Until well into March 2020, I was skeptical about the benefit of everyone wearing face masks. That skepticism was based on previous scientific research as well as hypotheses about how covid was transmitted that turned out to be wrong. Mask-wearing has been a common practice in Asia for decades, to protect against air pollution and to prevent transmitting infection to others when sick. Mask-wearing for protection against catching an infection became widespread in Asia following the 2003 SARS outbreak, but scientific evidence on the effectiveness of this strategy was limited. "Before the coronavirus pandemic, most research on face masks for respiratory diseases came from two types of studies: clinical settings with very sick patients, and community settings during normal flu seasons. In clinical settings, it was clear that well-fitting, high-quality face masks, such as the N95 variety, were important protective equipment for doctors and nurses against viruses that can be transmitted via droplets or smaller aerosol particles. But these studies also suggested careful training was required to ensure that masks didn’t get contaminated when surface transmission was possible, as is the case with SARS. Community-level evidence about mask-wearing was much less compelling. Most studies showed little to no benefit to mask-wearing in the case of the flu, for instance. Studies that have suggested a benefit of mask-wearing were generally those in which people with symptoms wore masks — so that was the advice I embraced for the coronavirus, too. "I also, like many other epidemiologists, overestimated how readily the novel coronavirus would spread on surfaces — and this affected our view of masks. Early data showed that, like SARS, the coronavirus could persist on surfaces for hours to days, and so I was initially concerned that face masks, especially ill-fitting, homemade or carelessly worn coverings could become contaminated with transmissible virus. In fact, I worried that this might mean wearing face masks could be worse than not wearing them. This was wrong. Surface transmission, it emerged, is not that big a problem for covid, but transmission through air via aerosols is a big source of transmission. And so it turns out that face masks do work in this case. "I changed my mind on masks in March 2020, as testing capacity increased and it became clear how common asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infection were (since aerosols were the likely vector). I wish that I and others had caught on sooner — and better testing early on might have caused an earlier revision of views — but there was no bad faith involved." "I’m an epidemiologist. Here’s what I got wrong about covid."(https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo...)

tshaddox 5y ago

None of your examples are about the vaccine as far as I can tell. Are you suggesting that because some experts allegedly lied about some things in the past, no experts ought to ever be trusted again about any medical or public health matters?

Kretinsky 5y ago
Trust is acquired on the logn run, and can be broken easily. Would you mind if Union Carbide openned a chemical facility near your house? Well, they had the Bhopal disasted[0], but they can be trusted again, right? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
- tshaddox 5y ago
  And trained pilots cause most plane crashes. Perhaps it’s time to place our trust elsewhere and randomly assign 2 passengers to the cockpit on every commercial flight!