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> Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for anything at all they decide to? F

> Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for anything at all they decide to? For me it was the masks. The masks were my tipping point. At some point at the beginning of the pandemic they said that the disease was totally not airborne and that masks were useless. I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that) very serious in TV explaining to all the citizens of the republic that we should not buy nor wear masks. That we should clean our doorknobs and vegetables, wash our hands, and avoid touching our face. If we did that we would be safe, no need of masks. Just two weeks later, he appeared again on TV announcing that wearing masks was now mandatory. That it was the most important thing to do. Without any correction on the previous statement. Without any explanation of whether the previous statement was wrong due to ignorance or intentionally (to save masks for health personnel). Not only he was a liar "for our own good", he acted as if people hadn't even a two-week memory! An utmost lack of respect. I found it extremely offensive that a democratically elected president treats the citizens who elected him as little children, and not as adults. I don't believe any of the stupid conspiracy theories, but I have more sympathy for the conspiracists that follow these theories (I am compassionate to them) than for the evil lying politicians.

cm2187 5y ago
Even before the masks, they were presenting "case fatility rates" as "infection fatility rates" (by just calling them "death rate", which everyone understands as risk of death when infected), when there was hardly any test. Of course if you only test people who show up at the ICU, you will get a very high death rate. That was obvious from the outset and I think deliberate disinformation as a scare tactic. It is not before June that they started admitting that the IFR was way below 1%, when the first serology studies started showing up (though I came to believe that this number is meaningless, you need to look at IFR by age). Sam Harris invited Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease MD from John Hopkins in early April 2020, and his estimate at that time was around 0.5%. So it's not like the information wasn't there.
- phh 5y ago
  Well yes the information was there, I remember clearly that back then, we had the "perfect" measurement (for such an early study that is): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_Princess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_P... 14 people out of 2666 died, hence 0.5% death rate (because I don't agree with the estimate that only 700 individuals got it, I saw no good reason not to consider everyone got it, but even without that, it'd give low 2%) A retrospective on who said what on the matter of death rates would be extremely interesting to pick the ""good"" medias and the ""bad"" ones
- zarzavat 5y ago
  A great number of politicians still don't understand the difference between cases and infections. So you see for instance travel from rich countries in Europe being banned, and rich European countries banning each other, purely because they do enough testing to quantify the number of infections. And when Omicron arrived it was the countries with the highest sequencing capacities that were in the firing line.
- neuronic 5y ago
  I think this is more nuanced. In the beginning, testing was very sparse and unavailable so it's hard to blame anyone for just looking at the obvious infections. It took a while until we even understood that the majority of cases are asymptomatic and very mild. The 1% IFR is trueish across all age groups but not so much when you look at specific age groups. You can clearly see it in current German data: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105512/coronavirus-covid-19-deaths-by-gender-germany/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105512/coronavirus-covi... You might have an asysmptomatic child with a 0.003% IFR and hand them to your grandparents for caretaking, with a quite high chance of putting them into the ICU if infected. So it's not so easy to deal with like a cold. Also, variants might change the distribution and death isn't the only negative outcome of a COVID infection. It's a systemic disease affecting all organs which will put a strain on the health systems for a long time to come, especially if it becomes endemic and people will just keep reinfecting themselves year after year. It's too shortsighted to just dismiss it as a cold just because cases are often very mild.
phh 5y ago
> I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that) very serious in TV explaining to all the citizens of the republic that we should not buy nor wear masks. I don't remember this from Macron, but rather from Véran (Health Minister), but I could be wrong. anyway, at the time this was a more than reasonable request. Because the very first persons we had to protect were health professionals, and we didn't have enough masks for everyone. (We didn't even have enough for health professionals) > If we did that we would be safe, no need of masks. I'll need to check again what he said, because I really don't remember that part, and I remember that the "L’usage du masque en population générale n’est pas utile" made sense to me, precisely because we had to protect health professionals first, which contradicts that part.
- hosteur 5y ago
  > anyway, at the time this was a more than reasonable request. Because the very first persons we had to protect were health professionals, and we didn't have enough masks for everyone. So that makes it ok for them to lie? I do not agree. And the trust is lost as a result. They should have explained that we should prioritize masks for health care professionals if that was their reasoning.
  - phh 5y ago
    I don't see the lie. As I said, I don't remember them ever saying that it was safe without mask. They only said it was not useful. I would actually say that at the time, it was counter-productive for the general public to wear masks, because it prevented protecting health professionals. I agree there is a bit of conundrum that "not useful" is not exactly in between "counter-productive" and "useful", and here you could argue that the "not useful" in Véran's mouth meant "doesn't protect". I definitely wouldn't blame you for that, and yes I'm being very nice to them for my interpretation. The reality is that had they said "yes masks are super important, but it's even more important to give them to health professionals", we'd have seen what we saw with hydroxychloroquine (which is that people who actually needed it couldn't get it), but 10 times worse. Could they have twisted their words 7 times more in their mouth before saying it, so that it's not factually a lie? Yes sure.
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scratcheee 5y ago
This may be unpopular, but I'm actually fine with polititians manipulating the truth in that scenario (_if_ we accept as a starting point that the shortage of masks was already unavoidable, and the best option for public health was to convince the public to minimise purchases). Part of the job of politicians is to act as a rudder for the general public, and if tragedy of the commons applies to a scenario, a politician doing what they can to counteract that effect, even by deceipt, isn't fundamentally wrong (if it's for a genuinely good cause and the situation didn't have a less distasteful solution). If polititians need to tell us that there is no fuel shortage to avoid a rush that worsens the fuel shortage, so be it. It is (and _should_ be) assumed that polititians are manipulating the truth, the only question is whether they're doing it at a level and for a cause that are acceptable. I am _much_ less comfortable by similar behaviour in scientists. Science is built on trust and a pursuit of truth, lying is anathema. This is true both within scientific debate, and from the outside, when scientists share their perspective it should be a counter balance to the more flexible interpretation of truth provided elsewhere. Tldr: Polititians can and should play politics (politics _is_ mostly white lies, or just lies, depending on your cynicism level). Scientists should not, it hurts the reputation of science as a whole.
- thathndude 5y ago
  I get your point. But the long term damage doesn’t justify the lie. That’s a race to the bottom. And what happens when the scientist and politician is in a hybrid role, like Fauci? Folks don’t trust Fauci because credibility, in general, has been harmed. Q conspiracy theorists thrive in a world of distrust. Chronic distrust of politicians is too high a price to pay to justify the use of the occasional manipulation.
  - zarzavat 5y ago
    Plus it's simply ineffective. Enough people saw through the lies such that all the masks sold out anyway. I reckon an honest approach and appeal to morality would have seen more masks donated to hospitals than simply telling people that they don't work.
    - 5y ago
CreepGin 5y ago
As an Asian American, this baffles me a little bit. We knew the virus was airborne since January 2020. It was all over Chinese/Taiwanese/SEA news outlets. I live in New England, Asians here started wearing masks months before others. I remember purposely choosing to go to Asian Supermarkets instead of Stop & Shop for safety back then.
- toyg 5y ago
  I'm Italian and the events in February and March 2020 made it very clear to me how the anglo press largely just ignores foreign sources. The "debate" about lockdown in the UK mirrored the Italian one almost day by day, with a delay of 3 weeks between here and Italy. Italian sources and discoveries were either ignored or discounted. It was like watching a child "discover" on their own how to start a fire. If they do that with sources in a relatively easy and popular language, I cannot imagine what they do with complex Asian ones.
  - ricardobayes 5y ago
    Even though I usually like to stay away from political topics on here, but it pains me that a country I (used to) love so much, UK, is spiraling deeper and deeper into a void. So much so I have to believe its leadership no longer acts in favour of the country. For reasons unknown to me, however it is long known Brexit was a wanted scenario for Russian geopolitics, as laid out in their textbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
    - aix1 5y ago
      Thanks for pointing out the book. Terrifying.
    - native_samples 5y ago
      One guy writing a book in 1997 that argues France and Germany should be strongly united in a Union, does not imply anything about the decision of British voters in 2016. You're peddling a literal conspiracy theory there.
iqanq 5y ago
What exactly did Macron ever do to earn your respect?
- enriquto 5y ago
  Everybody has my respect by default, until they make a major fuck-up like Macron did there. Maybe he fucked up sooner than that, thus not being worthy of respect at that point. But I'm not interested in politics at all so I missed it.
  - iqanq 5y ago
    >Everybody has my respect by default That's terrible, and doubly so when you apply it to politicians.
    - beowulfey 5y ago
      So if a stranger comes up to you on the street to ask you the time, do you immediately insult them for being an inferior human not deserving of your respect? In my opinion, not giving respect to fellow humans by default is the terrible choice.
      - iqanq 5y ago
        No, I am neutral to them. Respect is earned. But it is a spectrum, not a binary choice. >In my opinion, not giving respect to fellow humans by default is the terrible choice. Not every walking person deserves to be called a "fellow human".
        deleted 5y ago
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- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  He picked up his english teacher. I'm sure all his mates went crazy when he told them.
Fiahil 5y ago
> I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that) very serious in TV explaining to all the citizens of the republic that we should not buy nor wear masks. Ah! This one is actually a story of "the lesser of two evils". You can't really tell people to buy masks where there is none available, and you can't really tell there is nothing to do unless you want to put every one in panic mode. You can't really trust people to act rationally in the presence of a new and unexpected situation that nobody trained for, and you can't tell them that you're also as unprepared as they are for that. So, handle the situation like you want, there's no way you aren't damaging something. I guess it was easier to take a slight (to medium for some government staff, Olivier Véran) reputation hit and announce it to the press via your health minister, than risk a state-wide panic meanwhile you are fixing the mask situation (remember the stockpile was left in a degraded state and wasn't usable). If you think of it, the only reason why getting vaccinated is not yet mandatory is because of the next elections in May. You wouldn't risk to alienate ~1/6 voters (again, they are the most motivated ones and they refused to get a shot despite not being allowed in restaurants), if it's not national-security-like important. So I suspect it will become mandatory either when we crossed the threshold where it's really dangerous (500.000 covid case per day, we're currently at 350.000), or after the elections, in june. Whichever comes first. With our current trajectory, you could expect the president or the prime minister to announce it in about two weeks, despite having said differently in previous announcements.
- enriquto 5y ago
  > I guess it was easier to take a slight (...) reputation hit, Not a reputation hit. A credibility hit. Essentially 100% of what they say now is lies to my ears. If their policy is to lie to me "for the global good", this is the most rational position. I'd have preferred if they had told the truth as they knew it (the disease is airborne, masks help you to avoid infect people, please leave all masks to health personnel, people who hoard masks will be severely punished).
  - thathndude 5y ago
    Precisely this. The occasional manipulation to try and prevent a run on toilet paper or gas stations is not worth a total loss of credibility.
ricardobayes 5y ago
Politicians will never or very rarely correct their statements. It is for the same reason as football referees. I took up refereeing as a hobby and we were taught very firmly by the ref coach that no matter what decision we take, we stick to it and never change it. Because that is a sign of weakness and will degrade the quality of the game even more than that individual decision.
- enriquto 5y ago
  I'd hope that our elected representatives did not treat us as adversarial football players, but maybe I'm asking to much.
  - timeon 5y ago
    Well people are rooting for the parties as if they were football teams. Especially if there are only few political parties.
    - enriquto 5y ago
      I haven't yet given up on society, only on the current generation of shitty leaders.
cortic 5y ago
Happened in the UK as well, Boris (and to be fair the WHO) told us masks were counter productive. That they might get you to stand closer to people and touch your face more, increasing your chances of getting Covid.. All presumably to save a mask shortage; But we know, and they should have known, that the public doesn't buy the same kind of masks that our NHS buys and there never was going to be any shortage. This encouraged examples like; people walking up to you in the supermarket explaining why you should take your mask off. It lead to some number of deaths, probably 10s of thousands in the UK as this policy lasted for six months and it undoubtedly was part of the reason care-homes were hit as hard in the first wave. Now here we are a year later, and no one has been held accountable, no talk of this in the media, no anger. Not only were we treated like children, we were treated like children by incompetent heartless leaders that got a lot of us killed, and there seems to be no corrective process for this.
- chimprich 5y ago
  > All presumably to save a mask shortage I don't think so. There seemed to be genuine uncertainty early on in the pandemic about whether masks would be helpful. We didn't know if the virus was airborne and there was a question about whether the masks would actually be helpful. For example, the masks could have had very low benefit but encouraged people to touch their face more. Whitty in March 2020: "In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that. The only people we do sometimes use masks for are people who have got an infection and that is to help them to stop it spreading around." I think this was a mistake: common sense suggests that they should have had some effect (and the evidence ended up supporting this). But I don't see any evidence for it being deliberate misinformation to avoid pressure on mask sourcing. I also think that this one mistake should not be held up as the key problem in the pandemic. Public health information in the UK has generally been very good. Most of the missteps in the pandemic were from poor governmental decisions. > no talk of this in the media This is absolutely not true. I've seen this issue discussed ad nauseum.
  - elihu 5y ago
    As far as I know, the advice that wearing a mask doesn't protect you very well from getting Covid has held up pretty good; they're a lot better at protecting everyone else from the mask wearer. The logical flaw then was that telling people to just wear masks if they're infected doesn't work very well if highly contagious people don't know they're infected, which turned out to be the case. I can see where it might have taken awhile to figure that out, but still the lack of transparency about how these decisions were made and the resulting credibility deficit is a problem.
causi 5y ago
The CDC and WHO are still spouting off about cleaning surfaces without, to my knowledge, one single well-documented case of surface transmission.
- headsoup 5y ago
  It's not a long stretch to question if anything the CDC recommends actually comes from caring for public health at all rather than private interests. The US is becoming more and more the outlier in over-hyped fear and infantalism vs a world moving on.
  - hoffs 5y ago
    It is a long stretch
jokethrowaway 5y ago
To be fair, I believe more the criticism about masks and I'm on the side that they're pretty useless. Their first explanation made more sense. People are certainly reusing them, they keep touching their face to adjust them, they don't respect distancing rules because they have a mask on, a lot of masks are not filtering enough. On top of this they're annoying. With the risk of covid being so low, masks are too much of a hassle for me to bother and I wear them only to avoid fines from the totalitarian regime I live in (and I'm certainly not changing them or buying any, I'm still using some I managed to get for free).
- op00to 5y ago
  Must be really frustrating to be completely wrong about masks.
mongol 5y ago
Would it have been different for you if he had elaborated on the reason for the changed policy, and apologized for what he said earlier? Also, in the first case, did he express it very categorically, or did he say something like "to the best of our knowledge, the virus..."?
- newsclues 5y ago
  In Canada our leaders said the same things, no masks required… as they shipped our stockpiles of PPE to China
  - op00to 5y ago
    No, this didn’t happen.
    - newsclues 5y ago
      https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ottawa-faces-criticism-for-sending-16-tonnes-of-personal-protective/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ottawa-face...
      - hoffs 5y ago
        Yeah, they shipped it because they didn't expect they will need it even when WHO was suggesting that there is a likelihood of cases in other countries...
dosethree 5y ago
Same thing happened in the US. It made no sense to everyone and degraded public trust at a critical juncture.
_benedict 5y ago
I think in the case of masks, it is highly plausible there was no deliberate attempt to mislead. While at the time it seemed pretty clear to me that masks had a high probability of being helpful, there was a dearth of research that would support this conclusion - indeed the very limited research conducted on public mask usage did not seem to support it. On top of this, I believe a major contributing factor was that many medical experts were used to very stringent mask protocols, and did not seem to consider the obvious differences between a hospital setting (where Covid may be rife) and every day life where it is a medium-to-low risk event, and carried over their belief that anything less than their stringent (and unrealistic protocols for the public) would render them useless. I saw many regular doctors expressing this belief on Twitter at the time, as well as explaining how mask fitting was a laborious process, and that without this the mask would be useless, or that if you touched the mask while taking it on or off it would be worse than useless. So, I think it is entirely possible that experts were giving leaders and journalists their honest assessment that masks were useless for the public - no doubt more exuberantly than they would have done if masks were plentiful, but not necessarily dishonestly. I don't disagree that public messaging is highly manipulated in general, but I think it is more plausible that this particular case was fabricated by flaws in the decision process rather than dishonesty.
- neuronic 5y ago
  Another point on top of yours, at least in the EU, was that there was a plain shortage of masks and every single functioning FFP2+ mask was needed for hospitals and ICUs. I have often observed discussion on how this might have been a convenient political move in the beginning when the EU had no way to get masks except for waiting on Chinese orders. But that's the realm of conspiracy again.
javiercr 5y ago
Exactly the same thing happened in Spain. +1 to everything you said.
2-718-281-828 5y ago
op00to 5y ago
What the hell? Our understanding of COVID was literally changing day by day. It would be dishonest to NOT change based on the updated science. I’m so surprised and disappointed this absolute bullshit shows up on HN.
morelandjs 5y ago
It’s not unscientific to change your mind when presented with new evidence, quite the opposite. It is, unfortunately, unpalatable as a politician to be uncertain, even when the facts demand it. I blame our culture of “leaders always know”.
throwaway6734 5y ago
The alternative is that governing massive democratic countries is incredibly difficult and it requires lies/facades/manipulation to ensure stability. Imagine the largest project you've ever worked on and then imagine scaling it up by many orders of magnitude. Conspiracy theorists almost always operate in negative space and are unable to stand on their own.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Happened in my country as well. In the beginning of the pandemic when there were a lot of unknowns, authorities made blatantly incorrect statements and decisions and even contradicted one another. People stopped trusting the government, the doctors, the news. Even now they're saying thay vaccines are risk-free which is quite simply factually wrong, they have a favorable risk/benefit ratio but the risks are not null. No wonder there are conspiracy theories all over the place. News are disinformation, you can't trust anything you read and uncertainty is at an all time high. People no longer trust these authorities but they still need to make sense of the world so they start looking for patterns. Sometimes they see things where there's nothing and sometimes they're right. I have a lot of sympathy for these people.
Tycho 5y ago
Isn't this more a failure of the scientific advisors? Surely they would be able to deliver a clear verdict on this (eg. definitely transmitted by aerosol, definitely not transmitted by aerosol, or possibly transmitted by aerosol so urge caution).
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
>For me it was the masks. The masks were my tipping point. Before covid we knew masks were effective. Doctors obviously wear them during surgery. masks are important when dealing with HIV and such. So when Fauci and others came out and said masks didn't work. They were knowingly lying. Worse yet, there were instructions on how to turn a tshirts in masks as well as how to produce hand santizers. They took these down. The correct decision would have been to say exactly the fear, 'we have supply issues, we recommend cutting up old tshirts.' Not only does it prevent spread, it solves all problems. Then we went a week later and they talked about 'new normal' and '2 weeks to flatten the curve'. Their lying didn't stop. They lost any smidgen of trust they had. Then they came out with emergency approvals to use experimental medicine for something that clearly isn't a vaccine and they are lying and calling it a vaccine? Sorry but this amount of lying should make literally everyone question their motives.

cm2187 5y ago

Even before the masks, they were presenting "case fatility rates" as "infection fatility rates" (by just calling them "death rate", which everyone understands as risk of death when infected), when there was hardly any test. Of course if you only test people who show up at the ICU, you will get a very high death rate. That was obvious from the outset and I think deliberate disinformation as a scare tactic. It is not before June that they started admitting that the IFR was way below 1%, when the first serology studies started showing up (though I came to believe that this number is meaningless, you need to look at IFR by age). Sam Harris invited Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease MD from John Hopkins in early April 2020, and his estimate at that time was around 0.5%. So it's not like the information wasn't there.

phh 5y ago
Well yes the information was there, I remember clearly that back then, we had the "perfect" measurement (for such an early study that is): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_Princess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_P... 14 people out of 2666 died, hence 0.5% death rate (because I don't agree with the estimate that only 700 individuals got it, I saw no good reason not to consider everyone got it, but even without that, it'd give low 2%) A retrospective on who said what on the matter of death rates would be extremely interesting to pick the ""good"" medias and the ""bad"" ones
zarzavat 5y ago
A great number of politicians still don't understand the difference between cases and infections. So you see for instance travel from rich countries in Europe being banned, and rich European countries banning each other, purely because they do enough testing to quantify the number of infections. And when Omicron arrived it was the countries with the highest sequencing capacities that were in the firing line.
neuronic 5y ago
I think this is more nuanced. In the beginning, testing was very sparse and unavailable so it's hard to blame anyone for just looking at the obvious infections. It took a while until we even understood that the majority of cases are asymptomatic and very mild. The 1% IFR is trueish across all age groups but not so much when you look at specific age groups. You can clearly see it in current German data: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105512/coronavirus-covid-19-deaths-by-gender-germany/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105512/coronavirus-covi... You might have an asysmptomatic child with a 0.003% IFR and hand them to your grandparents for caretaking, with a quite high chance of putting them into the ICU if infected. So it's not so easy to deal with like a cold. Also, variants might change the distribution and death isn't the only negative outcome of a COVID infection. It's a systemic disease affecting all organs which will put a strain on the health systems for a long time to come, especially if it becomes endemic and people will just keep reinfecting themselves year after year. It's too shortsighted to just dismiss it as a cold just because cases are often very mild.

phh 5y ago

> I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that) very serious in TV explaining to all the citizens of the republic that we should not buy nor wear masks. I don't remember this from Macron, but rather from Véran (Health Minister), but I could be wrong. anyway, at the time this was a more than reasonable request. Because the very first persons we had to protect were health professionals, and we didn't have enough masks for everyone. (We didn't even have enough for health professionals) > If we did that we would be safe, no need of masks. I'll need to check again what he said, because I really don't remember that part, and I remember that the "L’usage du masque en population générale n’est pas utile" made sense to me, precisely because we had to protect health professionals first, which contradicts that part.

hosteur 5y ago
> anyway, at the time this was a more than reasonable request. Because the very first persons we had to protect were health professionals, and we didn't have enough masks for everyone. So that makes it ok for them to lie? I do not agree. And the trust is lost as a result. They should have explained that we should prioritize masks for health care professionals if that was their reasoning.
- phh 5y ago
  I don't see the lie. As I said, I don't remember them ever saying that it was safe without mask. They only said it was not useful. I would actually say that at the time, it was counter-productive for the general public to wear masks, because it prevented protecting health professionals. I agree there is a bit of conundrum that "not useful" is not exactly in between "counter-productive" and "useful", and here you could argue that the "not useful" in Véran's mouth meant "doesn't protect". I definitely wouldn't blame you for that, and yes I'm being very nice to them for my interpretation. The reality is that had they said "yes masks are super important, but it's even more important to give them to health professionals", we'd have seen what we saw with hydroxychloroquine (which is that people who actually needed it couldn't get it), but 10 times worse. Could they have twisted their words 7 times more in their mouth before saying it, so that it's not factually a lie? Yes sure.

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scratcheee 5y ago

This may be unpopular, but I'm actually fine with polititians manipulating the truth in that scenario (_if_ we accept as a starting point that the shortage of masks was already unavoidable, and the best option for public health was to convince the public to minimise purchases). Part of the job of politicians is to act as a rudder for the general public, and if tragedy of the commons applies to a scenario, a politician doing what they can to counteract that effect, even by deceipt, isn't fundamentally wrong (if it's for a genuinely good cause and the situation didn't have a less distasteful solution). If polititians need to tell us that there is no fuel shortage to avoid a rush that worsens the fuel shortage, so be it. It is (and _should_ be) assumed that polititians are manipulating the truth, the only question is whether they're doing it at a level and for a cause that are acceptable. I am _much_ less comfortable by similar behaviour in scientists. Science is built on trust and a pursuit of truth, lying is anathema. This is true both within scientific debate, and from the outside, when scientists share their perspective it should be a counter balance to the more flexible interpretation of truth provided elsewhere. Tldr: Polititians can and should play politics (politics _is_ mostly white lies, or just lies, depending on your cynicism level). Scientists should not, it hurts the reputation of science as a whole.

thathndude 5y ago
I get your point. But the long term damage doesn’t justify the lie. That’s a race to the bottom. And what happens when the scientist and politician is in a hybrid role, like Fauci? Folks don’t trust Fauci because credibility, in general, has been harmed. Q conspiracy theorists thrive in a world of distrust. Chronic distrust of politicians is too high a price to pay to justify the use of the occasional manipulation.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  Plus it's simply ineffective. Enough people saw through the lies such that all the masks sold out anyway. I reckon an honest approach and appeal to morality would have seen more masks donated to hospitals than simply telling people that they don't work.
  - 5y ago

CreepGin 5y ago

As an Asian American, this baffles me a little bit. We knew the virus was airborne since January 2020. It was all over Chinese/Taiwanese/SEA news outlets. I live in New England, Asians here started wearing masks months before others. I remember purposely choosing to go to Asian Supermarkets instead of Stop & Shop for safety back then.

toyg 5y ago
I'm Italian and the events in February and March 2020 made it very clear to me how the anglo press largely just ignores foreign sources. The "debate" about lockdown in the UK mirrored the Italian one almost day by day, with a delay of 3 weeks between here and Italy. Italian sources and discoveries were either ignored or discounted. It was like watching a child "discover" on their own how to start a fire. If they do that with sources in a relatively easy and popular language, I cannot imagine what they do with complex Asian ones.
- ricardobayes 5y ago
  Even though I usually like to stay away from political topics on here, but it pains me that a country I (used to) love so much, UK, is spiraling deeper and deeper into a void. So much so I have to believe its leadership no longer acts in favour of the country. For reasons unknown to me, however it is long known Brexit was a wanted scenario for Russian geopolitics, as laid out in their textbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
  - aix1 5y ago
    Thanks for pointing out the book. Terrifying.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    One guy writing a book in 1997 that argues France and Germany should be strongly united in a Union, does not imply anything about the decision of British voters in 2016. You're peddling a literal conspiracy theory there.

iqanq 5y ago

What exactly did Macron ever do to earn your respect?

enriquto 5y ago
Everybody has my respect by default, until they make a major fuck-up like Macron did there. Maybe he fucked up sooner than that, thus not being worthy of respect at that point. But I'm not interested in politics at all so I missed it.
- iqanq 5y ago
  >Everybody has my respect by default That's terrible, and doubly so when you apply it to politicians.
  - beowulfey 5y ago
    So if a stranger comes up to you on the street to ask you the time, do you immediately insult them for being an inferior human not deserving of your respect? In my opinion, not giving respect to fellow humans by default is the terrible choice.
    - iqanq 5y ago
      No, I am neutral to them. Respect is earned. But it is a spectrum, not a binary choice. >In my opinion, not giving respect to fellow humans by default is the terrible choice. Not every walking person deserves to be called a "fellow human".
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
jokethrowaway 5y ago
He picked up his english teacher. I'm sure all his mates went crazy when he told them.

Fiahil 5y ago

> I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that) very serious in TV explaining to all the citizens of the republic that we should not buy nor wear masks. Ah! This one is actually a story of "the lesser of two evils". You can't really tell people to buy masks where there is none available, and you can't really tell there is nothing to do unless you want to put every one in panic mode. You can't really trust people to act rationally in the presence of a new and unexpected situation that nobody trained for, and you can't tell them that you're also as unprepared as they are for that. So, handle the situation like you want, there's no way you aren't damaging something. I guess it was easier to take a slight (to medium for some government staff, Olivier Véran) reputation hit and announce it to the press via your health minister, than risk a state-wide panic meanwhile you are fixing the mask situation (remember the stockpile was left in a degraded state and wasn't usable). If you think of it, the only reason why getting vaccinated is not yet mandatory is because of the next elections in May. You wouldn't risk to alienate ~1/6 voters (again, they are the most motivated ones and they refused to get a shot despite not being allowed in restaurants), if it's not national-security-like important. So I suspect it will become mandatory either when we crossed the threshold where it's really dangerous (500.000 covid case per day, we're currently at 350.000), or after the elections, in june. Whichever comes first. With our current trajectory, you could expect the president or the prime minister to announce it in about two weeks, despite having said differently in previous announcements.

enriquto 5y ago
> I guess it was easier to take a slight (...) reputation hit, Not a reputation hit. A credibility hit. Essentially 100% of what they say now is lies to my ears. If their policy is to lie to me "for the global good", this is the most rational position. I'd have preferred if they had told the truth as they knew it (the disease is airborne, masks help you to avoid infect people, please leave all masks to health personnel, people who hoard masks will be severely punished).
- thathndude 5y ago
  Precisely this. The occasional manipulation to try and prevent a run on toilet paper or gas stations is not worth a total loss of credibility.

ricardobayes 5y ago

Politicians will never or very rarely correct their statements. It is for the same reason as football referees. I took up refereeing as a hobby and we were taught very firmly by the ref coach that no matter what decision we take, we stick to it and never change it. Because that is a sign of weakness and will degrade the quality of the game even more than that individual decision.

enriquto 5y ago
I'd hope that our elected representatives did not treat us as adversarial football players, but maybe I'm asking to much.
- timeon 5y ago
  Well people are rooting for the parties as if they were football teams. Especially if there are only few political parties.
  - enriquto 5y ago
    I haven't yet given up on society, only on the current generation of shitty leaders.

cortic 5y ago

Happened in the UK as well, Boris (and to be fair the WHO) told us masks were counter productive. That they might get you to stand closer to people and touch your face more, increasing your chances of getting Covid.. All presumably to save a mask shortage; But we know, and they should have known, that the public doesn't buy the same kind of masks that our NHS buys and there never was going to be any shortage. This encouraged examples like; people walking up to you in the supermarket explaining why you should take your mask off. It lead to some number of deaths, probably 10s of thousands in the UK as this policy lasted for six months and it undoubtedly was part of the reason care-homes were hit as hard in the first wave. Now here we are a year later, and no one has been held accountable, no talk of this in the media, no anger. Not only were we treated like children, we were treated like children by incompetent heartless leaders that got a lot of us killed, and there seems to be no corrective process for this.

chimprich 5y ago
> All presumably to save a mask shortage I don't think so. There seemed to be genuine uncertainty early on in the pandemic about whether masks would be helpful. We didn't know if the virus was airborne and there was a question about whether the masks would actually be helpful. For example, the masks could have had very low benefit but encouraged people to touch their face more. Whitty in March 2020: "In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that. The only people we do sometimes use masks for are people who have got an infection and that is to help them to stop it spreading around." I think this was a mistake: common sense suggests that they should have had some effect (and the evidence ended up supporting this). But I don't see any evidence for it being deliberate misinformation to avoid pressure on mask sourcing. I also think that this one mistake should not be held up as the key problem in the pandemic. Public health information in the UK has generally been very good. Most of the missteps in the pandemic were from poor governmental decisions. > no talk of this in the media This is absolutely not true. I've seen this issue discussed ad nauseum.
- elihu 5y ago
  As far as I know, the advice that wearing a mask doesn't protect you very well from getting Covid has held up pretty good; they're a lot better at protecting everyone else from the mask wearer. The logical flaw then was that telling people to just wear masks if they're infected doesn't work very well if highly contagious people don't know they're infected, which turned out to be the case. I can see where it might have taken awhile to figure that out, but still the lack of transparency about how these decisions were made and the resulting credibility deficit is a problem.

causi 5y ago

The CDC and WHO are still spouting off about cleaning surfaces without, to my knowledge, one single well-documented case of surface transmission.

headsoup 5y ago
It's not a long stretch to question if anything the CDC recommends actually comes from caring for public health at all rather than private interests. The US is becoming more and more the outlier in over-hyped fear and infantalism vs a world moving on.
- hoffs 5y ago
  It is a long stretch

jokethrowaway 5y ago

To be fair, I believe more the criticism about masks and I'm on the side that they're pretty useless. Their first explanation made more sense. People are certainly reusing them, they keep touching their face to adjust them, they don't respect distancing rules because they have a mask on, a lot of masks are not filtering enough. On top of this they're annoying. With the risk of covid being so low, masks are too much of a hassle for me to bother and I wear them only to avoid fines from the totalitarian regime I live in (and I'm certainly not changing them or buying any, I'm still using some I managed to get for free).

op00to 5y ago
Must be really frustrating to be completely wrong about masks.

mongol 5y ago

Would it have been different for you if he had elaborated on the reason for the changed policy, and apologized for what he said earlier? Also, in the first case, did he express it very categorically, or did he say something like "to the best of our knowledge, the virus..."?

newsclues 5y ago
In Canada our leaders said the same things, no masks required… as they shipped our stockpiles of PPE to China
- op00to 5y ago
  No, this didn’t happen.
  - newsclues 5y ago
    https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ottawa-faces-criticism-for-sending-16-tonnes-of-personal-protective/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ottawa-face...
    - hoffs 5y ago
      Yeah, they shipped it because they didn't expect they will need it even when WHO was suggesting that there is a likelihood of cases in other countries...

dosethree 5y ago

Same thing happened in the US. It made no sense to everyone and degraded public trust at a critical juncture.

_benedict 5y ago

I think in the case of masks, it is highly plausible there was no deliberate attempt to mislead. While at the time it seemed pretty clear to me that masks had a high probability of being helpful, there was a dearth of research that would support this conclusion - indeed the very limited research conducted on public mask usage did not seem to support it. On top of this, I believe a major contributing factor was that many medical experts were used to very stringent mask protocols, and did not seem to consider the obvious differences between a hospital setting (where Covid may be rife) and every day life where it is a medium-to-low risk event, and carried over their belief that anything less than their stringent (and unrealistic protocols for the public) would render them useless. I saw many regular doctors expressing this belief on Twitter at the time, as well as explaining how mask fitting was a laborious process, and that without this the mask would be useless, or that if you touched the mask while taking it on or off it would be worse than useless. So, I think it is entirely possible that experts were giving leaders and journalists their honest assessment that masks were useless for the public - no doubt more exuberantly than they would have done if masks were plentiful, but not necessarily dishonestly. I don't disagree that public messaging is highly manipulated in general, but I think it is more plausible that this particular case was fabricated by flaws in the decision process rather than dishonesty.

neuronic 5y ago
Another point on top of yours, at least in the EU, was that there was a plain shortage of masks and every single functioning FFP2+ mask was needed for hospitals and ICUs. I have often observed discussion on how this might have been a convenient political move in the beginning when the EU had no way to get masks except for waiting on Chinese orders. But that's the realm of conspiracy again.

javiercr 5y ago

Exactly the same thing happened in Spain. +1 to everything you said.

2-718-281-828 5y ago

op00to 5y ago

What the hell? Our understanding of COVID was literally changing day by day. It would be dishonest to NOT change based on the updated science. I’m so surprised and disappointed this absolute bullshit shows up on HN.

morelandjs 5y ago

It’s not unscientific to change your mind when presented with new evidence, quite the opposite. It is, unfortunately, unpalatable as a politician to be uncertain, even when the facts demand it. I blame our culture of “leaders always know”.

throwaway6734 5y ago

The alternative is that governing massive democratic countries is incredibly difficult and it requires lies/facades/manipulation to ensure stability. Imagine the largest project you've ever worked on and then imagine scaling it up by many orders of magnitude. Conspiracy theorists almost always operate in negative space and are unable to stand on their own.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Happened in my country as well. In the beginning of the pandemic when there were a lot of unknowns, authorities made blatantly incorrect statements and decisions and even contradicted one another. People stopped trusting the government, the doctors, the news. Even now they're saying thay vaccines are risk-free which is quite simply factually wrong, they have a favorable risk/benefit ratio but the risks are not null. No wonder there are conspiracy theories all over the place. News are disinformation, you can't trust anything you read and uncertainty is at an all time high. People no longer trust these authorities but they still need to make sense of the world so they start looking for patterns. Sometimes they see things where there's nothing and sometimes they're right. I have a lot of sympathy for these people.

Tycho 5y ago

Isn't this more a failure of the scientific advisors? Surely they would be able to deliver a clear verdict on this (eg. definitely transmitted by aerosol, definitely not transmitted by aerosol, or possibly transmitted by aerosol so urge caution).

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

>For me it was the masks. The masks were my tipping point. Before covid we knew masks were effective. Doctors obviously wear them during surgery. masks are important when dealing with HIV and such. So when Fauci and others came out and said masks didn't work. They were knowingly lying. Worse yet, there were instructions on how to turn a tshirts in masks as well as how to produce hand santizers. They took these down. The correct decision would have been to say exactly the fear, 'we have supply issues, we recommend cutting up old tshirts.' Not only does it prevent spread, it solves all problems. Then we went a week later and they talked about 'new normal' and '2 weeks to flatten the curve'. Their lying didn't stop. They lost any smidgen of trust they had. Then they came out with emergency approvals to use experimental medicine for something that clearly isn't a vaccine and they are lying and calling it a vaccine? Sorry but this amount of lying should make literally everyone question their motives.