I hope everyone remembers when the authorities and the media were telling us that we are too stupid to use the masks correctly so the general population shouldn

I hope everyone remembers when the authorities and the media were telling us that we are too stupid to use the masks correctly so the general population shouldn't be using it. This was early 2020. And I am aware of Paul Graham's submarine (and Tim Wu's books and Edward Bernay's work force that matter)... What I don't understand is what happened afterwards when masks became political and discussed everywhere. Where is this coming from? Who is pushing it and benefiting from it? Right before the pandemic, attention to plastic straws was a thing in mainstream media, but I haven't seen anything about the environmental impact of the masks, most of which are made with plastics which take 400 years to degrade (compare that to straws which take 200 years). If plastic straw thing was purely environmental, there would be a push for cloth masks or masks made with biodegradable material from the same people, right? Does anyone have any ideas to what is happening?