[laurent92]

> 2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them.

This is the most probable explanation for governments around the world saying that masks are “Absolutely useless” (literal quote) until June 2020.

It is lying-as-a-form-of-governance. It’s extremely detrimental to credibility: From that point, anything new a government said can be taken as a probable lie, since they lie as a routine operation of their job, just for practicability, because it’s easier than explaining. The common answer was “Doctors say masks are useless, why don’t you believe science.”

> I wish more people thought critically and had healthy criticism

The Covid response has killed the permission of citizen to doubt science, even though it is widely recognized that “science” had been used to make people do the opposite of what’s in their interest. You can’t both admit they told people not to wear masks at one point AND ask them to believe that they can trust the vaccine. Newspapers had to be in on the lie, social media had to prevent critical thinking for the duration of it: It’s extremely damaging to public health.

I’m surprised that individual governments didn’t even think about “Let’s not participate to a blatant lie, let’s tell people we don’t have masks and they should not buy one to let them available to hospitals, but tell them they should wear anything they have at home.” No government used the pedagogy method. They all opted for lie-as—a-policy, and-pretend-it’s-science.

[mschuster91]

> I’m surprised that individual governments didn’t even think about “Let’s not participate to a blatant lie, let’s tell people we don’t have masks and they should not buy one to let them available to hospitals, but tell them they should wear anything they have at home.” No government used the pedagogy method. They all opted for lie-as—a-policy, and-pretend-it’s-science.

They probably thought about the decent method, but unfortunately solidarity in most if not all societies has eroded so far that large swaths of the population would have gone and scalped ffp2 masks from wherever they could get them anyway. Case in point: toilet paper crisis.

Governments are in a lose-lose situation and have been for decades now. Appealing to anything involving solidarity with others does not work any more, and yet solidarity is the core of our society model - and there is no (easy) way of fixing this, short of a communist revolution and that won't happen either.

[gurkendoktor]

I disagree. The appeal to solidarity w.r.t. masks would never have worked because a tiny minority of scalpers can ruin it all. But the white lie didn't work either, so it seems like the worse option regardless.

Appeals to solidarity w.r.t. staying at home, wearing masks, getting vaccinated to flatten the curve all worked quite well in my bubble. Projects like Zero Covid would have required insanely high levels of compliance. If you say "anything involving solidarity with others does not work anymore", how high is your bar? What used to work but now doesn't?

(I'd guess that solidarity is lower than it used to be, but if anything I am surprised how much goodwill still exists considering growing inequality, atomization, erosion of public trust and all that.)

[blub]

The government and hospitals don’t source masks from the local store or amazon. They can also force companies in a crisis to sell only to them and ban exports.

If the government is competing for masks with regular citizens, they had already failed years before. And they did, spectacularly.

[mypalmike]

One theory is that governments acted maliciously and lied. The other theory is that they were being advised by bad science (the 5 micron boundary).

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

[laurent92]

In both cases, they are guilty of speaking. If they were benevolent, but wrong in terms of science, then they should shut up.

“But it was impossible to predict!” that the mask was useful. Well, Pr Raoult did. Many doctors did. Government can’t claim innocence “by being wrongly advised” after implementing nationwide policies without knowing anything correct AND banning criticism on Facebook.

You can’t claim innocence when you perform wilful censorship.