They knew that masks worked from the get go and openly admitted that their statements about masks being ineffective were driven by fears of shortages, not lack of data. This is why their statements were effectively "masks don't work unless you are a healthcare worker". Scientific organizations should not be issuing politically motivated or economically motivated statements; they should be stating the truth to the best of their ability. It's ok to put some spin on information to achieve results, but issuing knowingly false statements immediately shreds your credibility.
> Scientific organizations should not be issuing politically motivated or economically motivated statements
How is this political or economic? It was purely public health.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we thought we could trace and contain anybody with covid, thus ELIMINATING the virus. In this view, only healthcare workers need masks! If healthcare workers go without masks because every ordinary joe stocked up on masks and toilet paper, that means that healthcare workers get infected and become the spreaders, which is the opposite of "containing".
The original PR was something like "masks don't work unless it's an N95 mask and you wear it in a very specific way, and healthcare workers need those anyways so don't buy 'em". Yeah, I can agree it feels misleading now.
But in a world where we're trying to literally ELIMINATE the virus, it makes sense: Wearing a cloth mask near someone with the virus COULD get you infected, so you're better off not being in that situation in the first place.
Once it became clear that we couldn't just have everybody stay at home until the virus is gone, the CDC changed their recommendation to wearing cloth masks. This was about 2 weeks into "lockdowns", at the very very beginning of april.
I fail to see whats so bad about the CDC's recommendations. From the point of view of public health (again, that's what the CDC is. A public health agency), these recommendations make sense in context.
> At the beginning of the pandemic, we thought we could trace and contain anybody with covid, thus ELIMINATING the virus. In this view, only healthcare workers need masks! If healthcare workers go without masks because every ordinary joe stocked up on masks and toilet paper, that means that healthcare workers get infected and become the spreaders, which is the opposite of "containing".
Healthcare workers aren't getting masks through the same supply chains as regular people; they are getting them through hospitals. If it truly was the case that hospitals were being outbid for supplies by private entities, that is a commerce regulatory problem arguably out of scope of the CDC. The government should have bitten the bullet and passed a law to forcibly route material to hospitals and / or eminent domained existing stockpiles for sale by companies or individuals and given them to hospitals. It is not the CDC's job to handle supply chain management in these contexts. If the CDC would like to get involved, it should be encouraging people to give masks to health care workers because they work and because health care workers should take priority. This preserves their credibility and shifts the responsibility to act onto the entities that should be bearing it: the president and congress.
If covid-19 were containable, then average people don't need masks. This isn't new territory: we've contained infectious diseases before, like SARS and ebola, and average Joe didn't need a mask then, either.
The CDC (and frankly every major government in the world) believed that covid-19 could be contained, and that no major outbreak would happen inside their country. This was incorrect. But if you hold this assumption, the CDC made the correct recommendation: N95 masks, properly worn, are the masks that protect against covid-19, and average people don't need them.
If covid-19 were contained why would there be a mask shortage? Transmission in the general population seems necessary to cause a nationwide shortage in first place.
>The CDC (and frankly every major government in the world) believed that covid-19 could be contained
There's plenty of photos from asian countries where mask use was immediate, wide spread, and effective.
We are now inching towards the political reality of the situation, but that is essentially what the CDC and various hospitals tried to do.
New York went to the federal government to get masks and was told to pound sand. They then ordered them from Canada and were once again impeded by the federal government[1]. So now you are in a situation where your the hospital supply chain is now gone, and you are forced to buy masks for medical workers in the marketplace, and you are now facing the real possibility that the general public may buy up all the masks before they can contain and eliminate the virus.
The CDC may have been acting in it's own best interest in the face of a federal branch who refused to believe that the virus was a big issue. If the CDC truly believed they had time to contain and eliminate the virus, I can see how telling people to not stock up on masks may have been a good idea at the time.
If you insist I'm happy to go hunting for studies, but let's remember that the CDC from the start was advocating that people reserve masks for healthcare workers. If they didn't believe that masks worked, why would they do that?
I do insist. You're making the claim that WHO / CDC knew that masks work. So, let's see the evidence that you think they had.
> If they didn't believe that masks worked, why would they do that?
Because a healthcare professional stuck in a room with symptomatic people is a different situation to a member of the public walking around.
Especially because HCPs are trained to use masks, they use them in combination with other PPE and routine handwashing; their PPE is made to standards and tested to make sure it complies with those standards; HCPs are audited on their use of handwashing and PPE.
