Let's not forget that the German government resorts to "alternative facts" since the pandemic began just as they see fit. When we had nor masks available last march, they said "masks are useless" two months later they were mandatory "because they are the best thing we have". Recently, a post by the government on Facebook said "AstraZeneca gave us one of the best vaccines ever" just as people started to cancel their appointments when they saw that their vaccine was going to be from AstraZeneca. Now they pause vaccination with it. Yeah.

I'm not aware what exactly the German government has said in the past w.r.t mask usage. However, governments claiming mask usage was not required near the start of the pandemic followed by them later requiring people to use masks was actually an understandable decision on their part from what I've understood of the situation as it unveiled.

At the beginning of the pandemic, it was believed that the virus was using droplet transmission alone. In such a scenario, surgical masks, for the general public, would only be required in people who were sick to prevent transmission and N95 masks would primarily be required by health care workers. Considering the mask shortages faced in many countries at the time due to panic buying, the communications made by governments to the public w.r.t the benefits of masks make sense from a cost benefit perspective since it would guarantee that the people who needed the masks the most (medical workers and sick people) would receive them and reduce the spread of the virus.

Fast forward 2 months later, airborne transmission as well as asymptomatic transmission of the virus were both confirmed independently in several labs. This would mean that the prior strategy of only using surgical masks on sick people wouldn't really work well anymore. In the meanwhile, the availability of masks was much higher due to increased production. Hence, to reduce the risks of airborne and asymptomatic transmissions, governments released advisories asking all people to wear masks.

Governments didn't say that a mask wasn't required. They said masks didn't help (presumably to prevent a run on them). It's definitely an understandable decision, but there's a big problem with it.

When officials start doing this, you have to play a sort of game where you try to figure out why they said something and what it signifies. You have to try to divine the state of reality and figure out what to do based on what you think they were trying to get people to do (there's a lot of uncertainty in this).

By that point, by definition, trust in the person (and probably the institution) is gone, and we don't have a lot of trust in institutions to spare.

Indeed. I'm quite furious that my government (Finland) ordered such a "mask assessment" from a retired professor, in order to reduce the political pressure caused by PPE shortages.

Now anti-maskers and other covid deniers are citing that report: "don't do anything, even the government research says it is useless".

I was well aware even by March that masks were the way to go. It was a simple lie, by e.g. the Surgeon General, in order to try to save masks (while they didn't even start ramping production of them!)

But of course if a government official lies to you about your own health risks then that has very high costs, much higher than whatever masks were saved. They could have just said "masks are useful, but you need to be trained to use them correctly, they are difficult to manipulate, etc. and they are very scarce so sadly let's stay home and let doctors and nurses use them".

I might sound as if I'm upset at that, because I REALLY am. I hate when governments lie, even if they are "white lies", and I hate when they treat their constituents as kids.

The lesson from 1918 for public health is that if you lie to or mislead the public once, even if by accident, you have reduced credibility in the future and are less likely to have the public listen to you. The authorities didn't learn this lesson and instead misled the public for 2 months, then did a 180 and expected people to blindly listen to them again.

As a citizen, would you trust the government if they did yet another 180, after demonstrating to you 2x that they didn't actually know what they were talking about?

> As a citizen, would you trust the government if they did yet another 180, after demonstrating to you 2x that they didn't actually know what they were talking about?

One of the many things that I've learned from this pandemic is that for better or worse, the answer to this question is emphatically yes for a significant percentage of the population. Many folks will indeed blindly trust whatever they are currently being told by people they believe are authorities or experts. At times this may be a good thing, but I personally lean toward thinking it's not good overall. And as you correctly point out, another big chunk of people will understandably lose faith in institutions and authorities that either were wrong or simply lied, which I'd argue likely causes significant long term damage to the healthy functioning of a society.

Even if it was believed that sick people wearing mask would be enough, there will be asymptomatic infections as well as the social stigma of wearing a mask if only sick people do it. The only way that enough people wear masks is to have everyone do it.

> Considering the mask shortages faced in many countries at the time due to panic buying, the communications made by governments to the public w.r.t the benefits of masks make sense from a cost benefit perspective since it would guarantee that the people who needed the masks the most (medical workers and sick people) would receive them and reduce the spread of the virus.

The government lying to its people is never acceptable. Also, there was plenty of time to ramp up mask production when the virus was spreading in China and later Italy. Taiwan did this successfully, why did supposedly more developed countries fail so badly at ensuring adequate mask supply?

Truth does not work that way. If you have to prioritize masks for something, regulate that market down - by simply making it a crime to deal with them without offering them to the government first.

Governments followed conflicting WHO recommendations and trying not to create a PPE crisis for health workers.

And still nobody bothered to check what kind of trend-changes are visible in the epidemiological curves around the time of masking.

People never look at "date of death" or "infection date" all they care about is "reporting date" - and every newspaper out there will show you the effects of government measures on "reporting".

> When we had nor masks available last march, they said "masks are useless" two months later they were mandatory "because they are the best thing we have"

Wow, this is exactly how the masks thing played out in Poland. I wasn't aware that this "makes are useless" followed by "masks are mandatory" (with Poland together with a ban on selling them on the biggest platform, big like Amazon is in the US - Allegro).

And now here in Poland we are at the "AstraZeneca vaccine is safe" and we are vaccinating with it, I wonder how many EU countries still use it besides Poland.

Pretty much the same thing happened here in New Zealand too, FWIW. I understand it was WHO providing this advice (i.e. no evidence regarding the effectiveness of masks etc) at the time so perhaps the German government is not entirely at fault. I know that once the WHO changed their tune (following research comparing countries who had policies on masks and those who didn't) the New Zealand government eventually got round to making masks mandatory but even then only in certain places.

Wow, same in Switzerland. They told people to keep using fully packed trains and buses and that masks weren't necessary. Couple weeks later, when masks were well available they suddenly made it mandatory to wear them on public transport.

I had to double check that I'm reading about Germany, not Poland.

Also, “closing the borders is absolutely out of the question”.

To be fair, country borders in the EU are not that useful for containing anything. Earlier and better travel restrictions - both cross countries and between different areas in one country - would have been useful though.

Disputed by the WHO until it was much too late.

Every country in the world except South Korea, HK, China and Taiwan failed to recognise the importance of masks at the beginning only to later change their minds.

No. They willfully misrepresented their importance so that civilians didn’t buy them before the hospitals could. They were unprepared to respond to the increase in demand due to their complete incompetence. Anyone using a shred of logic saw through the “masks don’t work” insanity.

There was a government organized massive-buy back of masks by china in the early stages of the pandemic via marshalled parallel traders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_trading_in_Hong_Kong

Globalization came to bite the hand that easily gave production out of hand for single-use items.

They didnt say its useless because it was true but because they wanted to reserve them for healthcare people. They did the same in France.

I mean some people were looting pharmacies for chloroquine so lying at that point on masks is almost a security issue..

> - billions per week of half assed lockdown vs a few billion more for high quality timeley vaccine delivieries of the good stuff --- of course they chose the lockdown

This is not the issue. A few billion would not have magically solved the problems with vaccine deliveries. The EU has contracts with pharmaceutical companies which these companies are not honoring sometimes intentionally so.

AstraZeneca for example doesn't have the production capacity to supply what they promised to the EU even if the Belgian site was working properly. That's the result of the EU audit. These companies are betting that the consequence of them not fullfiling their contractual obligation will be insignificant compared to their benefits. As these companies remain hugely profitable, their production issue is not linked to difficulty accessing capital. It is naive to assume things would have gone differently if the EU was paying more. It would just have meant more profits for them.

The heart of the issue is that contraty to the USA or China the EU is weak so companies don't hesitate trampling it. If a Chinese company did to China what AstraZeneca is doing to the EU, the CCP would take control of it and its CEO would never be seen again. Meanwhile, the USA has little qualm using its legal system to punish companies defying the state to much. Congressional inquiries are not fun.

Your claims are off-topic and irrelevant with respect to the safety of this vaccine.

Any potential safety issues with vaccines must be investigated, otherwise there will be a huge problem with trust in vaccines and in the regulator. There's already a huge problem with vaccine skepticism, and vaccine fanatics are making things worse.

Suspending vaccinations for side effects that happen in 1 in 300000 cases is not medically reasonable. Even if all these cases are due to the vaccine, not vaccinating gives a worse result than vaccinating so it’s the dumb thing to do.

Which is what WHO and EMA are saying. But now that there’s panic, they’re not relevant anymore.

When was the WHO ever relevant wrt Covid 19 though? Their advice has been contradictory. They gave guidance before knowing whether masks would help, and later had to change it. They gave guidance about the transmissibility of the virus, and then changed it. Not knowing whether something is true does not stop them from speaking with authority. To put icing on the cake, they perform a puppet show for the CCP and then declare their confidence in understanding the origin of the virus. They say a lot of definitive things without knowing anything definitive.

Is this Germany or elsewhere? Sounds as bad as France

I'm very disappoint finding out that the minister of health is just a lobbyist with no medical background. He seems to care a lot about suing people who talk about his villa than doing actual work.

The masks don’t work lie was pretty much global.