[jsharp]

I get where you're coming from but the fact remains that experts had strong suspicions and beliefs that masks, and in particular N95 masks would give protection against the virus. And they did not communicate this with the public because they were afraid of shortages for essential workers.

Experts were deliberately "shading facts" or leaving out important context to influence the public to act a certain way.

That's really not much different than lying! I would argue it is lying but others might disagree.

The end result was that for at least a few weeks Americans went around believing masks don't work. I vividly remember reading these reports and telling friends "well y'know they aren't recommending masks I guess they don't work to protect you". I wasn't alone all the people in my friend group came to the same conclusion.

And yes the experts are smart! They can hide behind "well we never explicitly said they didn't work!", or "we didn't have all the data and didn't feel confident recommending them"

But they were not transparent about what they knew! And the reason they weren't being transparent was to protect mask supplies for medical personnel.

People can hide behind the legalese and lawyerly defense of "well it wasn't technically a lie!" but to many normal people like myself that's just laughable! The intent was to mislead the public! Most people just consider that lying...