[VLM]

To extend the factual data, benzene costs about twice as much as ethanol does (to one sig fig) so its obviously a contamination or production mistake as opposed to a money saving opportunity. Wet ethanol is going to be a little bit cheaper to make than contaminated dry ethanol, so its a mistake or supply demand thing.

As such there is little point in the FDA doing a recall; I thought hand sanitizer went out of style around the time masks came into style. Use by the general public of both seems to have virtually no effect on long term population transmission rate. "Feel good" "keep them busy" activities.

[oasisbob]

Nature news has a nice article from earlier this year rounding up some of the data and changes in recommendations on the spread of the coronavirus through fomites:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4

Seems like an easy case where hindsight is 20/20.

[dimal]

Except that it never seemed to make any sense, even at the time. Early on, we were seeing cases double every three days. It seemed extremely unlikely that that level of transmission could come from surfaces alone. The most reasonable early guess should have been that it's airborne. Yet experts were telling people to wash their hands and NOT wear masks. Maybe they were conflating "no evidence of airborne transmission" with "evidence of no airborne transmission"? And we were told not to wear masks, yet we also needed to make sure that health care workers had PPE. But if masks were bad for us, why were they necessary for them? Maybe they wanted to conserve limited supply for the front line?

[paulmd]

Fauci more or less came out and said that the CDC's public recommendations at that time were not based on the science available to them, but were an action-driven measure to preserve the available PPE supplies for healthcare workers, as in the depths of the early pandemic they were dangerously depleted.

To put it another way, they lied to the public to keep the masks where they could do the most good.

https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-confirms-public-health-experts-...

You can equivocate about what is "enough evidence" that masks are effective and whether that threshold had been reached yet (you can always collect more evidence, but when people are dying it's not bad to make some guesses that it probably is airborne/aerosol and masks will help). But the Surgeon-General went as far as to claim that the science showed that masks were not effective. That the science was in and it showed that masks did not prevent transmission among the general public - which is different from "not enough evidence to conclusively say yet".

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/29/health/face-masks-coronavirus...

The USG's actions here were medically unethical - they misrepresented the benefits and dangers of an intervention in order to manipulate the patient's behavior. Maybe it's justifiable under the circumstances but at best it's shady.

I think under a different president it probably would have gone differently. But it doesn't change the responsibilities of the medical professionals involved here - you don't get to abdicate your ethical vows just because the president tells you to.

[harry8]

It's just so incredibly bad. People stop believing the CDC. I have. Without solid evidence what the CDC say is not something to take account of. I can't really get too upset about anti-vaxxers believing what I consider to be dangerous (to all of us) nonsense.

At some point you can't understand all the evidence for some given proposition. That's a different point for each of us depending on what we've studied, the proposition etc. At some point we have to rely on some kind of authority in the belief that they won't tell lies because if they did there would be dire consequences for the people involved. Even when we check the evidence we don't personally check the lab to see if the evidence is faked.

Anti-vaxxers and their ilk look at current medical experts as the authority and call bullshit. If I can't make an argument from evidence to them because it won't be persuasive to that individual all I can do is say, well yes, but not /this/ time. They wouldn't lie again this time like they did before. But they would if it suited their purpose, they've shown that. So I don't think they have an ulterior purpose this time. Not super convincing is it? So we're left with attacking the anti-vaxxer "science" as BS. From evidence. Which can be difficult to make convincing to some people. Meh. Anti-vaxxers is just one example in one field that shows the effect. There are so many. "They'd even lie to us about how to be safe in a damn pandemic!" Yeah they would. They did.

I'll put an estimate on the marginal impact on loss of life from that masks don't work lie. More than one life lost that would not have been if the lie was not told. More than one is sufficient. Feel free to tighten the estimate to how much more than one.

Fauci, yep. I'd cross the road to avoid him which he wouldn't care about at all as he soaks up the adulation he so clearly craves. It's easy to criticize from the comfort of obscurity under zero pressure compared to what he must have faced but that doesn't mean we must keep silent. To hell with him. He has no business remaining in public life making and influencing decisions because he is a liar of the worst kind. Disagree with me by all means, but if /you/ see that as an attack on the Democrats in favor of Republicans (or Russia, or China) you're not much better yourself when it comes to undermining the credibility of genuine expertise.

[vkou]

> Yet experts were telling people to wash their hands and NOT wear masks.

Experts were telling people that wearing non-n95 masks is unlikely to protect you from other sick people.

They are still correct on that point. You primarily wear cloth masks to protect other people, not to protect yourself.

[mannerheim]

Up until around April or so, the CDC was explicitly saying they did not recommend the general public wear masks. For example, here's a tweet from the end of February:

https://twitter.com/cdcgov/status/1233134710638825473

[vkou]

Please read the tweet you linked:

> CDC does not currently recommend the use of facemasks to help prevent novel #coronavirus.

Please note the emphasized word.

The CDC is not saying don't wear masks. The CDC is not saying masks fail to prevent the spread of the virus. The CDC is saying that you wearing a mask is not likely to protect you from catching it.

If you are reading that tweet and interpreting that as "don't wear masks", you are not putting enough emphasis on protecting the people around you.

[mannerheim]

Except 1. preventing the spread of coronavirus IS preventing it and 2. public health officials explicitly told people not to wear masks:

> “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!” tweeted Dr. Jerome Adams, the U.S. Surgeon General, on Feb. 29. “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” In an interview with Fox & Friends, Adams said that wearing a mask can even increase your risk of getting the virus. “Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.”

https://time.com/5794729/coronavirus-face-masks/

[plank_time]

It’s not incorrect. N95 works. Saying it is unlikely is a flat out lie. And the absurdity of saying that is what broke the trust of the government officials early on the pandemic. It’s a crime for them to have said that.

[darkwater]

There is this nugget of wisdom in that article

> Nevertheless, scientists warn against drawing absolute conclusions. “Just because viability can’t be shown, it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t contagious virus there at some point,” says epidemiologist Ben Cowling at the University of Hong Kong.

So, some actions might actually be "feel good" ones but also completely dismissing a possible way of infection is not that wise.

[tzs]

> As such there is little point in the FDA doing a recall; I thought hand sanitizer went out of style around the time masks came into style.

There are people who have occasion to use hand sanitizer for reasons unrelated to COVID.

[rarefied_tomato]

The benzene is the money-saving opportunity. Per GP it's added to avoid a costly drying process. The cost of removing the trace benzene would nullify those savings.

[pushrax]

Though 96% ethanol via cheap distillation is fine for hand sanitizer, so the only real explanation is they're leveraging existing supply chains (as described) or have made a mistake.

[forgotmypw17]

If you wait for someone else to protect you from life's dangers, you'll be waiting a long time.

Personally, I've decided to remove most "products" from my life, as much as possible, and I feel much better for it.

[asveikau]

Anecdotally, hand sanitizer is quite popular in places I come across in San Francisco. Some businesses require a squirt of it at entry.

[fho]

It's basically mandatory in every grocery store in Germany ... and every other store follows suit.

[asveikau]

Even not in a pandemic, the grocery store thing especially makes sense. You'll be touching products that will make it into somebody else's mouth. (Hopefully with a wash in between, but you never know.)

[hedora]

Hand sanitizer drys out skin by removing the protective lipid barrier.

It has not been shown to decrease disease transmission, and there’s good reason to think it increases disease transmission by letting oozy stuff pass in and out of skin.

Put another way, would you rather eat:

- whatever microbes are on a stranger’s hand (probably picked up at the store, and mostly non-pathogenic)

- or whatever toxins are in the hand sanitizer, along with whatever bodily fluids seeped out of said stranger’s dry, cracked skin?

Covid might change the tradeoff a bit, but I’m skeptical.

[TedDoesntTalk]

Where I live in the US, I've never seen any business require hand sanitizer use.

[aarongolliver]

(USA, pre-pandemic) I've seen "mandatory" hand sanitizer use exactly once, at a camp which had some nasty norovirus outbreaks (which was misery, especially I'm sure for people who had to fight over shared bathrooms).

Now I see it at the entrance of most businesses / by checkout registers.

[wkearney99]

In a small sampling of places I've been in the MD metro DC area it's not uncommon they have a dispenser at the door, prominently placed to indicate suggested use. A few places have personnel dispensing it, some in a manner that does not suggest it being optional.

[dividedbyzero]

In the major metropolitan area in Germany where I live, I've seen this only once at a hairdresser last summer. None of the grocery stores I've been to has required this (though many now offer it)

[SilverRed]

You could bring your own known safe bottle. I really doubt they would mind as long as they see you use something.