[0xy]

The CDC did not say "don't buy masks because healthcare professionals need them". The CDC falsely claimed they were not effective.

This false narrative persists even today.

How many thousands died because they were told by an authority masks don't work?

Your point of view seems to suggest that the ends justify the means. I ask you how many deaths are an acceptable amount of collateral damage to protect the health system's access to masks. 1,000? 5,000? 50,000?

[wrycoder]

It persists, because procedure/surgical masks do virtually nothing to stop SARS2. [0] I won't even mention cloth masks.

In sum, of the 14 RCTs that have tested the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses, three suggest, but do not provide any statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis, that masks might be useful. The other eleven suggest that masks are either useless—whether compared with no masks or because they appear not to add to good hand hygiene alone—or actually counterproductive. Of the three studies that provided statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis that was not contradicted within the same study, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than hand hygiene alone, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than nothing, and one found that cloth masks were less effective than surgical masks.

N95 are better, but those are not generally available to civilians.

[0] https://www.city-journal.org/do-masks-work-a-review-of-the-e...

[CoryG89]

Umm, perhaps I'm mistaken, but I'm fairly certain that, at least in the US, it's always been fairly easy to obtain N95 masks, up until the pandemic. I realized I had a box of them lying around which my ex-girlfriend had purchased for painting.

[wrycoder]

Yeah, so did I. I use them for sanding and sweeping.

But early in 2020, they disappeared off the shelves. Amazon, in particular, only sold them to medical professionals. Same thing, if you went directly to 3M.

I was able to buy a few more at about ten times the usual price.

A few are available at reasonable prices now, but it's still very limited. When I wear a mask, it's an N95. You can dry them out and reuse them - SARS2 is very fragile.