| > 2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them. This is the most probable explanation for governments around the world saying that masks are “Absolutely useless” (literal quote) until June 2020. It is lying-as-a-form-of-governance. It’s extremely detrimental to credibility: From that point, anything new a government said can be taken as a probable lie, since they lie as a routine operation of their job, just for practicability, because it’s easier than explaining. The common answer was “Doctors say masks are useless, why don’t you believe science.” > I wish more people thought critically and had healthy criticism The Covid response has killed the permission of citizen to doubt science, even though it is widely recognized that “science” had been used to make people do the opposite of what’s in their interest. You can’t both admit they told people not to wear masks at one point AND ask them to believe that they can trust the vaccine. Newspapers had to be in on the lie, social media had to prevent critical thinking for the duration of it: It’s extremely damaging to public health. I’m surprised that individual governments didn’t even think about “Let’s not participate to a blatant lie, let’s tell people we don’t have masks and they should not buy one to let them available to hospitals, but tell them they should wear anything they have at home.” No government used the pedagogy method. They all opted for lie-as—a-policy, and-pretend-it’s-science. |
They probably thought about the decent method, but unfortunately solidarity in most if not all societies has eroded so far that large swaths of the population would have gone and scalped ffp2 masks from wherever they could get them anyway. Case in point: toilet paper crisis.
Governments are in a lose-lose situation and have been for decades now. Appealing to anything involving solidarity with others does not work any more, and yet solidarity is the core of our society model - and there is no (easy) way of fixing this, short of a communist revolution and that won't happen either.