Wouldn't it have just been easier to explain it than to lie to the public and then continue to deny and defend the lying after it's already been exposed?
The CDC may not have said those words, but the surgeon general absolutely did. There was plenty of conflicting messaging around the effectiveness of cloth masks as well.
Yep, already mentioned that USSG said that. Note that he never comes up in these discussions as someone who lied though. No one I know seemed to even note what he said. Everyone seems (correctly) more fixated on CDC/NIH which were dominating the public messaging.
We got mixed messages. Some didn't offer nuance, others did. The conflation of messages boiled down to the simplest, and misattributed.
We've also had the CDC telling us the vaccines are safe and effective, when neither are strictly true. They may be less dangerous than getting a severe case of COVID, but they don't confer immunity, and they don't stop you from spreading it, in direct contradiction to other statements they've made.
Is it any wonder that people misremember who exactly told them that masks did or don't work, and when they heard it?
I don't know if we can call it outright lying, but going from "you don't need a mask" to basically saying you shouldn't be allowed in public without one seems like either incompetence or corruption on the CDC's part. You can argue semantics all you want to try to justify their behavior, but that is what people see and it doesn't increase trust or confidence in them as an organization.
Yes, people see that because they think authority figures have some Magic Answer Box that they’re pulling or withholding answers from, rather than the reality which is that our understanding of the situation was shifting day by day.
The Magic Answer Box people are demanding that they be trusted with nuance and detail and yet continuously demonstrate Magic Answer Box thinking in the face of nuanced and detailed information.