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?
"Vaccine is safe" does not and has never meant "has zero possible adverse events."
"Vaccine is effective" does not and has never meant "confers 100% protection from infection."
The vaccines remain both safe and effective in the same way that e.g. Tylenol is safe and effective. If you want the fully nuanced definition of these statements mean in the Tylenol case or the vaccine case, you can literally look up the data from the clinical trials and see it. Of course your rebuttal to this will be, "well, I can find X dataset with real world evidence of Y claim" and I'll say: well, there's a reason real world evidence is (counterintuitively, given the name) not considered to be very good evidence in pharma world. That's because it's incredibly hard to isolate variables in analysis of real world data, even assuming the data exists in an analyzable format (which it generally doesn't - also contrary to most people's expectations).
Hmm no, it's no wonder that people misremember who exactly told them what. We have a shitshow of a media ecosystem and you have "contrarians" like yourself who are pumping nonstop garbage like "CDC said X" into it when CDC did not, in fact, say X.
Mistakes were certainly made and everyone was learning as we went, but your line of inquiry actually points pretty solidly away from the solutions we actually need: 1) there should NEVER be PPE shortages in the richest country on earth, 2) there should RARELY be testing capacity shortages and sitting presidents should NEVER deliberately slow down pathogen testing, and 3) there should be much better data infrastructure that allows us to understand all of these things in real time.
Some blame for each of these lays at CDC feet, some at FDA, some at NIH, and so on, but fixing these requires an entirely different conversation than the one we're having.
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.