[notahacker]

Let's make the exceptionally charitable assumption that you are asking this question in good faith...

Nobody that listened to public health experts ever "hated" masks. But initially, they didn't rush out to buy masks because the advice was to prioritise isolating the infected, social distancing for everyone else and clean hands to avoid [overestimated risk of] contact transmission, and not to rely on masks to protect you from infected people because there was no evidence they would offer that protection (the only masks they had reasonable confidence might work were far too limited in supply to stop it on a population level)

The recommendation changed (pretty quickly, based on stronger evidence of aerosol transmission and asymptomatic transmission and COVID being sufficiently widespread to make altogether avoiding contagious people unrealistic) to suggesting that although social distancing was recommended because cloth masks alone were insufficiently effective at preventing infection, masks were better than nothing and so on a population scale wearing them in public places would slow infection rates. At this point - even though I'd already had the infection - I started wearing a mask to the supermarket because apart from it being logical, it was also required to enter. It wasn't much of an imposition, and subsequent evidence largely supports the reduced transmission risk.

I think the question works better in reverse. When was it you switched from being angry at the CDC for telling you not to bother with the masks because they couldn't altogether prevent infection so you were better off avoiding people with COVID altogether to being angry at the CDC for recommending masks in public places to somewhat reduce risk of infection? What was the scientific evidence that lead you to change your mind?

[xdennis]

You're re-writing history. The existence of airborne diseases has been known for hundreds of years, and masks have been used for more than a hundred.

In Asia they were using masks from the start, just like they did with the original SARS.

But with this second SARS doctors/WHO were saying that surgical masks had no effect and that Asians don't know what they're doing.

Then, masks not only had no effect, they were bad for you.

Then, all of a sudden masks were good. Cloth masks were good too. And you had doctors showing you how to make masks out of t-shirts.

Then masks were so good you had to wear them by force.

Then cloth masks had no effect. Then surgical masks had no effect. Only N95 and above were good.

It was absolute roller coaster, and with every turn (excused with “the science has changed”) doctors were hammering a nail into the coffin of public acceptance of science.

[notahacker]

I love the irony of being lectured about "rewriting history" from someone arguing that the WHO adopted the position that "Asians don't know what they're doing" and "masks not only had no effect, they were bad for you"...

[Izkata]

> The recommendation changed (pretty quickly, based on stronger evidence of aerosol transmission and

This is not only backwards, it is hilariously so: Aerosol transmission was only partially accepted a year or more after the mask push. People still resist it even now. The whole reason masks were supposed to work was the assumption that it was entirely droplet transmission.

The people who believed it was aerosol spread that first year were the ones against masking, because the virus is too small to be stopped by cloth masks.

[notahacker]

Funny that, because I can find references to likely aerosol transmission and the assumption that cloth masks would reduce aerosol transmission to a small degree in the early 2020 minutes of the body that later recommended mask mandates (on the basis reducing stuff to a small degree is important when reducing pandemic spread...) in my country

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Not all aerosol particles are the same size, and particles don't have to be smaller than holes they pass through for a grid of fibre to obstruct a significant proportion of them. The change in guidance wasn't a conclusion masks were a panacea, they were a reflection that even a small degree of protection was better than no protection in a situation where existing measures weren't slowing its spread fast enough.

The people who were against masking on principle by and large didn't care what degree it reduced it by, because they just didn't want to be told to wear masks.