[Guvante]

Yes mistakes were made. The mask kerfuffle was a black eye on the CDC 100%.

But calling it overall insane and pretending everyone was ignorant at the time only makes sense if you are ignoring everything that wasn't eventually confirmed true.

[Gibbon1]

Felt to me the CDC wanted to appear competent and authoritative while being caught flat footed[1] with something they hadn't dealt with before.

Me I tried to figure out what mitigations were needed and decided it wasn't knowable so did them all until the picture became clearer.

[1] CDC thought the next big pandemic was going to be influenza. And then got hit with something different. But then executed as if it was. Bonus for about 50 years they didn't fund any research on how influenza and other respiratory viruses spread either.