Hacker News Reader

Comment by sixothree | Hacker News Reader

> I still can’t comprehend why someone like Fauci who said in no uncertain terms not to wear a mask

I thought the general assumption was they were afraid of dramatically affecting supply for the people who were risking their lives taking care of sick patients.

View on HN

The hard part for me, was in the same breath of saying that, they said 'All health care workers need to wear a N95 or better rated mask.'. It was a clear lie to mislead the public, and so transparent it could not possibly accomplish the task of avoiding hoarding, while also torpedoing any trust anyone paying attention might have had in the CDC.

That set of statements probably cost almost as many (or more) lives as the (very misleading) 'no such thing as asymptomatic spread' comments from WHO.

The opposite of saying "yes, everyone should wear a mask" is not "no, nobody should wear a mask, it doesn't help". It's extremely common in public statements for authorities, especially in crisis management, to avoid saying something simple because they know it to be false but at the same time they can't acknowledge that it's false (because that would endanger their efforts). All Fauci and his commission should have done is avoid giving a statement on the matter while they're working on ensuring health care providers do receive their masks.

If you're in a position of authority and you DO come out and say something you know to be false then don't be surprised at having to deal with long running consequences for making such a statement.

And in the process lost a significant portion of trust in public health measures. Saying the don't work is very different than saying they are short in supply and blocking sales temporarily or something. Second one is much easier to reverse without teaching public to second guess every public health directive from there on.

Did they say they don't work or did they say they weren't recommending people wear them?

> On February 19, Fauci told USA Today, “In the United States, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask.” On March 8, as scientists estimated tens of thousands of undetected Covid cases in the US, Fauci told 60 Minutes, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.”

You can decide for yourself, but to me he was pretty clearly trying to make people think masks don't work masks don't work while leaving a small sliver of plausible deniability.

This whole article makes a compelling case that he's really just as much of a calculating politician as anyone in Washington https://www.thedriftmag.com/the-case-against-fauci/. And he's done a great job branding himself because most people seem to think the opposite, until you look at him closer.

The problem is the premise that government officials can ethically lie to the public to do things such as protecting a supply chain. So what else are they lying about that they haven’t yet revealed? The trust relationship between people and government is broken.

This, exactly this. And the guidelines re: masks changed pretty quickly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com