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Comment by Rule35 | Hacker News Reader

> You are looking at this with hindsight.

I wasn't when I criticized it the day I heard it. It was obviously not right.

> Later on aerosole scientists made the correct analysis that the more important path was to prevent the small droplets from infected people spreading over shirt distances

(I quoted this just because I laughed at 'shirt distances' in this context.)

> Was it malicious? Unlikely.

Was using his authority to say something absolutely unproven and implausible malicious? Or just extremely obviously going to have negative consequences which he ignored?

> the trump administration [...] Fauci and the CDC and the scientists are not the fall guy here.

Fauci and the WHO both go out of their way to say things that they can't know. Sure, Trump is also awful, but that's not relevant to our "scientists" overstepping. At this point Fauci is a politician. Better than some, but still.

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You are missing the point. The CDC and WHO believed (incorrectly) that N95 masks did not provide any benefit to a healthy population when the number of infections were concentrated in healthcare facilities. You can't pick and choose only part of the message and claim maliciousness. The whole perspective is important.

I also was arguing with people on Facebook weeks before the CDC and who changed their position and I predicted masks would become mandatory. But that was my personal opinion and not proof that Fauci acted in bad faith. You and are I anecdotal data points with no responsibility to anybody . Nobody got it "right" but the scientists were at least putting the effort in the right direction instead of right wing politicians.

Typing on a mobile without my glasses so autocorrect will have its day!

> claim maliciousness.

To be fair, malicious was someone else's word. It's close enough I ran with it, but perfidy and incompetence might be better. We're trusting the guy to be a chief scientist and he's making political statements.

> You can't pick and choose only part of the message and

I'm not. I'm picking on the whole message as being something he could not have known and thus was damaging to claim.

> But that was my personal opinion and not proof that Fauci acted in bad faith.

His job is to not say unsupportable things so that we can base policy off of his words. What is it other than bad faith to conflate your politics and your job?

> You and are I anecdotal data points with no responsibility to anybody

Speak for yourself. I've got family.

> Nobody got it "right" but the scientists were at least putting the effort in the right direction instead of right wing politicians.

Nobody made him fight the lab leak hypothesis, etc. He's borrowing partisan fights. The WHO hasn't officially investigated so it can't know, and if it doesn't know, he doesn't know.

Also, just fyi, there's no such thing as right wing anymore. The term means royalist. Left means communist, which there sadly is no lack of. Perhaps breaking free of these antiquated labels will give some clarity.

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