I caught this over at Daily Kos:
Top infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci sat down for an interview with The Street on Friday to explain what was going on in those early months, when government professionals, under the White House direction, began to give out what is clearly incorrect medical information about masks and their function to the general public. It turns out, our country’s lack of preparation for this pandemic, mixed in with our country’s completely incompetent and narcissistic leadership, meant that officials like Fauci felt compelled to tell half truths as damage control.
First, Dr. Fauci was asked the burning question that anyone reading this site has known the answer to for about four months now: are masks important to wear when you leave your home? “Masks are not 100% protective. However, they certainly are better than not wearing a mask. Both to prevent you, if you happen to be a person who may feel well, but has an asymptomatic infection that you don’t even know about, to prevent you from infecting someone else. But also, it can protect you a certain degree, not a hundred percent, in protecting you from getting infected from someone who, either is breathing, or coughing, or sneezing, or singing or whatever it is in which the droplets or the aerosols go out. So masks work.”
But why oh why did government health officials say it wasn’t important in February? Dr. Fauci, a considerably more diplomatic person than myself gives this explanation: “Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people, namely the health care workers who were brave enough to put themselves in harm’s way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected.”
Everything I have read about standard pandemic response is that it is vital for public health officials to tell the truth. If they don’t, they lose credibility and nobody will believe them when they give the public health guidance.
Can you see the problem here? By lying to the pubic instead of saying “we don’t have enough medical masks to go around so please just make a cloth mask or use a scarf or bandana” from the very beginning we might not be dealing with this nonsense where people think masks are some kind of political plot. Instead, they very adamantly insisted that masks were bad and would actually cause you to get the virus, even though they knew that wasn’t so. It was a major error.
I started writing about the virus in January before it we even knew it was here. And in the earliest news reports from China and Japan and South Korea, everyone was wearing masks. I knew from the beginning that all those people who had already gone through SARS understood that it was important. And also, it is just common sense.
I’ve been wearing a mask when I go out since February.
I understand the pressure these public health experts were under from Trump. We’ve watched them squirm through the last four months trying to keep the Manchild appeased while trying desperately trying to warn the public and give them guidance about what they can do. But I think the mask thing was an unforced error they did on their own. All the TV experts went right along with it. And it hurt their credibility right out of the gate.
It’s not the only thing, unfortunately. Their approach to the protests was similarly off base. Obviously, I totally agree with the goals of the demonstrations but there is no doubt that it was risky to go out in big crowds even if it was mitigated by masks and being outdoors. I don’t think the public health experts were adamant enough about the proper protocols for doing that which includes getting tested and isolating from people who are older or vulnerable. I certainly didn’t hear very many TV experts saying that and instead it was all about how Black Lives Matter is a public health issue too — which is true of course, but completely irrelevant to the fact that we are still in the midst of the pandemic. Even if the protesters were young and healthy, which most of them seemed to be, a whole lot of Black and Hispanic people, as well as older white people, were at risk of getting sick if these people didn’t follow proper protocols which they weren’t even being told to do.
Clearly, experts were in the right to argue for the goals and purposes of the protests and express their solidarity with the movement. And I don’t think you could have stopped those protests even if you wanted to which I certainly did not. But it was very depressing to see the public health experts punt once again and not be straight with the American people about the risks and the proper way to deal with them. I think they lost another bit of their credibility from that.
Needless to say, Trump used that as the excuse he needed to start holding his rallies again and it’s probably going to make a bunch of people sick. He probably would have anyway so I don’t hold that against the experts. But we’d all be better off they just did their jobs and told it like it was.
There are enough lies and fudging of the facts coming from the Trump administration officials We can handle the truth from the public health experts, whether from the government or the professionals who appear on our TV. We desperately need it.