The CDC is full of doctors. Who, when asked "does <x> help against <y>?" always think of bloodletting or lead-against-malaria and answer "no", unless they have empirical evidence (studies) rejecting this so-called "Null Hypothesis".
That approach wasn't particularly smart in this case. But it's so fundamental to medicine today, precisely because the alternative killed an untold number of people over centuries, that people steeped in it were not able to overcome these priors.
The idea of this having been a strategy to ration limited supplies is rather widespread, obviously. And if you look at a timeline, you will notice that it was mentioned in the mainstream press in the very first articles reporting about the guidance on masks.
So I believe what happened actually went the other way around: experts were looking for arguments to support their guidance against mask usage. And because the argument above doesn't satisfy many people, they came up with their own conspiracy theory about their "true" reasons. Mentioning it, with a wink, allowed them to use the one argument that people would understand. And everyone ate it up!
> That approach wasn't particularly smart in this case.
Woah wait where did that come from? Yes it was smart. It looked bad but they were behaving correctly. And before you argue that masks don’t have any downsides (which I was saying when I originally started wearing them) it’s really easy to accidentally contaminate your mask and now you’re breathing through whatever got on it. I’ve done this by mistake at least once now and was sick for a week because of it.
That approach wasn't particularly smart in this case. But it's so fundamental to medicine today, precisely because the alternative killed an untold number of people over centuries, that people steeped in it were not able to overcome these priors.
The idea of this having been a strategy to ration limited supplies is rather widespread, obviously. And if you look at a timeline, you will notice that it was mentioned in the mainstream press in the very first articles reporting about the guidance on masks.
So I believe what happened actually went the other way around: experts were looking for arguments to support their guidance against mask usage. And because the argument above doesn't satisfy many people, they came up with their own conspiracy theory about their "true" reasons. Mentioning it, with a wink, allowed them to use the one argument that people would understand. And everyone ate it up!