U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams one month ago told everyone in America to stop buying masks, claiming, “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.”
Vice President Mike Pence, at about the same time, told reporters, “The American people do not have to buy masks.”
Recommended Stories
This was bad information and possibly dishonest. The Trump administration now is advising people who go out into public to wear masks to protect themselves and others from the coronavirus.
So, why did they ever tell us otherwise?
Maybe they thought it was a “noble lie.” There were, after all, reasons to warn people against buying masks. At the time, Anthony Fauci explained, with detail and nuance, why masks might not be as effective as people think.
Fauci of @NIH tells Senate that N95 masks could help the public prevent some #coronavirus infections but don’t provide the absolute protection the public thinks they will because poor fitting, face touching, and other ways to get virus.
— Rich Daly (@RDalyhealthcare) March 3, 2020
Also, the surgeon general could have limited himself to the argument that we all should leave more masks to healthcare workers and people who know they are sick. But, instead, he explicitly made a plain statement that totally denied any health benefits of masks for healthy people amid a viral pandemic.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio made basically the same argument.
You do not have to wear a face mask if you’re feeling well. Masks help protect people who feel sick or people who work with sick patients. Please spare face masks for those people in need.
Learn more at https://t.co/0BYxDIh4uE pic.twitter.com/cfJvs8oM3f
— NYC Mayor’s Office (@NYCMayorsOffice) March 11, 2020
Medical professionals give us partial truths all the time, often because they think that regular people won’t understand the whole truth or because they guess that our passions, laziness, or greed will lead us astray. They want to lead us in the opposite direction. That is probably prudent in some situations, but it often is self-defeating.
In this case, people with masks probably declined to wear them because the surgeon general told them it did nothing, and so, it’s possible some people got sick needlessly because they followed this official “expert” advice.
Seriously.
