> So why did the health authorities radically change their minds about mask wearing in April 2020? The cynical would say that the authorities feared a shortage of masks if they would have told the public to buy masks, leaving health professionals unprotected. This hypothesis is unlikely for two reasons. The first is that from the beginning we were encouraged to use cloth handmade masks that could be sewn by anyone and even be an additional source of income for poor communities.<p>Not sure how this theory got dismissed. It's been common knowledge for a while that this is exactly what happened. Knowing that doesn't make you cynical, it makes you informed. From [1], written in July 2020:<p>> Some of the messaging from public health officials was even more explicitly opposed, though. In late February, CDC director Robert Redfield testified before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee and was asked if healthy people should wear masks. “No,” Redfield responded. The day after that, US surgeon general Jerome Adams tweeted “Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS.” Fauci himself, in early March, told a Senate committee that the general public didn’t need to wear them because Covid-19 wasn’t widespread enough.<p>> The WHO was even more explicit in its advice: Tightly-fitted N95 masks, which filter out particles as small as 0.3 microns, are for health care workers dealing with sick patients, and they’re in critically short supply. Masks made of other materials—surgical masks made of a synthetic nonwoven, meltblown textile, layers of different kinds of cloth, and so on—can gap at the sides and don’t, on their own, fully protect people from getting infected. More quietly, public health experts worried that if people started wearing masks, they’d overestimate their level of protection and get careless. The science was blurry, but the message had to be clear: No masks for civilians.<p>Back to TFA:<p>> Thus the most likely reason why, at the beginning of the pandemic, the health authorities contraindicated the use of masks was because the vast majority of randomized controlled studies, which are the gold standard of clinical trials, carried out until then had concluded that face masks are mostly ineffective in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses.<p>The motive for lying about this later on would be...?<p>I have to conclude that the entire article is a result of motivated reasoning where the above paragraph was the intended "likely reason" at the outset, with the rest of the article crafted to support it, even in the face of much more likely explanations that contradict it.<p>1. <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/how-masks-went-from-dont-wear-to-must-have/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/how-masks-went-from-dont-wear-to...</a>