The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use. Also, at the time, there wasn't clear evidence of the effectiveness of masks by the public (although there was some evidence with earlier respiratory infections that mask use by the public is beneficial).
But instead of just saying that, the message from the vast majority of public health officials (and media types like Sanjay Gupta) was that "masks don't work for the public". It's not hard to go back to March 2020 and find lots of videos to this effect. This all spectacularly backfired a couple months later when health officials told everyone to wear masks.
And what made me slightly angry was that many officials tried to say something like "well, we have new data now". Which was somewhat true, but also conveniently swept over the fact that there was never data that said "masks don't work for the public", but health officials didn't have a problem saying that in public earlier.
The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use. Also, at the time, there wasn't clear evidence of the effectiveness of masks by the public (although there was some evidence with earlier respiratory infections that mask use by the public is beneficial).
But instead of just saying that, the message from the vast majority of public health officials (and media types like Sanjay Gupta) was that "masks don't work for the public". It's not hard to go back to March 2020 and find lots of videos to this effect. This all spectacularly backfired a couple months later when health officials told everyone to wear masks.
And what made me slightly angry was that many officials tried to say something like "well, we have new data now". Which was somewhat true, but also conveniently swept over the fact that there was never data that said "masks don't work for the public", but health officials didn't have a problem saying that in public earlier.