Comment by saghm

I think GP is referring to the very early days (March 2020 to maybe May or so) when they were advising against the general public masking. Based on what I read afterwards, it sounds like the idea was that they were worried that the higher end PPE would end out getting bought out by people who were worried (which given the outages on things that in seem pretty unrelated like toilet paper), so they discouraged masking for the general public at first to ensure supply for places like hospitals that needed it most. After a few months, they probably had more confidence in the availability in equipment, so they flipped the recommendation. I remember being surprised by this, since masking was never really something that I had done before or seen my friends and family do, but from reading a bit it seemed clear that it was the right thing to do, so I adapted. I suspect that the bad faith arguments against masking would still have been made if they hadn't first recommended not masking, but it certainly didn't help with getting the general public on board. I'd imagine that a certain segment of the population was not going to follow the recommendations no matter what, and the segment that did properly mask obviously would have even if the messaging had been to mask from the start (or if they didn't say anything about masking until they started recommending it), but I don't have a strong sense of how many people "in the middle" were swayed due to the fact that they at least appeared to have an inconsistent message on this.