Docs Lying to the Public to Protect Themselves?
or, Why People Often Do Not Trust the Medical Establishment
This thread of doctors, one of them the great marketing (of herself ;-) guru Kara Swisher's anesthesiologist* brother, seems to imply so. It's not that they didn't know how germs transmit, but they were more concerned about thefts of masks and PPE from their hospitals and shortages occuring...As a physician, incensed over the theft of masks and PPE from hospitals and health care workers in February, I am guilty of contributing to the confusion regarding the protective ability of masks. Mea Culpa. As Dr. Wachter says, evidence evolves opinions and recommendations....
[I}f you go back.and look at context, it was about the theft of PPE, as well as lack of data on this particular virus, AND, WHO recs, surgeon general recs, etc. As I said, I was focused on reception more than transmission. We all, hopefully, learn and adjust.So they effectively lied to the public about the performance protection of masking, and the deception killed people then and today, as you can't just "walk back" misinformation from the so-called experts... People died because of that poor advice, intentional or not. Mea culpa doesn't bring people back from the dead. How about, I won't promote false information in the future to protect my own? And I'll work double-time now to overcome the lingering myth that masks don't protect?
“The word that we got was that we were struggling to make sure we get personal protective equipment, including masks, for the health care workers, so the initial recommendation was: Don’t put masks on, because we’re going to be taking them away from health care workers,” says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “That understandably got interpreted as, we didn’t think masks were of any benefit.”
The early debate over the value of masks in Covid, along with efforts to preserve masks for healthcare workers, led to mixed messages. This left space for masks to be politicized, a mistake we've not recovered from.
Read the scientific article here:
How Masks Went From Don’t-Wear to Must-Have
-----------------------Public health messaging and science have to work hard to stay in sync during a crisis. During the Covid-19 pandemic, they haven’t always succeeded.
...
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.
* Like his father before... You have to wonder about the quality of "legacy" professionals sometimes. "First Do No Harm" means thinking down the road, and if you're not ready to push masks on the public, at least don't discourage their use to prevent hoarding and shortages. That's kind of an ethical consideration, which perhaps is realized only in retrospect if you are not a natural long-term thinker, concerned with consequences for the overall populations. In years to come when we look at the escalating numbers of infected, and the early deaths of this pandemic and the populations affected, these admissions above might be viewed like the Tuskegee study once was...
(The medical establishment hurting the black population to help the whites -- here, the docs.. Or am I just analyzing this too black-and-white, even if that is the theme for the summer, it seems?)
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