Fauci emails are quite telling.
Well this should put to bed the idea that the initial mask guidance was a noble lie.
I would love if the whole "noble lie" explanation for public policy was generally discarded. It is far overused, especially by people skeptical of government bureaucrats. It almost never is a correct assessment of a policy action.
Most of the time what is going on is:
- a genuine gap in scientific knowledge
- an actual error in scientific reasoning
- a bad standard of evidence for policy in a crisis
(2) is generally minimized by the conservative, consensus-driven behavior of the experts in the government agencies, but at the cost of speed and 3).
The mask guidance error was a mix of 1) and 3).
- we had very limited evidence for broad-based cloth mask wearing and we had never had a respiratory virus that had significant asymptomatic transmission
- standards of evidence came into conflict with making decisions under uncertainty. Advocating cloth masks was close to a zero-cost intervention that at worst would have been mostly useless. Ideally we minimize 3) by effective policy leadership that can make the necessary calls amidst uncertainty.
Hey, I came across this post with the #guidance tag, and just thought you would find something interesting:
We don't know from this email what low risk environment Sylvia was going to, but that factors in to the recommendation to not wear a mask. "I'm going to dine indoors with poor ventilation for several hours while listening to a series of open mic participants from close to the stage" may have been met with a different recommendation.
I understand your evaluation that this was an error in a mix of your 1) and 3). You may be interested that in fact, there may be a little bit of 2) involved as well: The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill
In truth, this might actually fall under 3) as well. At any rate, I thought you would find it informative.
Cheers.