Okay, I hate to call out Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman on what is, perhaps, not a huge deal, but we have the right to expect “more” from a Nobel dude like Paul, and I’m afraid Paul’s “error” here is more than a foot fault. In the course of a rap on the irresponsible rich, The Paranoid Style in American Plutocrats, which, frankly, could be, well, better researched, Paul admits that us Acela folks don’t always get it right the first time: “For example, in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic top health officials opposed widespread masking, but they reversed course in the face of persuasive evidence, because that’s what serious scientists do.”
Well, no, Paul, that’s not what really happened, and the link you provided, to Marie Fazio’s April 27, 2021 story in the Times, How Mask Guidelines Have Evolved, doesn’t quite tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth either. “Top health officials” didn’t “reverse course in the face of persuasive evidence”. They stopped lying.
It all started back in February 2020, when then Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams tweeted in a no longer extant tweet “Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if health care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
The “real time” story in the Times about Adams’ tweet, dated Feb. 29, 2020, Surgeon General Urges the Public to Stop Buying Face Masks, by Maria Cramer and Knvul Sheikh, also quoted extensively from remarks made by Dr. Michael J. Ryan, executive director of the health emergency program at the World Health Organization, remarks that were, to put it bluntly, absurd. Among other things, Ryan said “Not having a mask does not necessarily put you at any increased risk of contracting this disease.” At the time, medical “experts” repeatedly implied that the “real” purpose of wearing a mask was to protect others from getting a disease the wearer of the mask already had. Yet the whole point of this outpouring of advice from the medical establishment urging the general public to stop buying masks was to ensure a complete supply for medical personnel, who of course did not have COVID and instead needed to be protected from getting the disease from their patients who DID have it! By wearing a goddamn mask!
And so we have disinformation piled upon disinformation, Paul lying about the lying, in a sort of knee-jerk Acelaland daisy chain of ass covering. We “experts” do have to stick together, after all!
Afterwords
I have ranted about the incompetence of the medical establishment in the face of both the COVID and the fortunately less lethal monkeypox many times for many reasons, but perhaps most coherently—or at least most loudly—here. It’s only fair to point out that the Times has published many articles taking the CDC and other agencies of the medical establishment to task for their miserable performance under fire, which I have often drawn on in writing my own takes—and are linked to in my posts—but somehow some Timesfolk just can’t help rewriting history when the truth seems just a little too ugly.
I just figured they were lying to us because there was a shortage of masks at first, and they wanted plenty of them available to Health Care workers.
Very perceptive! Their actions remind me a bit of the legislators and judges who loudly and proudly make guns easier to get and carry, then ban them in courthouses, state assemblies, the capital building….