OUR “PUBLIC HEALTH” EXPERTS ARE DANGEROUSLY IGNORANT AND DANGEROUSLY ARROGANT: The masks and the experts: America’s Covid problems are bigger than Trump.

By contrast on masks, what happened is that initially we were seeing mask-adoption driven by grassroots decision-making and experts stepped in to intervene and tell people not to wear them. That probably counts as the biggest failure of the expert public health community, and I think it bled into a larger lag among experts to really emphasize the central role of air flow in the spread of the virus.

I will put my cards on the table here. I bought a box of procedure masks sometime in mid-to-late February when the official guidance from the government and in the media was anti-mask. Not because I had any particular insight into the matter, but because the things we were being told about masks were just illogical.

Elizabeth Rosenthal writing in the New York Times opinion section did a January 28 article telling people to wash hands instead of focusing on masks. . . . Then there started to be more buzz that the real issue here was simply that the government was afraid of shortages. On February 29, the Surgeon General just blurted out that masks are simultaneously ineffective but also actually very necessary for health care providers.

Yes, a sane statement from an unexpected quarter, but we’ve descended into such a bizarre hell-world.