Masking has been one of the biggest failures not just for the US but for what we might call The West - here meaning NA, EU, WHO vs countries and governments in East Asia. But I think people are getting the failure a bit wrong. There was and even now remains a strong ...

2/ public health orthodoxy that masks don’t work or that there’s no scientific basis for using them for the public at large. Mostly this comes down to no strong studies/evidence for their efficacy, even though that is largely because it’s very hard to do studies other than ....

3/ during a major epidemic. If you look at the arguments it’s mainly a lack of strong evidence. But when you look closer the standard being applied is often that cloth masks simply don’t provide strong protection, like you need if you are working with people with covid ...

4/ like an N95 mask or more. That’s true but not really the appropriate standard since you’re not talking about robust protection. you’re talking about limited the spread in general. Again this was a strong belief well before the Covid mask scarcity became and issue.

5/ And if you listen closely there are still a lot of big name pub health folks who are fighting a rearguard action on this front. The reality is that East Asia has more experience on this front and they were right. But many in the US and EU had a condescending atttifude ...

6/ that it was a largely ineffective or mostly harmless cultural quirk. There’s no question that the need to preserve supplies of n95 masks played into this too. But this thing that folks in the US and Europe were mostly wrong about predates Covid. Arrogance laid us low.