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Our choices with respect to masks and WHO are... they were right back then (masks are useless), they were wrong (masks are useful), or they were lying purposefully to mislead. People insist that authorities were lying... I prefer to think they were wrong. 1/

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Natalie Christie Peluso

she/her

@nataliepeluso

Oct 26, 2020

Replying to @StuartJRitchie and @MWStory

Great piece, although I personally continue to flinch whenever anyone suggests the WHO didn't recommend masks because they don't work. Global PPE shortage was insane in March & there was a clear motive to preserve what they had for hospitals. Plus clear evidence China used them.

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This choice seems oversimplified. The actual argument (as I recall it) was that whatever benefit might be conferred by masks was not enough to justify taking them away from front-line medical personnel who needed them.

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You remember incorrectly. They were stating outright, without ambiguity, that the masks were not effective. It was stated again, and again, and repeated in very clear terms. I remember because I challenged these claims. I thought that they could not know.

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It didn't make any sense. How could masks only work for health care workers? It's clear to me that the authorities on these topics were lying, and I won't trust them as sources of information in the future. It was a lesson learned based on many aspects of how they handled this.

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My impression is that they didn't want a shortage of masks for health care workers and didn't consider them to be important elsewhere so they lied about it. In some countries like Taiwan, they instead directed massive resources to producing enough masks for everyone.

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Taiwan didn't rely on different scientific facts. They took a different approach to governance. It was never unclear that masks were useful. It's still not clear how much different types of masks help, but it wasn't ever in doubt that they would almost certainly reduce spread.

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The WHO has a lot of blood on their hands in this crisis. They downplayed it from the start. They discouraged governments from taking it seriously, preparing for it and taking actions to make it much worse. They even did this with their naming guidelines: who.int/emergencies/di

1:30 PM · Oct 27, 2020Twitter Web App

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> From a risk communications perspective, using the name SARS can have unintended consequences in terms of creating unnecessary fear for some populations, especially in Asia which was worst affected by the SARS outbreak in 2003. This was representative of the overall approach.

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They were against masks, against travel restrictions, against quarantines, against contact tracing, etc. Meanwhile, China was treating it as a very serious outbreak and deploying all of that to fight it. Countries like Taiwan that disregarded WHO advice made out very well.