Early in the pandemic, virtually all the major health orgs spread the message "masks for the public don't work". Of course, the real issue was that there was a valid fear that there would be a run on masks and not enough for healthcare workers. There was never any significant evidence masks for the public don't work, on the contrary there was at least some flu-based evidenced that they were beneficial, but at best you could say "we don't know".
So I'm very sympathetic to the authorities trying to give simple messages, but in the end the original guidance really bit them in the ass and made a lot of people lose trust. I wonder if the simpler message could have been "don't use a mask, because it means nobody will be left to treat you when your nurse/doctor needs a mask".
We aren't supposed to make decisions on medical interventions based on "evidence that X doesn't work". Otherwise, we'd default to just doing stuff until we had evidence that it was worse than doing nothing at all. Literally every failed drug ever tested had a biologically plausible reason for starting the test, and yet we know that most drugs don't work when you take them out of the lab!
Saying that there were some papers out there recommending masks is beside the point, because you can find papers recommending lots of things that don't work. Pretty much anything, in fact. We can see the double-standard at play directly with the Ivermectin debate. Public masks and Ivermectin both have an evidence base of low-quality data, with weak effect sizes and huge error bars overall, and a clear bias of the strongest reported effect toward the lowest-quality evidence. But one is evil and the other is magic, depending on your politics.
To take it back to the subject of the OP, here we have two issues that are fundamentally nuanced (the evidence bases are ambigious, at best), and collapsing the range of allowable communication to "you must do X!" leads to obviously wrong outcomes no matter what you do. So maybe we shouldn't be doing anything at all? Or maybe...maybe...we could try to get answers with experiments, instead of just making things up and asserting that we're right?
For whatever it's worth, I recommend this paper as a balanced, comprehensive review of mask literature (not just cloth, though that is the title). You will not find a more complete treatment of the data for public masking:
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2021-11/working-pa...
> What I am saying is their adamant declarations of "masks don't work for the public", which note is an affirmative declaration, were false, and never had any supporting evidence.
There's no such thing as an affirmative declaration of the null hypothesis. You either have proof that something works, or you do not. If you do not have evidence that X works, or the evidence is ambiguous, your conclusion is the null hypothesis (that X doesn't work)...but that doesn't mean that you have to scream it from the rooftops. You can just say "we don't know; the evidence is poor."
The only accurate thing you can say in the "mask debate" is that strong declarations both ways are wrong. The original declarations were wrong, and the declarations now are also wrong. If you look at the data you can't judge either way (with the exception of cloth masks, which are looking quite poor), and so we must equivocate.
The only way you can possibly go on this issue and still be correct is to use nuance. And if you do that, then it's a question of how you use medical evidence to advocate for interventions.
No??? This is what having a prior is for. In this case, the prior was the mechanistic model which told you with reasonable confidence that masks would work in the slices of worlds where the primary mode of transmission was one mitigated by mask-wearing. We do not in fact live in a state of helplessness absent a double-blind peer-reviewed RCT; you will actively come to incorrect conclusions if you refuse to use your existing models & knowledge of the world to draw conclusions about the likelihoods of various outcomes.