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I recently caught my chud family member watching some dumb youtube video about "experts lying about COVID" (yes, chuds are still malding), and like, what's the fucking point anymore?
You can be as gracious, understanding and in good faith as possible, but people will believe whatever nonsense some idiot influencer says is the truth. It makes me so mad, and unable to argue with these people, because their irrationality makes me irrational. Fuck.
Anyway, how are y'all doing? 
The surgeon general tweeting, "STOP BUYING MASKS!" and Fauci going on 60 Minutes and agreeing with a claim that masks could increase your chance of catching it are a bit more than "imperfect" messaging, if you ask me. Early on, their response was to lie and tell people masks don't work in the hopes that it would leave more masks available for healthcare workers, it didn't work and was a complete betrayal of public trust. It wasn't just mixed messaging about cloth masks, they were putting out overt lies, many of which would become staple talking points of the anti-mask movement.
Anecdotally, I have a brother who's a bit of a weirdo politically but he was 100% on top of shit with COVID and early on he had liberal coworkers making fun of him for wearing a mask to work because it went against CDC guidelines. When the CDC did a 180, it not only discredited them but also discredited ordinary people who were trying to do the right thing and follow the science and pressure others to do so. If you're bullying people for wearing masks in February and then bullying people for not wearing masks in March, people stop listening to you and start pushing back, and "pushing back" often meant becoming antimaskers.
Yes it was generally also privileged reactionaries but as someone who cares about science I find it outrageous that these institutions peddled anti-mask nonsense and in a sane world they'd be held accountable to restore public trust. Unfortunately the only people looking to hold them accountable are the reactionary anti-maskers, for all the wrong reasons. Individuals should also be condemned and shamed for not complying with the correct guidance, but scientists and health officials also have a responsibility to act with a higher level of integrity.
you're hitting up against Atikaram bias
both liberals and leftists fall prey to this bias all the time, by hanging onto words of authority rather than looking at evidence or other means of reasoning.
"If the authority says it, it is true" -- this is the mindset of a very large portion of both liberals and leftists. In this case the authorities were dead wrong, and were also wrong for every year before 2020 by disregarding Asian masking. This is a very very big deal
at the same time, chuds would not have worn masks regardless of what Fauci did. I hope this is obvious. There was also a large chud cohort in 2020-2021 claiming that COVID did not exist. This has been memory wiped from their chip, and apparently most leftists don't remember it either.
As usual, the reality is that everybody involved is a moron independent of their politics
Also, the bug was demonstrably a bioweapon out of Ft D34thrick, so who knows
https://imgur.com/a/CRwan3n
The bioweapon reality is another good demonstration of stupidity. Everychud believes the Chinese made it, and everylib believes it's not humanly possible despite 50 lines of evidence lining up perfectly. In other words, if it's a honkey don't listen to the talky~___~
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I remember looking up the effectiveness of masks pre 2020, and the consensus in the english speaking world was that there's no real public health benefit to masking in public during flu season. They basically portrayed the practice of masking in Asia as polite decorum and superstition.
Why did it take a pandemic for americans to learn what the Japanese had been doing for decades? IDK. But what the CDC was saying early in the pandemic was the same advice they were giving in the previous year's flu season. So calling it a "lie" isn't right, it was incompetence