Medical professionals give us partial truths all the time, often because they think that regular people won’t understand the whole truth or because they guess that our passions, laziness, or greed will lead us astray. They want to lead us in the opposite direction. That is probably prudent in some situations, but it often is self-defeating.

In this case, people with masks probably declined to wear them because the surgeon general told them it did nothing, and so, it’s possible some people got sick needlessly because they followed this official “expert” advice.

Seriously.