Q: Is some of the vitriol toward you about being a flip-flopper with your pandemic advice a result of having to make public health decisions in public in real time?
A: When you’re doing an experiment, you collect data, you validate it, you scrub it, you analyze it, and then you write something that’s based on science that’s not dynamic, but is immutable. When you’re dealing with a pandemic response, it’s very dynamic, and a somewhat mysterious evolution of a process that has a lot of consequences, because people’s lives are involved. The public expects you to analyze the situation and come out with daily proclamations about what should be done. When you’re humble and scientific enough to say, You know, we were saying this a week, a month, 2 months ago, but now things have really changed, that’s taken as flip-flopping, being wrong, and having made a mistake.
The classic one I know that you’re referring to is about masks, right? How many times are we gonna go over that? The surgeon general tweets, Please do not buy masks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, Masks are unnecessary. I, as one spokesman, say, You know, we don’t know if it works outside of the health care setting. Nobody is fully aware of the aerosol spread. And we had no real idea that 60% of the transmissions were by an asymptomatic person. So, right then, we shouldn’t necessarily be wearing a mask. As soon as [the known facts] changed. I said, Whoa, wait a minute, we better be wearing a mask in an indoor setting. And that becomes flip-flopping arrogance.
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