Carl Zimmer

But still, these guidelines and so on were incredibly slow to be updated, let alone what people might actually do to safeguard us from an airborne disease.

I think there are a number of different reasons, and I've tried to figure that out.

And I've talked to people like Anthony Fauci to try to better understand what was going on.

And

There was a lot of ambiguity at the time and a lot of mixed signals.

But I think that also in the United States in particular, we were dealing with a really bad history of preparing for pandemics in the sense that, you know,

The United States actually had said, you know, we might need a lot of masks for a pandemic.

which implicitly means that we acknowledge that, you know, the next pandemic might to some extent be airborne.

You know, at least our healthcare folks are going to need masks, good masks.

And they stockpiled them and then they started using them and then they didn't really replace them very well and supplies ran out or they got old.

So, and so you had someone like Rick Bright, uh, um,

who was a public health official in the administration in January 2020, trying to tell everybody like, hey, we need masks.

And people are like, don't worry about it.

Don't worry about it.

Like, look, if we have a problem with masks, he said this and he recounted this later,

Look, if the health workers run out of masks, we just tell the public just to not use masks, and then we'll have enough for the health workers.

And Brian was like, that makes no sense.

That makes no sense.

And lo and behold, there was a shortage among American health workers, and China was having its own health shortage, so they weren't going to be helping us out, and it was chaos.

And so a lot of those messages about telling the public, don't wear a mask, was don't wear a mask.