The not wearing masks things was terrible, because it seems like they probably recognized there was some benefit but they wanted to reserve them for health workers. That what I always thought and I'm not alone. The WHO seems to have a series of flawed statements (like the one recently where they made a misleading comment about asymptomatic people). It's like the who needs to hire a competent pr agency. If only they had said "there's some protective affect by wearing masks but we want to prioritize health workers getting ppe while we ramp up manufacturing".

> but the WHO and CDC famously told people not to wear masks for way too long after data was distributed showing mask's effectiveness for preventing infection

Do you have links to that data? For you to make this claim you'd be able to link to a meta-analysis or a well run RCT.

As usual there is nuance to this story which the incendiary popular media failed to capture, because it doesn't bait clicks.

Early on the WHO's biggest concern was that panic buying would lead to mask shortages for health care workers. If you have to choose between an unmasked public and unmasked health care workers, having the public go without is definitely the better option.

So IIRC around March they issued the guideline - if you feel sick, wear a mask, otherwise don't. And it made sense in context, because after masks worn by health care workers, the infected are the next most effective place to deploy masks in terms of protecting public health.

Eventually mask supply increased because everybody started producing them. The WHO then changed its recommendation to "everyone should wear."

So I don't really think the WHO did anything wrong here. But because of the one-sided way it was portrayed in the media, the negatives got amplified and we ended up with "WHO NWO EXPOSED MILLIONS DEAD!! BILL GATES EUTHANIZES AFRICA CONTINENT GLOBAL ELITES KILLING VACCINE PEDOPHILIA" all over YouTube. Again.