But we didn't know that at first. Even the experts had no clue how it transmitted and had to just be like "assume it spreads in all the ways until we can figure out how it spreads." And then of course once they knew people needed to mask, they told people not to mask for a good while. At least in the U.S..

The logic was "medical workers need masks more than anyone else, so we have to tell everyone not to mask to save our reserves of masks." But they didn't say "don't mask to save reserves for medical workers." They said "you don't need to mask." (Fauci himself was saying this knowing full well people needed to mask.)