1/ THREAD: a breakdown of the fallacies in the arguments by the Dutch government against wide adoption of face masks in public #COVID19NL

2/ "Face masks are scarce & we need them for health care workers." Fallacy of equivocation: the idea is to encourage adoption of non-professional, self-made masks by the general public, which can be surprisingly effective. https://twitter.com/TSubtext/status/1245433501538603008

3/ "It will give people a false sense of security & they will get reckless." Slippery-slope argument (maybe?), which basically boils down to rejecting any measures that improve safety (seat belts, fire alarms), which in the past have proved to be very efficient.

4/ "In some Asian countries people wear face masks but it has not prevented corona outbreak." It's the all-or-nothing-at-all dichotomy: these countries are all doing MUCH BETTER in terms of containing spread of the virus. https://twitter.com/koryoinleiden/status/1250716817292767232

5/ "There's no conclusive evidence that it works" --> "so we conclude that it doesn't work." Fallacy from ignorance! @rivm has been doing this throughout: a few weeks ago, no conclusive evidence for asymptomatic transmission, so we claim that asymptomatic trans. cannot occur...