The whole time I was reading this piece, this was the thought that was on my mind — & then @zeynep literally had it written out right here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/opinion/coronavirus-airborne-transmission.html
#covid19

2/ @zeynep - one of the best pieces you’ve written on this IMO. & some of the best in infection prevention- the team I am researching & writing w/ now from Brigham & Women’s similarly have shifted toward short range aerosols likely being dominant mode of transmission. Big shift

3/ From perspective of @RanuDhillon @sri_srikrishna and myself- we focused on the worst case scenario as it related to precautionary principle & PPE which is where #bettermasks came from

& we were criticized first by academics who held on to dogma of droplets as rationale

4/ What frustrated me the most was academic arguments being used to say public did not need better PPE despite hospitals having better infection prevention protocols than public spaces, & despite many #covid19 patients actually being less infectious by the time they were admitted

5/ despite insane inequities in who the virus infected; there were experts arguing against getting these high risk non medical workers better protection than the cloth masks they were wearing all year bc privileged academics were that committed to a dogma that favored droplets

6/ I guarantee you none of them would go work in a poorly ventilated kitchen or factory during covid surges w/ a cloth mask on; but this is the fundamental problem: who gets to talk about #covid19 as “experts” etc & who actually gets infected on the job- very diff groups here

7/ & lastly- I’ll say that I have no professional commitment to aerosol scientists, to @zeynep (although we are friends), or to anyone else on this issue; my commitment was and is to the patients I took care of who would have been protected by, among many things, #bettermasks