There's an interesting interview with Lipkin on This Week in Virology where he admits to some classic 'for your own good lying' regarding the effectiveness of masks. Referring to an old SARS study he says:

(P)eople who use facemasks in a consistent way have a 70% reduction in community transmission and if they use them intermittently it was 60%. That was - you know i found that impressive and we talked about it but there was no access to facemasks and so i was.. i thought a long time about trying to publish this coz if i did that - if we did that - it would have deprived - you know - people on the frontlines because there weren’t sufficient facemasks - for getting access to those - and it would have made things worse - so i didn’t proceed with that - so that’s something that unfortunately is going to go in the memoirs rather than the written record.

After asking two modelers to model likely infections in New York around the end of Feb - two weeks before the virus exploded in mid-March, he says:

"There was a big spike as you might anticipate a couple of four weeks later and i anticipate that we’ll see the same thing nationally but then one of these people doing the modelling said, ‘But you know all we need to do is put people into facemasks and everybody can go back to work tomorrow.' I said ‘Absolutely not! That’s crazy!' First of all most people don’t know how to use facemasks, right, so you know they fiddle with, you know, so they really sort of obviate the whole purpose - and secondly - uhm - you know - we don’t really have any data to support that - all we know is that in conjunction they’re important."

This is the kind of thing we've seen too much of. Haughty experts appointing themselves as gatekeepers of the truth - which invariably involves covering up the truth or outright lying for 'our own good'. Problem is, as we saw with the WHO's lies, it wasn't for our own good at all - it directly ushered in an unmitigated disaster.