Subject: Re: Defending Quackery
It has been pretty well established that cloth masks were particularly useless.

It has been pretty well established now that asking people to wear cloth masks was particularly useless. The better evidence at the time of most of these mandates was that cloth masks were effective, and even now it has not yet been established whether the lack of effectiveness of the mandates is because cloth masks didn't impede transmission or because too few people actually followed the rules.

That does not translate into retroactively claiming that advocates of masking did not believe at the time that masking helped. Or that masking was motivated by any other desire than to improve public health.