But the authorities, and other people, may lie or not tell the entire truth. They tell you what they want you to know.
You’d think that lesson would still be fresh from the pandemic, when at the very beginning the CDC tried to get the public not to hoard masks so the actual medical professionals could have them, then that got twisted and metastisized into “masks don’t work” and the ant-masker/anti-vaxxer bullshit.