Had they not done that our mask supply would have met the same fate as our toilet paper supply, and medical personnel would be SOL.
Now however they can’t backtrack without looking clueless.
Catch 22.
If they’d had the human common sense to promote the wearing of masks, they would have had the intelligence and ethics to have been heavily stocked with masks in advance. If retail inventory is taxed in ways to our detriment, then that issue needs to be revisited, too.