I think yes, you can call those statements rational, but that just gets at an additional level of difficulty here. Bayes only gets you so far as holding a belief with maximum probability it is true, given some level of seen evidence. To actually get maximally probably true beliefs without the qualification, you need to actually gather more evidence. In some cases, that may just mean accumulating knowledge that other people already generated, but in some cases, you may need to generate knowledge from scratch. The ability to do that may be severely bounded by resource and time constraints. One person can't personally do all science, so now you need division of labor and assignment of workers to efforts, so you need optimal matching and scheduling algorithms. These are theoretically not computationally intractable, but the algorithms rely upon pre-existing accurate ability and preference ranking, so now you need to go back to information gathering and suddenly you have a bootstrapping problem here that feeding your algorithm the data it needs to tell you how to gather data in the first place requires you to gather data first.

> "You should wear masks because rigorous science tells us that it is effective."

you've really just glossed over the hard part, which is when and where masks work, which is in turn the difficult political problem to solve.

simplifying, covid spreads mouth-to-mouth with a brief stint in the air, not mouth-to-air-then-(much)-later-to-mouth, which is the mediopolitical narrative that's being pushed vehemently but irrationally, and upon which masking policies are erroneously based.

what's always ignored in these narratives is that the virus falls apart quickly all by itself outside the cozy confines of the body, not to mention floats away to oblivion quickly when outside.

if we're really concerned about masks working, we'd have to force people to wear them among friends and family in private spaces like homes, not outside and in grocery stores where they have basically no effect.

"masks work" is a grossly overreaching blanket political statement, not a summary of "the science". scientific evidence suggests masks reduce droplets (and aerosols, with better masks) being ejected into the air. there's less clear evidence that it reduces airborne viral particles being inhaled through the mask. but there's almost no evidence that the way we've deployed masks is doing much other than signalling our fears and concerns.

i'd be open to supporting mask policies that are based on actual evidence (e.g., wear them when socializing at home), but not the mediopolitically fearmongering policies we have.