Fauci is finally admitting that the kind of masking we saw and that he pushed for during the pandemic doesn’t work.
He said this in the New York Times yesterday:
Wallace-Wells: It was around the same time that the mask guidance wavered — first, masks were not recommended, and then they were.9 But I want to ask you to reflect on the even bigger picture: Were the culture-war fights over masking worth it? Or did those fights have a bigger negative impact on future vaccine uptake among conservatives than the positive impact they had on spread? To be clear: I’m not someone who doesn’t think masks work. I think the science and the data show that they do work, but that they aren’t perfect and that at the population level the effect can be somewhat small. In what was probably our best study, from Bangladesh, in places where mask use tripled, positive tests were reduced by less than 10 percent.
Fauci: It’s a good point in general, but I disagree with your premise a bit. From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent. But for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it’s not at the margin. It really does work.
But I think anything that instigated or intensified the culture wars just made things worse. And I have to be honest with you, David, when it comes to masking, I don’t know. But I do know that the culture wars have been really, really tough from a public-health standpoint. Ultimately an epidemiologist sees it as an epidemiological phenomenon. An economist sees it from an economic standpoint. And I see it from somebody in bed dying. And that’s the reason it just bothers me a lot — maybe more so than some others — that because of the culture wars you’re talking about, there are people who are not going to make use of an intervention that could have saved their lives.
I feel like we’ve come full circle to the initial interview he did in 2020 saying that population masking is not effective.
What he says about wearing N95 masks may be true to a point, but that’s not what we saw during the pandemic. The most common mask by far was the surgical mask and we still see those all over the place today.
But the real point is that Fauci went from saying that masking is ineffective to claiming it was effective and pushing for it, and now once again he’s finally admitting it’s not effective.
Fauci also claims in the interview that he never shut schools down or factories, nor did he criticize people who made the decisions on this:
Certainly there could have been a better understanding of why people were emphasizing the economy. But when people say, “Fauci shut down the economy” — it wasn’t Fauci. The C.D.C. was the organization that made those recommendations. I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations. But show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the C.D.C.’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that. But I never criticized the people who had to make the decisions one way or the other.
Fauci was the one at the center of everything COVID arguing for the shut downs. He wasn’t just a CDC explainer guy. He pushed for the shutdowns of everything to control the spread and criticized people like DeSantis who was pushing to reopen the schools.
And when confronted on all of this, especially from the likes of Rand Paul, Fauci would stand by and defend his decisions to shut everything down.
Fauci flip flops more than a fish out of water.