When you don’t provide any context and just throw out “masks won’t help lay people” you end up being incorrect. Fauci was specifically talking about “paper masks” from the drug store, as he put it. It’s still true that they have limited efficacy as PPE (unless gaps are filled), but are useful as source control. In fact, the CDC suggested mask use as source control for symptomatic people who had to leave quarantine at that time on their website. This was the same suggestion they’ve been making for decades regarding the flu. Once they realized that covid was being spread asymptomatically, they suggested everyone wear masks as potential source control as early as the first week of April while the country was under lockdown. The alternative was to suggest that everyone buy up all the N95’s which would have ended up massacring healthcare workers and spreading covid even further.
Proper hand washing with soap and water is superior than sanitizer. It literally removes the infectious agent. Nevertheless, the CDC never said don’t use sanitizer in a pinch. They simply stated a fact. In fact, they specifically stated that people should use only sanitizers with 60% alcohol and rub their hands vigorously for 20 seconds. I still have the announcement to my students back in March 2020 about this. Hell, the CDC has posters and brochures from 2016 about hand hygiene which includes sanitizers.
Can you provide a cite for that? I cited where he said not to wear them. If that was out of context, please provide the context that is missing from the news quote.
Yes, this is a policy reason – a very very good one – for encouraging people to not buy up N95 masks. It’s not a reason to tell people that they won’t possibly know how to properly wear one so it won’t help them, and also it will make them more likely to catch covid as a result. (Note: I’m not specifically talking about Fauci, I’m talking about the wave of misinformation around wearing masks from that time.) It’s not OK to lie about science just because you have a good reason.
Again, once, as you point out, health experts started calling for everyone to wear masks, people made their own. They didn’t form rampaging mobs to steal them from healthcare workers. I myself had a full box of 20 healthcare grade N95s in my emergency supplies. I recognized how valuable they would be to me and my family, but I donated them to healthcare workers, of course.
Proper use of hand sanitizer literally makes the virus fall apart. Hand washing is better when you are near a sink. Hand sanitizer is better when you are away from a sink, and have a bottle of sanitizer in your pocket or nearby. There is not just one measure of what makes one of them better. Hand washing also begins to destroy your skin, whereas hand sanitizer is gentler when you are having to clean your hands many times per day. Again, advantages and disadvantages. Hand sanitizer is not just OK “in a pinch,” it’s the best tool for the job in many situations – and so is handwashing in different situations.
I remember US authorities publishing misleading information about masks. (Not false information, just intentionally misleading information.) I have to say, i don’t recall any similar issues around hand sanitizer.
Washing hands, if possible, is a little better because if your hands are dirty as well as infected, virus can hide from the sanitizer under the dirt. But hand sanitizer is an excellent safety measure against all manner of bugs, especially if your hands are basically clean. My doctor sent me some link from formal US sources explaining this when i asked about what steps we could take at some potentially risky activity.
I, too, donated the 20 N95 masks i had in my house, but i used the surgical masks i had lying around, and gave some to friends. I also carried a small container of 70% rubbing alcohol in my pocket, and used it when i returned to my car from an errand. I did that based on researching what killed the virus, but i thought it was in accordance with standard advice.
(I’m also puzzled by references to “paper masks from the drug store”. I’m really not aware that there were ever any significant number of “paper” masks in this country that didn’t have an electrostatic layer. At least, not until we were flooded with counterfeit stuff after everyone started wearing masks.)
Apparently, I’m combining the 60 minutes interview with the Fauci-gate emails.
“Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection,” Fauci wrote back in a Feb. 5 message. “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material.”
I thought it was Fauci who used the term “paper masks”, but it must have been someone else. I assume they were talking about dust and allergen masks as opposed to spun-polypropylene surgical masks. But even if he was talking about surgical masks, he’s absolutely right. Loose surgical masks are for source control, not PPE.
And about the hand sanitizer vs. handwashing, your quibbling about my words “in a pinch” does not make the CDC somehow dishonest. Handwashing is more effective against a broad spectrum of infectious agents and it removes them. Period. And it’s not just because it removes dirt. Coronaviruses are, of course, sensitive to alcohol, but some viruses and bacteria are more resistant.
Back to the topic of the thread, your point seems to be that Fauci and the CDC were not being ‘honest’ so they’re (we’re?) not being ‘honest’ about accepting infection-acquired immunity for vaccine requirements. We’re somehow not following the science. Here’s the science. If we were going to have vaccine requirements (which we’re not) infection-induced immunity would only work if:
You can prove a recent infection by a certain variant that has been shown to be effective against the new variant. This would correlate with keeping your vaccination status up-to-date with boosters which would may be required once a year unless cases/severity dwindles. They may be required for healthcare workers like the flu vaccine. The vaccine data will always be there. However, if there’s no infection data, your prior infection may not count.
You prove that you have met the standard of antibody levels. Mild infections may come out positive on a covid test, but may result in low antibody levels, faster waning, and inferior immunity. Vaccines are much more studied, hence the current dosages and boosters.
During the height of Omicron in my area, it was really difficult to get a more advance test – hours or days of waiting, and if you didn’t feel sick, why bother? Just assume you have it, isolate for the required length of time, and move on.
Do you think that should give you a pass from vaccine requirements? I could take a picture of the positive test and everything.
Did you convince your doctor with that test? Did your doctor include it in your records?
I would let doctors be gatekeepers of this information.
My mom was given scarce antibody treatment based on a rapid test. All the hospice workers switched into full PPE based on a later rapid test. A friend’s college kid was exempted from his college’s required weekly PCR tests for three months based on a rapid test. Those all did require a photo of the rapid test (except the one where one of the hospice workers was in the room when i did it, and saw the results herself.) My sense is that the medical establishment trusts rapid tests in situations where they have trustworthy evidence that it was done properly (including a photo) and where they trust the chain of information, and where the diagnosis is plausible.
But I’d also be okay with a requirement for PCR follow-up for purposes of documentation.
I think it’s funny that we have this highly contentious thread about “fulfilling requirements” when there are few requirements, at least in the US, for any evidence at all of immunity.
I’m not talking about fraud here. I’m saying that, say, I genuinely took a test and it came out positive. At the height of COVID, it took hours or more to get a real test done, so I just skipped that, told my doctor that I had a positive at-home test, isolated for the right amount of time, and that was the end of it.
Would you consider this sufficient?
This thread is becoming increasing moot, of course, as all kinds of restrictions are getting lifted.
No, i think your doctor should see the test result. That was certainly the standard here. My doctor actually took my word for my booster shot, but asked to see the photo of the rapid test. I think that’s the standard in part because people make mistakes reading them.
(Re taking my word for the booster: I had discussed the risks and benefits of joining this study with my doctor, and complained to him about the side effects i had from the shot. He had excellent reasons to trust me that I’d had it.)
Natural immunity is way better then vaccines. All vaccines do is try to trick our adaptable immune system into thinking it’s the real thing, but it sometimes falls short of the real thing. Our immune system has evolved so much through out the ages and long before we started using vaccines.
Natural immunity seems to work about as well as immunization against covid. With the major downside that you need to catch covid to develop natural immunity. Covid is a lot more dangerous than any of the vaccines. I mean, my mom caught covid and now has perfect immunity, as dead bodies don’t host any viral infections.
Natural immunity has a zero level of effectiveness: Of people who have gotten natural immunity, 100% of them come down with covid at some point in their lives. By contrast, at least some people who get the vaccine will never come down with covid.
I know many people that have gotton Covid after the 3rd shot but now that they have gotton it a have never gotton it again. My mother got covid so she has way better immunity then this covid vaccine which only uses RNA proteins. Out T cells and B cells (adaptive immune system) react more strongly to a real encounter. Thats like a boxer sparing with a real person vs a punching bag. Natural immunity is what has developed for well over hundreds of thousands of years.
This sentence is incoherent. You clearly do not know know what RNA is, what a protein is, or how the vaccine works. Stop repeating talking points from fools on Facebook and listen to actual scientists.
Sticking with your analogy, it would be far more apt to say that the vaccine is sparring with you, since the vaccine hits you with some of the same prominent proteins that are present in the pathogen, training your immune system to learn to fight back effectively if it encounters the actual disease; but it does not harm you.
The disease, on the other hand, is certainly not sparring with you. It’s a fight. For a novice with no boxing skills, do you think getting in the ring for an actual fight with Mike Tyson is a sensible way to acquire boxing skills? And how about when Mike Tyson is not constrained by any referee or any rules?
How did our natural immune system that evolved over millions of years fare with Smallpox?