There were other high-placed people who didn’t recommend masks early on. Michael Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, now on Biden’s Covid Advisory Board, was saying well into July of 2020 that, while it seemed intuitive that masks helped prevent the spread of Covid, there was no actual evidence that showed as such - what studies there were were confounded by too many other elements to prove anything one way or another. And places like New Zealand had no use of masks early on, and had no spread. Once the evidence and the knowledge about how the disease was spreading advanced, he and others went along with the evidence.
Clearly, the solution to Covid in, say, New York City was to para drop Special Forces medics on mini motorcycles (led by the man that should have been Surgeon General, Dr. Ben Ghazi) and use firefighting planes to dump millions of gallons of hand sanitizer on the most infected parts of the city using landmark churches as targeting points.
It’s the only rational solution we had at the time.
Yeah, for instance once it became clear that there was going to be a shortage of toilet paper and other paper and cleaning products, people immediately adjusted their purchasing decisions to only pick up what they needed for a reasonable time frame, ensuring plenty of supply for everyone.
… or when the pipeline got ransomware’d affecting most of the Eastern United States, even though it did not impact the supply going to Florida, Florida still ran out of gas.
Now, in spite of massive evidence that vaccines and masks work, a significant portion of the population still refuses both. My opinion is that Fauci didn’t intentional lie. What would be the motive? On the other hand, leaders of the Republican party and right wing media lied and are still lying about masks and vaccines ostensibly because “Freedom!” but actually because they want to remain in power and make more money. Remember “I downplayed it and I’m still downplaying it.”? Magiver’s arguments are the equivalent of “But the emails!”
His statements back in March 2020 were that masks offered imperfect protection against Covid-19, and that public demand could cause a supply crisis that denied masks to front-line health care workers. For example:
"On March 27, Fauci spoke to a San Francisco NBC affiliate. He said given the shortage of masks, the general public ranked last behind doctors and nurses, and people who are infected.
“When we say you don’t need to wear a mask, what we’re really saying is make sure you prioritize it first for the people who need the mask,” Fauci said. “In a perfect world, if you had all the masks you wanted, then you could get some degree of protection, but make sure you prioritize it well.”
For those who care about the actual science behind the decisions and aren’t just trying to score silly political points (in other words, not Magiver), you might find this article pretty interesting. It’s about the early days and the thought process behind washing your hands versus wearing a mask, etc. It goes into detail about where things like the idea that 6 feet of distancing is ideal (wrong) and that droplets have to be 5 micron to be airborne (also wrong) came from in the first place and why they lasted as long as they did in the mainstream of medicine.
It’s on Wired and I happen to be a subscriber, but it didn’t appear paywalled even when I’m signed out.
All that was needed was a ban on the sale of them to non-medical people. Once it was established that they were necessary for non-medical people then you would have seen people making their own.
That’s why the lie matters. He delayed this process.
Uh, what @Jackmannii pointed at was your post that claimed that Faici said that masks didn’t work, that was not correct at all.
“I don’t regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs and masks for the health providers who are putting themselves in harm’s way every day to take care of sick people,” Fauci told O’Donnell.
“When it became clear that the infection could be spread by asymptomatic carriers who don’t know they’re infected, that made it very clear that we had to strongly recommend masks,” he said.
So, technically, Fauci did say masks don’t work, if you parse this one way. He did NOT say that NO mask works; he said that the ones that you (at that time) normally buy at the drugstore (i.e. wimpy single-ply paper ones) don’t work. That’s not much of a lie. That’s not a lie at all.
Right – Fauci said “Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected”.
And that is still true. The primary purpose of masks is to keep the mask-wearer from spreading infection. They do a much better job of this than from protecting the mask-wearer from other people’s infection (though there is some benefit there too, as Fauci acknowledges).
AFAICT Fauci said a true thing there – the main function of masks is to help prevent the spread of infection.
And that’s why people should still wear masks when indoors in public places or otherwise in close-contact with strangers – to prevent spreading infection to them.
If we can safely assume that Anthony Fauci had that power then sure.
As I understand it, though, the Trump administration would generally have taken the stance that they didn’t have powers like that and Fauci would have been constrained to that. Conceivably, he proposed. And, just as conceivably, Trump or one of his advisors advised this response. It’s fairly easy to show that the Trump’s administration’s general strategy at the time was to lie about the danger outlook of the virus while working behind the scenes to fight it. Fauci would be, probably, the smallest element in that.
