Probably a waste of time but I’m going to quote this post from a few days ago. Magiver hasn’t bothered to acknowledge it or respond to it so I can only assume he/she missed it or knows the statements in it have to be ignored in order to keep up the “Fauci lied” nonsense.
It would seem that “evolving advice based on evolving science” = liar liar pants on fire. Apparently changing your opinion when more information becomes available is the same as telling lies.
Who knew?
As it was, masks were being stolen by the box from our ER and clinics. Keeping them locked up didn’t completely fix the problem since staff members were doing a lot of the stealing. (People can be irrational when it comes to protecting their families.) And that was before they recommended universal masking.
Recommendations are based on cost vs. benefit, with “cost” being far more than money. As time went on, the benefit of universal masking went up, as the prevalence of the disease went up and it became clear that asymptomatic carriers and spreaders were more common than we thought. And the cost of masks went down, as they became more available and the danger of health care workers doing without subsided. So at some point the benefit outweighed the cost and the recommendations changed. That’s how we do it.
But forget all that. Let’s say that whatever you’re trying to say about Fauci is true. As an internist, Fauci is the closest thing my profession has to a hero. He toiled in relative obscurity for decades doing nothing but steering the practice of medicine at the highest levels. The fact that he became a household name was amusing to me at first, but seeing him vilified by certain segments (up to and including calls for him to be executed) is heartbreaking.
If anyone on Earth has earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to topics of medicine, it’s Tony Fauci. Even if he has been an imperfect spokesman at times, there’s no doubt that whatever he tells us is based on the best knowledge we have at that time.
You need to look at @Dr.Winston_OBoogie answer. Your statement was grossly incomplete, and it reflects what the clickbait media is famous for, the “scandalous” title in an article is not really what someone like Fauci said.
What? he always had to power to say masks were a good idea and to encourage people to make their own.
And it would have occurred earlier if he encouraged this.
And your opinion of Rand Paul is…?
I’ve got this one. The answer is “Fauci lied.”
Firstly, that’s not what you wanted of him, see above. Secondly, on what basis would he encourage people to make their own? N95 masks are a special construction and I’ve seen no indication that anyone had any reason to believe that a homemade version wouldn’t act like a power diffuser for pestilence.
As it is, the common t-shirt sleeve mask and nylon sock mask are both more dangerous to the world than going bare faced. I asked on this forum a decade ago about the science of masks, because I was living in Japan at the time, and the answer then was that an N95 mask becomes more harmful than helpful after 30 minutes of use because it soaks up germs for about 30 minutes and then reaches its threshold for absorption and/or threshold for keeping a hang on the little guys and then you start creating plooms of aerosolized germs every time you exhale through the diffuser that you’ve just created.
To be clear, homemade masks, made in accordance with now-known guidelines and used appropriately (removing from your face when away from other people and washing/changing regularly) are useful in stopping the spread of Covid. Masks made inappropriately and used incorrectly vary between useless to harmful. There is no law of the universe, so far as we were aware in Spring of 2020, that it was feasible and useful to make effective masks at home. Outside of N95, you may as well have gone around licking the walls so far as any other type of mask was concerned.
20/20 hindsight doesn’t change the knowledge that we had in the past. George Washington’s doctor didn’t lie when he said, “I can help you, sir!” That doctor proceeded on to kill the first President, but he had a genuine belief in the medical knowledge of the day and that’s just what it was at the time.
And yet the masks we were mandated to wear weren’t N95 masks and included homemade masks.
You’ll have to explain how that negates anything I said or bears in any way on your argument.
I think I’m the only one who’s getting this. It’s like this: Fauci is a stinking liar, whose lies impeded the resolute, dynamic pandemic response from Donald Trump, who totally would have otherwise spread the good word about covid mitigation techniques. (shakes fist) Fauci!
Covid, the fake, Chyna bio-weapon.
I have it on good word… well, I have it on some word that the whole thing is just gonna clear itself up. Poof. What’s all this hoo-ha about who said what, when, about masks?
If they’d just stop testing people there’d be no Covid!
OK, I think I’ve got it now.
Public health experts whose policies change based on evolving science and new evidence = liars and power-mad charlatans.
Politicians and talk show hosts who serially spew misinformation and insane conspiracy theories = people’s advocates fighting for Truth.
Good to have that cleared up.
I think you’ve found the key. Redefine “lie” and “truth”, in fact, invert them, and suddenly everything fits!
Hey, Rand Paul is in the title so let’s talk about all his lies. And these meet the true definition of lying. He’s got blood on his hands just for sowing mistrust for a dedicated scientist like Dr. Fauci.
How about starting with Ivermectin, shall we? Here’s more blood on his hands.
The hatred for Trump deranged these people so much that they’re unwilling to objectively study it,” Paul told constituents on Friday, Aug. 27, after a woman asked why ivermectin wasn’t more available, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer ’s report of the gathering. “So someone like me that’s in the middle on it, I can’t tell you because they will not study ivermectin.
In fact, the NIH currently counts 81 studies on ivermectin and covid-19.
https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=COVID-19&term=ivermectin&cntry=&state=&city=&dist=&Search=Search
The FDA weighs in with this headline:
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-should-not-use-ivermectin-treat-or-prevent-covid-19
I wonder if there’s any other lies we can find.
I didn’t track the gaps down but those all seem to be research taking place in the Middle East and South America. They don’t seem to be authorized by our government, and that would track with our government’s (and Fauci’s) public statements.
It should also be noted that there is already an antiviral (Remdesevir) which is available for and clinically proven to be effective at fighting Covid. Finding more would be good but we’re not actually panicked to find one because like…we already got that. But all of them would fall in the territory that you don’t want to take them pre-emptively, Ivermectin because it’s a cytotoxin and Remdesevir because your body forms a tolerance to it and it will cease having an effect if you’re taking it regularly.
If you want a prophylactic - e.g., something to take to lower your odds of suffering a poor outcome if you contract Covid - well firstly just get f***ing vaccinated. You know the ones that Donald Trump and his vaccine Czar, Moncef Slaoui, crafted and ensured the safety of? And if you’re still concerned after that, get your vitamin D level tested and make sure it’s in a healthy range.
If you haven’t done either of those things then, I mean it’s like sitting in a room with a bathtub to full of gold coins, fluffy puppies in the corner, a full bar, exotic dancers, a circus act, and a private chef all available and crying that you can’t possibly enjoy yourself because someone forgot to put marshmallows in your hot chocolate. Take the f***ing gold coins and buy yourself all the marshmallows you want man.
The early recommendation that non-N95 masks were of little use was not based on science per Dr Fauci’s own admittance. It was to keep people from buying them so they would be available for medical use. Non-N95 masks are what the public ended up wearing after they hit the market. So recommending them earlier than later means they would have been useful earlier.
So if we agree on the cost vs. benefit argument we’re left with using non-N95 masks to help limit public exposure. It doesn’t take 100,000 dead people to figure out that a respiratory illness is likely an airborne transmitted disease. The likelihood of this is just common sense. It didn’t rapidly spread through China because bats are a major source of food for the Chinese.
I would genuinely welcome your input of Dr fauci’s accomplishments based on your years of experience. He may be worthy of the praise heaped upon him. It would be refreshing to hear from someone who experienced a career’s worth of Dr Fauci. But it’s not like the media love-fest with him was based on anything. I mean, really, there should be a Vatican website where he can be nominated for people’s choice award for sainthood.
For the sake of argument I will agree his career has been one of positive contributions in the medical field based on your say-so. It doesn’t make him infallible. His early mask recommendations were not, by his own admittance, based on science. They were based on the idea that masks were in short supply and he wanted to steer them toward medical personnel. That is logical in a vacuum of finite medical grade masks but illogical in a scenario where the goal is to prevent transmission of the disease in the general populace.
We lost valuable time in the use of non medical grade masks for general use. Which is almost entirely what we ended up using in the fulfillment of mask mandates. If I remember correctly the death rate was doubling every 3 days. Not much when the numbers are low but it ramps up quickly. Early use of non-N95 masks could have made a profound difference in the early stages of the disease.
Ah, the rewriting of history, and the pandemic isn’t even over yet. The frequency of the doubling of the death rate. A terrible thing, certainly. It has nothing to do with the inept response from Trump and the Trump administration. But the part of the administration featuring one Dr. Fauci, guilty. Not too shabby. I can see it growing conservative, conspiritorial legs.
Which is unfortunate but still doesn’t come down as a lie, and it’s based on an unreasonable assumption that, as said, half-assed masks would prove more useful than harmful. At the human race’s level of knowledge at that moment in time, jury-rigged masks were just as likely to increase the spread of disease as reduce it, for all we knew. And that’s a genuine danger which does in fact exist for some styles of masks and for masks which are used incorrectly, it’s not just some haphazard speculation.
If you, at that time, believed that almost anything was better than nothing, and you had had the ability to blast that message across the world, then probably everyone would have cut a t-shirt sleeve off and started using that. It’s the quickest and most ready way to make a mask. That would have killed people. Your hypothesis would have been wrong.
If your hypothesis was that several layers of cotton, fashioned similar to how we make N95 masks would be useful then congratulations but that is still just luck. Getting lucky in science is fun, I’m sure, but you only get the award because the evidence showed it to be correct. Minus the evidence then any level of certainty in your own correctness is ego, not actual correctness.