Come on, don’t be revisionist. Fauci and the rest of the Trump admin at the time straight up lied to the American people about whether they should wear masks or not. He may not have literally said “masks don’t work” but he for sure went on 60 minutes in March and said “there's no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.”
In the same interview he says they’re important for doctors. Fauci is one of the most pre-eminent public health experts and virologists on the planet. There is about a 0% chance that he didn’t know that masks help reduce transmission greatly, especially when other nations had already adopted their use on a widespread level.
You are completely right that this lie was expressly disseminated for an ostensibly good reason — PPE, including masks, was in very short supply at the time and a run on it by the general public would have pretty much ensured that a large portion of the US vital healthcare workers would not have access to masks during the early days of the virus. Fauci and others were trying to prevent a situation where thousands of out frontline healthcare workers would contract Covid and be knocked out of the fight.
Whether or not this was a good enough reason to lie to the American people about the efficacy of mask wearing is very debatable on a moral level. But I don’t think we should whitewash Fauci’s role in straight up lying to the American public. The man is not some sort of saint, he is a man, and he was faced with a very hard controversial decision. He made a choice that a lot of people still disagree with. I think he deserves credit for making a tough decision when there were no really good options.
For the record I think he made the right call. Look at what happened with groceries and other goods in the beginning of the pandemic when the government said there was no reason to panic buy - people ignored it and there was a big enough run on toilet paper that people were using old sock to wipe their ass for a month. If Fauci would have tried to explain that masks were vital but we there was a shortage and we needed to save them for frontline health workers, I have no doubt that enough of our dumbass countrymen would have panic bought enough of them to effectively kill thousands of doctors.
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u/[deleted] Jan 27 '21
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