March 2020: Dr. Anthony Fauci talks with Dr Jon LaPook about Covid-19

Have you forgotten that we couldn't buy masks or other medical equipment for months because of China, and everyone, including WHO, Fauci, Obama, etc. were advising people against using masks due to shortage? - January 14, WHO: Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳( [link] ) - January 31, Trump suspends travel from China: Proclamation on Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Persons who Pose a Risk of Transmitting 2019 Novel Coronavirus( [link] ). A move condemned by many, including WHO and Biden. - February 1, Biden: We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency.( [link] ) - Feburary 2, Health Commissioner of New York City: As we gear up to celebrate the #LunarNewYear in NYC, I want to assure New Yorkers that there is no reason for anyone to change their holiday plans, avoid the subway, or certain parts of the city because of #coronavirus.( [link] ) - Feburary 24, Pelosi: You should come to Chinatown. Precautions have been taken by our city, we know that there's concern about tourism, traveling all throughout the world, but we think it's very safe to be in Chinatown and hope that others will come.( [link] )

> I think Fauci fell a beat behind the narrative marching band in March when he said no to masks for the general population, and so had to make up a dumb story in June about how he nobly lied to save PPE for frontline workers in March. Consider this interview, done early March, in which Fauci argues against masks: [this video] . You don't even have to read between the lines because he explains his reasoning bluntly: "Exactly, that's the point. It could lead to a shortage of masks for people [(healthcare workers)] who really need it." He never at any point thought masks were ineffective. When he did say so in March as you see from this interview, he said it because he was concerned about shortages for medical staff. There doesn't exist evidence with which one can credibly accuse him of committing this sort of revisionism. Bringing up Kramer betrays a lack of familiarity with Fauci's history. Kramer and Fauci eventually came to be very close friends, and Kramer is on record saying Fauci was LGBT community's best friend. Mullis lost his marbles later in his life, sounding fringe views on HIV, astrology and lots of other stuff. His contribution of PCR technique is undeniably one of the great discoveries in chemistry, but he's not an authority on much else.

> Fauci did not argue against civilian masking solely based on shortages. No, he did. You linked the same clip I linked, except minus the 20 seconds where he reveals his reasoning. Please refer to slightly longer version: [this video] I agree it wasn't a great thing to play down masks to the extent he did, but as someone else pointed out, explaining the nuance of the situation to 350 million people is a tough task. Remember the toilet paper situation? Imagine if he'd sold masks as the solution, people would try to get their hands on one at all costs, they would not have faith in home-made cloth masks, they'd want what doctors are wearing because those are the ones that really work (is what they'd be saying)! Stories like these would be commonplace: [link] I frankly don't know how else he could've handled this if at the time the information available to them indicated a possible shortage of masks. What would you have done in his place at that time in that situation? And coming back to my original point: doesn't Fauci deserve a pass on this one, considering how sticky the situation was? Give me a few minutes to find a link on Kramer talking about Fauci

>Last year they consciously lied that masks were ineffective to preserve them for health workers. I'm tired of hearing this meme. A lie implies they were hiding their intentions, but leadership was transparent about saving masks for healthcare workers from the start. It's just that nobody bothered to listen, and now people want someone to blame for not listening. Here is a video from Fauci from early March: [this video] In it Fauci says that masks are primarily ineffective at preventing you from contracting disease and effective at preventing its spread. At the time, it made sense to save the masks for healthcare workers and sick people.

>From "hug a chinese" to "masks don't help" one day, and "mandatory masks" the next. Which is exactly what you would expect to happen as we get new data on anything new. The fact that people were excepting the medical community to have prophetic knowledge about a novel virus barely a month after it had been confirmed speaks more to the American public's poor understanding of the scientific process. Side note, but just a reminder that Fauci NEVER said "masks don't work", as much as this gets repeated on social media. He said that they prevent infected people from spreading it to others and did not recommend that everyone wear them: [this video] And when further data came out about asymptomatic transmission, the recommendations changed. Side note 2: "hug a chinese" and "vaccinated people don't spread COVID" were both from politicians, not the medical or scientific communities. I found plenty of blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels from actual epidemiologists and virologists (such as "this week in virology") who did not say such things. Unfortunately Americans don't really care enough to distinguish between "science communicated by politicians" and "science communicated by scientists". After 2020 and watching as people working in relevant fields - like the podcast above, or "your local epidemiologist" - just got straight-up ignored by COVID deniers, I'm not even sure most of the public even knows how to look up "communication by scientists"...

The contemporaneous statements often mentioned shortages and preserving masks for healthcare workers. This Fauci interview in early March has him saying that he thinks masks aren't necessary at the time but also saying that he isn't against people wearing them (both things together at ~1 minute if you are impatient): [this video] This CDC transcript doesn't talk a lot about PPE, but it talks about directing it to healthcare workers that are at higher risk: [link] I'm sure there's stuff that looks worse if you go back through the 6 weeks previous to that, but early March is when things started to really happen in the US (I remember making a relatively large shopping trip that felt like it put me on the cautious side of things, and then the next week I started working from home). There's a lot of people saying that the government was saying not to wear masks, which is subtly different from saying that people don't need to wear masks, or that masks won't benefit most people. The surgeon general was out there saying they weren't effective for the general public, which is bad but still different from saying not to wear them. And I'm not sure it's entirely fair to attribute his comms failures to the CDC (they might have had a hand in it, who knows, but they don't control the surgeon general). Given how well people do with their masks (I still regularly see people wearing low quality masks incorrectly!), it seems true enough that they should be secondary to things like social distancing.

It's frankly worse because he won't even admit he was lying. We knew about asymptomatic spread back in January and he's mischaracterizing his own "masks don't work" message. It just further erodes any reason to trust him. "Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks" "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. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face." - Dr Fauci, March 8th 2020 [this video]