Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

> Over two years worth of bullshit, and still flowing...


When Fauci Told The Truth About Masking

https://brownstone.org/articles/when-fauci-told-the-truth-about-masking/
https://www.amazon.com/Unmasked-Global-Failure-COVID-Mandates/dp/1637583761

On February 4, 2020, just a month before his 60 Minutes interview, and
two months before the CDC, with Fauci’s support, changed their mask
guidance, he received an email from Sylvia Burwell, who had previously
worked as a secretary of Health and Human Services under President
Obama.

Burwell asked Fauci if she should bring a mask with her while
traveling, to which he responded:

    “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.”

More importantly, he gave her one of the many scientifically based
reasons why it wasn’t necessary,

    “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. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in
keep[ing] out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you. I do
not recommend that you wear a mask…”

There are several key points to highlight about his response,
beginning with his statement that masks are not meant to provide
protection to the wearer. Although this is consistent with the initial
recommendation for the public to wear masks as a form of “source
control,” the CDC and Fauci maintained that asymptomatic spread was
the reason for recommending universal masking. But as previously
noted, asymptomatic spread is incredibly rare to nonexistent.

If symptomatic individuals or those in the very early stages of
showing symptoms are responsible for the overwhelming majority of
spread, as multiple studies suggest, masks were never going to be
effective at preventing asymptomatic cases from spreading to others.
The new recommendations were doomed to fail as soon as they were
implemented.

Secondly, and most notably, Fauci gave a specific explanation of the
inherent flaws of masks purchased by the general public: that the
virus is too small and passes right through the material. This
sentence alone illustrates the inescapable contradiction to his later
statement on the lack of supply as his initial hesitation to recommend
masks. His immediate reply, based presumably on scientific evidence
that he had seen and reviewed, was that masks do not work against
viruses.

His assertion that masks might provide some slight benefit against
droplets caused by coughing and sneezing is precisely the same
argument used by the CDC and others to justify masking, but his
previous statement negates that line of thinking entirely. If masks
stop some droplets but the virus is too small to be blocked, lab
experiments purporting to prove mask efficacy are functionally
useless. Mechanistic laboratory simulations using mannequins wearing
masks to show how well they stop droplets are measuring the wrong
thing entirely.

Dr. Fauci knew pre-April 2020 that stopping droplets, the only thing
that masks might potentially accomplish, won’t help due to the size of
virus particles. He said nothing about ensuring supply for health care
workers, who would need masks for protection in their duty as
frontline providers treating COVID patients. He simply stated that
masks are ineffective.

Conclusively, his final comment forcefully restated his point, “I do
not recommend that you wear a mask.”

That sentiment sums up what Fauci knew about masking, and that is
exactly what he said when questioned on 60 Minutes.

Up until the CDC changed their guidance, Fauci’s thinking was entirely
consistent. Then, suddenly, and without any significant shift in
evidence base, his opinion dramatically flipped.

How can we be so sure that the evidence base didn’t change?

Well, because Fauci’s emails cover that as well. On March 31, just a
few days before the CDC’s new recommendation for universal masking, he
received an email from Andrea Lerner, another employee at NIAID and
the National Institutes of Health.

Lerner confirmed what the entire scientific community already knew;
there was no evidence that masking reduced transmission of
influenza-like illnesses:

    “In addition, I found the attachedd [sic] review on masks that
addresses use in the community settings. Attached are the paper and
figure 3, which summarizes the data from 9 very diverse RCTs
(overlapping with what I had sent earlier). Bottom line [sic]:
generally there were not differences in ILI/ URI/or flu rates when
masks were used…”

Fauci knew masks didn’t work to prevent illnesses like COVID. He knew
that the evidence on masks hadn’t changed because one of his top
employees confirmed that there was no positive impact from masking
based on the gold standard of scientific research, randomized
controlled trials.

On March 31, Fauci was sent that email, confirming that his statements
on March 8 to 60 Minutes were scientifically correct, yet on April 3,
he and the CDC, with no new evidentiary basis, recommended universal
masking.

The impact of that decision, based on an inaccurate assumption of
asymptomatic spread and a purposeful disregard for the evidence,
fundamentally changed the country. Masks became a political and
cultural flash point, prompting endless inaccurate information from
the media, embarrassingly poor-quality studies from scientific
institutions attempting to prove they worked, and their supposed
efficacy was used to justify putting children as young as two years
old in masks indefinitely.