Although many of us are required to wear masks in our communities, in stores and businesses, in our own business, and outdoors any time we can't social distance, we don't like it, but we do comply for a variety of reasons. Being in a city in a dense population area that was hard hit by COVID-19, and where it can be hard to avoid being close to people, where the peer pressure and medical community are strongly entrenched, it can be difficult and even dangerous to protest mask-wearing and thus cut oneself off from friends, peers, work, etc. and suffer the ostracism, distrust and disdain of those in our sphere. Not to mention that mask wearing is still controversial, and there are both benefits and risks that have already been discussed to death. My family members are all mature, whether in high-risk group or not. For me, its just better to be safe than sorry, and blend in, which doesn't mean I don't complain or point out the inconsistencies in the directives...it just means I comply when people are around, and I spend a lot of time alone, either at home or in nature, so I can be mask-free. ~PB
Dr. Anthony Fauci has been hailed as a hero during the coronavirus
pandemic, delivering thoughtful health advice while most members of the
Trump regime have spread misinformation about covid-19. But there’s one
area where Fauci let America down, hindering the public health response
and giving the U.S. both the highest coronavirus case count and the
worst recorded death toll in the world. Simply put, Fauci lied about
whether masks were helpful in slowing the spread of the virus.
© Photo: Getty Images
Fauci was asked yesterday by financial news outlet
The Street why the U.S. government didn’t promote masks early on during the pandemic. Fauci, who sits on the Trump regime’s
zombie-like
coronavirus task force, hinted that he knew masks worked, he just
wanted any available masks to be saved for health care workers.
“Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public
health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that
it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N-95
masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply,” Fauci said.
“And we wanted to make sure that the people, namely the health care
workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take
care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the
danger of them getting infected.”
Fauci didn’t just fail to
promote masks early on, he actively discouraged the use of masks, saying
they didn’t work. Americans are now paying the price because too many
people think masks are useless to combat the coronavirus. In reality,
masks have been shown to help prevent the spread of covid-19, as the CDC
now
admits.
All
we need to do is look at the things that Fauci was saying back in
February—a time before most Americans were taking the threat of covid-19
seriously and people like Donald Trump were assuming it was just a
problem for the Chinese government.
“There is no reason for anyone
right now in the United States, with regard to coronavirus, to wear a
mask,” Fauci told Spectrum News DC on
February 14.
It
was something that Fauci would say repeatedly whenever he gave
interviews in February, as the pandemic spread to countries like
Germany, Italy, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. And Fauci may not have
known it yet, but coronavirus was also spreading quickly in the U.S. By
the end of February, over
20 countries had identified the coronavirus within their borders.
Despite
being remembered as level-headed during the early days of the crisis in
the U.S., Fauci was incredibly slow to publicly recognize the threat
from coronavirus. On
February 17,
he recalled stories of people asking whether it was safe to travel,
ridiculing the idea that it might not be wise to get on a plane. But it
was clear to anyone paying attention to news media outside of the U.S.
that the coronavirus would soon be an international problem.
First,
a quick lesson in recent history: Human-to-human transmission of the
novel coronavirus was confirmed on January 21, Chinese leader Xi Jinping
said publicly that the health crisis from coronavirus “must be taken
seriously,” on
January 21,
over 20 million people in China were put into lockdown on January 23,
Disneyland locations in Hong Kong and Shanghai both closed in the last
week of January, and countries like Australia were already setting up
quarantine for some travelers in the first week of February. High school
teachers returning to Australia from China were even giving classes by
Zoom in early February, as Gizmodo reported
at the time.
By mid-February, the pandemic in Italy had gotten so bad that hospitals were becoming overwhelmed and case counts were
rising exponentially. The Lombardy region of Italy went into lockdown and on
February 23 grocery store shelves were stripped bare as people purchased food in a panic.
With
all of this going on around the world, February 17 was an incredibly
late date to be making fun of people who were concerned about travel.
But that’s precisely what Fauci did in the pages of USA Today.
“I was getting calls from people in Sacramento saying, ‘Can I get on an airplane to go to Seattle?’” Fauci told USA Today on
February 17. “Like, what? What does that got to do with anything?”
We now know that the first identified American death from covid-19 was on
February 6 in San Jose, California. And because the CDC wasted the entire month of February with
faulty tests,
no one knows just how widespread the disease already was in the U.S.
during the first weeks of February. And it wasn’t just in February that
Fauci dismissed the threat. As late as March, Fauci was still insisting
that masks were bad for public health.
“There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” Fauci told 60 Minutes on CBS during an interview that aired
March 8.
“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.”
It’s no surprise that anti-mask advocates often use Fauci’s interview with 60 Minutes when they
try to discredit
masks as an effective tool on social media. And platforms like Facebook
and Twitter are still filled with people who insist that you can
actually hurt yourself by wearing a mask because you’re forced to inhale
carbon dioxide. It’s a dumb and inaccurate argument, but it’s
surprisingly common.
Masks were the butt of jokes in early March, as people like Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz infamously
wore a gas mask
on the House floor while he went to vote on the $8.3 billion emergency
spending bill passed on March 4. Gaetz and other Republicans appeared on
Fox News to insist that it was all nothing but hype, something that
some commentators like
Laura Ingraham still claim, despite the fact that tens of thousands of Americans are still contracting the virus every single day.
2.29K subscribers
Video player from: YouTube (
Privacy Policy,
Terms
Other western countries like the UK were also initially skeptical of
masks, leading to a terrible outbreak in England, exacerbated by a
bungled response from Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a man who
eventually survived
his own bout with covid-19 after being moved to the ICU and given
oxygen. The BBC, Britain’s public broadcaster, even aired anti-mask
segments that insisted facemasks did nothing to stop the spread of
coronavirus, including this one from March 22 that’s still available on
YouTube.
The UK currently has over 298,000 cases and at least 41,000 deaths, the
fourth worst outbreak in the world. The U.S. has over 2.1 million cases
and more than 116,000 deaths, with no signs of the pandemic slowing
down.
What would have happened if Fauci had been honest with
Americans back in February, leveling with people that the U.S. didn’t
have a good supply of facial coverings for health workers and that any
N-95 masks should be reserved for doctors and nurses? Fauci could have
explained that while masks worked, they needed to be reserved for health
care professionals. The government was seizing most of the masks while
they were shipped anyway, so it’s not like most masks were finding their
way to stores.
Instead, Fauci and other top government officials
made fun of people who wanted to wear a mask. U.S. Surgeon General
Jerome Adams even told people on February 29 to stop buying masks
because they don’t work.
“Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!” Adams
tweeted.
“They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching
#Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for
sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
And, as a
result, there was mass confusion when the government finally flipped
and started to recommend masks for everyone, even if they had to make
them at home. The CDC didn’t change its guidance on mask use until April
3, finally recommending that people wear masks, even if they’re
homemade out of cloth.
© Photo: Getty Images
A restaurant guest wears a facemask with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of
the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as Fish
Tails bar and grill opens for in-person dining, amid the coronavirus
pandemic, on May 29, 2020 in Ocean City, Maryland
Fauci’s refusal to embrace masks has had a real impact on the way
that Americans perceive the coronavirus fight. And, like everything
today, even masks have become a partisan battleground. Roughly 70% of
Democrats say they wear a mask “every time” they leave the house,
according to a poll late last month by the
Kaiser Family Foundation. Compare that with just 37% of Republicans.
There
have been subtle differences in the ways that each country has fought
the coronavirus pandemic. New Zealand closed its borders and implemented
a system to test residents. Kiwis then scaled up its track and trace
program to identify close contacts, isolating them so that they didn’t
get others sick. Taiwan also implemented track and trace procedures, but
it put a special emphasis on masks to control community spread. Hong
Kong put a heavy emphasis on “
universal masking” as well, which is credited with keeping the spread of covid-19 to a minimum.
Health
officials in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan even tried to warn western
countries that they needed to wear masks, and it’s not the fault of the
American people that they didn’t listen. Americans were hearing from
their own health experts, not watching international news.
“If you
are going to a crowded place, put on a mask even if you are not ill
because others may be, even if they have cough etiquette or sneeze
etiquette, they may still get in touch with you,” Dr. Gabriel Leung, an
expert on SARS and Director of the WHO Collaborating Center for
Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Control, said at a press conference
in Hong Kong on
January 21, as Gizmodo reported at the time.
But
America’s own health officials, people like Anthony Fauci, were telling
Americans that masks were useless. And Americans are going to pay the
price in the months and years ahead, as there’s no guarantee that a
covid-19 vaccine will even work if it’s developed. It doesn’t matter if
his heart was in the right place in some effort to save masks for
doctors and nurses, Fauci did real harm to public health in the United
States.
When all is said and done, Fauci might be remembered as a
folk hero, but he sure has a lot of blood on his hands. And none of
this is anywhere close to done.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dr-fauci-made-the-coronavirus-pandemic-worse-by-lying-about-masks/ar-BB15zyW3?ocid=sf
26K subscribers
![Anthony S. Fauci, Donald Trump are posing for a picture]({"default":{"load":"default","w":"80","h":"45","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB15zuGK.img?h=449&w=799&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=501&y=139"},"size3column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"35","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB15zuGK.img?h=351&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=501&y=139"},"size2column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"35","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB15zuGK.img?h=351&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=501&y=139"}})
![a man talking on a cell phone: A restaurant guest wears a facemask with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as Fish Tails bar and grill opens for in-person dining, amid the coronavirus pandemic, on May 29, 2020 in Ocean City, Maryland]({"default":{"load":"default","w":"80","h":"53","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB15zoa6.img?h=533&w=799&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=493&y=168"},"size3column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"42","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB15zoa6.img?h=416&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=493&y=168"},"size2column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"42","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB15zoa6.img?h=416&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=493&y=168"}})
