Just months after Dr Anthony Fauci admitted that masks don’t work against COVID, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease is now saying masks do work.
During an appearance on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Fauci said “a number of studies show that masks actually do work” to stop the spread of COVID-19.
Anchor Jon Karl said, “There’s a new study out that suggests that masks were actually not effective, at least not in a global sense, in containing the pandemic. What is your sense looking back at all of this? Did masks prove to be less effective than you anticipated?”
Fauci responded:
“You know, Jon, some of the studies are confusing. The study that has been quoted a lot and causing a lot of confusion is this Cochrane Study which even the people who run the Cochrane Study say that that study can be misleading because people have commented on that study saying absolutely masks don’t work, which is absolutely not the case because there are a number of studies that show that masks actually do work.”
He added,
“There’s a lot of confusion when you take a broad series of studies, and you look at them in a meta-analysis. Only a couple of those studies have been specifically looking at COVID.”
“You have to be careful that that study can be very, very misleading. It’s a lot of good data that masks work.”
Karl said, “You’ve also said we’re not going to go back to the time of the federal mask mandates. That’s the thing of the past.
Fauci said:
“I don’t see that in the future at all. I can see that if we get a significant uptick in cases that, you may see the recommendation that masks be used under certain circumstances and indoor, crowded settings, but I don’t see them, certainly not federal mandates.”
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In April, Fauci said, “From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent,” he said in the interview with the New York Times.
Fauci continued:
“But I think anything that instigated or intensified the culture wars just made things worse. And I have to be honest with you, David, when it comes to masking, I don’t know.”
“But I do know that the culture wars have been really, really tough from a public-health standpoint. Ultimately an epidemiologist sees it as an epidemiological phenomenon.”
“An economist sees it from an economic standpoint. And I see it from somebody in bed dying. And that’s the reason it just bothers me a lot — maybe more so than some others — that because of the culture wars you’re talking about, there are people who are not going to make use of an intervention that could have saved their lives,” Fauci said.
READ: Jerry Nadler: Parents Who Refused to Mask Toddlers Are Guilty of “Child Abuse”
