“From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent,” Fauci told the Times. “But for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it’s not at the margin. It really does work.”
Collins focused on that particular quote when the 82-year-old immunologist appeared on CNN This Morning this week, asking whether Fauci believed the mask mandates put in place during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic were a mistake.
“You know, I don’t want to say a mistake,” Fauci responded, “but I think we really need to remember next time where we’re confronted with this, that when you have a situation where there’s doubt in the minds of some people about whether something works or not, we better try to reach out and be a better explainer of why we feel these things are important.”
“Because whenever, particularly in our country, with our free spirit, which we all embrace, that people being told what to do very often has the opposite effect,” he continued. “That’s what I was referring to in that interview.”
According to Fauci, the mask mandate would have had a greater effect on preventing individuals from catching Covid if there was not a “culture war” surrounding the implementation of the mandate when the pandemic first started in March 2020.
“But I think anything that instigated or intensified the culture wars just made things worse,” Fauci said. “And I have to be honest with you, 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,” he continued. “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 […] there are people who are not going to make use of an intervention that could have saved their lives.”
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As RadarOnline.com reported, more than one million Americans are estimated to have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic first started three years ago.
Besides coming under fire for claiming the mask mandate prevented “maybe 10%” of the U.S. population from catching the virus, Fauci also recently faced backlash after a Department of Energy report indicated the virus was leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
House Republicans have since demanded an investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 virus, as well as a probe into Fauci’s handling of the outbreak as chief medical advisor to the president in 2021 and 2022.