In 2019, an unknown virus caused acute pneumonia in a man from Wuhan City, China.
As of April 2024, that virus has caused over 700 million infections and 7 million deaths.
Our lives have changed significantly as a result of this virus — national shutdowns, teleworking, homeschooling, small business failure, mandates, and massive reports of illness and death. COVID-19 is the name of the novel coronavirus, also called SARS-CoV-2 because of similarity to the original SARS-Cov (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome).
Recently, President Joe Biden removed the title of “public health emergency” from COVID-19 in May of 2023, leaving Americans to process the events of the last three years.
In reflection, the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in America has left a bad taste in the mouth of the public. Many are raising concerns about the variability of public health messaging, the speed at which vital information reaches the general public, and the ability of a limited government organization to dictate the actions of a nation.
It is true that in terms of scientific discovery, there is a need for continual revision of previous conclusions to continue curiously towards the future.
The optimization of a modern car engine, the discovery of the structure of DNA, and the modification of antibiotics to suit our current bacteria-defeating needs are all great examples — we need to be flexible to grow, and thus we can learn more about the problems sitting directly in front of our face.
While that is true, we must investigate the way that scientists and the American government handled the distribution of COVID-19 related information, how that impacted what measures we took as a nation to prevent and treat the virus, and what information we are currently discovering about COVID-19, four years after the eruption of this virus.
Background of the COVID-19 Pandemic 
In this article, I intend to address the timeline of COVID-19 progression to the United States, how the CDC handled that information, and how mixed messages from trusted public health sources reduced trust in the American government. I searched through all the WHO situation reports for raw data, as well as scoured the CDC website for both current advice and archived guidances. Additionally, I incorporate relevant research studies and interviews from key figures in the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
To start, we examine the important context of who is involved in the distribution of this information, both initially and continuously as screening and treatment of the virus evolves.
The first information came through the World Health Organization (WHO) from the representative office in the Hubei province of China. As the information continued, it progressed through the hands of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), then to the hands of legislators who voted on where the CDC got to spend the government’s money, then to the many public officials and health experts that dominated popular media.
In the United States, the CDC is the primary source for all public health and disease mitigation strategies. Starting in 1946 as a small military committee in Atlanta, the CDC (at that time, the Communicable Disease Center) focused on the elimination of malaria in war areas. Since then, the CDC has expanded in power and breadth far beyond just malaria — they are the primary source of U.S. public health messaging and disease mitigation.
They are funded through budget approval by Congress, where money is specifically allocated by the sitting legislators to either enact or deny the efforts of the CDC and the sitting director. For example, this is the published budget report on the first round of emergent funding for the CDC’s response to COVID-19. This director is independently hired by the board at the CDC, but will soon additionally require the approval vote of Congress as early as 2025. This is largely due to the post-pandemic frustration of the current Congress with both Dr. Robert R. Redfield, director from 2018–2021, and Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, director from 2021–2023.
The CDC reports both to the American government as its primary stakeholder and to global health organizations — as part of the UN (United Nations) and the WHO (World Health Organization), the CDC gathers data about international public health affairs through our partnership with the WHO.
The WHO is a main source of data and scientific reports concerning new diseases in all corners of the world. The UN started the World Health Organization, designing a global health organization in 1948 with the aim to “connect nations, partners and people to promote health, keep the world safe and serve the vulnerable – so everyone, everywhere can attain the highest level of health.” The WHO is responsible for convening the world’s public health efforts to eliminate smallpox in 1980 and working to “provid[e] technical assistance to countries; set international health standards and providing guidance on health issues; coordinat[e] and support international responses to health emergencies such as disease outbreaks; and
promot[e] and advocat[e] for better global health.”
Although a portion of the funding for the WHO comes from required member contributions, a great majority of the budget comes from voluntary contributions, reportedly 87% in 2023. The U.S. was the single largest voluntary contributor to the WHO until 2020 and 2021, where President Trump pulled a large percentage of American voluntary funding, dropping us to third in the ranks of voluntary contributors to WHO. When President Biden took office in 2021, he stopped the efforts to withdraw the U.S. from the WHO, restoring our place as primary voluntary contributors to the WHO. While he was in office, Trump also started the process of pulling the US out of the WHO in 2020, ending our partnership upon the thought that the organization was not only ineffective at its job, but was deferential to China in its dealings.
These criticisms are poignant, considering the WHO is decentralized, unable to enact or force member nations to comply with their public health guidance, and is working with a more limited budget than some of the top medical institutions in the U.S. Yet, a fair concession remains that without the U.S. involved, China does stand to gain a significant proportion of member influence over the distribution of already-limited WHO funds. China held the start to a global pandemic, and the WHO appears to have not held China accountable for its failures as it holds other nations.
China has been a partner of the United Nations since 1946, and was one of the first to propose a global health-centered organization. At that time, China was still represented by the delegates from the Republic of China — that would be the case until 1971. Mao Zedong declared that China was to become the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, and it took between 1949 and 1971 for the first official delegates from the PRC to become official delegates of China in the UN and WHO.
What Happened?
The Beginning
All eyes were on China at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The WHO office in China was the first to discover what was, at the time, a “pneumonia of an unknown etiology (cause)” afflicting the first group of people between December 31st, 2019 and January 11th, 2020.
In a retroactive assertion from a Republican memorandum, a committee of Congress claims that the virus was created in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) through partial American funding. The memorandum from October 19, 2022 cites the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), with Dr. Fauci at the head, funded a grant to EcoHealth, which then funded the WIV to research the transmissibility of bat-associated coronaviruses. There is an assertion that, because of a failure to report shutdown on a virus with significant potential to grow out of control, there may be reason to investigate if the uber-transmissible COVID-19 was a “lab leak,” or just an unfortunate evolutionary mishap.
No matter the origin and questionable beginnings of the virus, the spread started rapidly after identification. Cases from December 31st, 2019 – January 11th, 2020 were grouped in Wuhan City, Hubei province of China, and the virus was quickly sequenced and published by January 7th, 2020. With testing measures in place, the virus was quickly identified to have spread to Korea, Thailand, and Japan by January 20th, 2020.
The WHO started its incident management protocol on January 2nd, which stretched from the regional level of the Hubei province, to the national level of China, and then to the global WHO headquarters.
Why does the WHO guidance matter?
The delegates from the United States had the first set of information available to them within the first three days of what would become a devastating global pandemic. The U.S. had interim guidance from the WHO as soon as January 7th on how to handle screening and testing, and the CDC responded by developing a U.S. system that same day.
The U.S. had the sequence of the virus and identifiable tests that could confirm or deny the etiology of this novel coronavirus. But what we did not have was the knowledge to prevent the spread of this disease if it entered the American borders.
And it did.
The Emergence in the U.S.
Our first reported case in the United States was from a traveler returning from Wuhan, China. In fact, by February 5th, 2020, nine of the eleven reported cases in the U.S. were from travelers returning from Wuhan, the other two being direct contact with those infected.
By January 17th, just over two weeks after the initial report of an “unknown pneumonia,” the U.S. started screening three major international ports of entry from Wuhan (Los Angeles Airport, San Francisco Airport, and John F. Kennedy Airport). By January 21st, the travel precaution for travel to Wuhan was upgraded from Level One (regular precaution) to Level Two (increased precaution for risk groups).
On January 23rd, the WHO declared COVID-19 a “public health emergency,” far after thousands of cases were reported and many more went untested. Alongside this slow declaration, many experts have also criticized the WHO’s response to the Chinese management of the pandemic. While the WHO harped on reported cases and measures taken to “prevent the spread” of the virus, they did not report on the unreliability of the case data from China, the lack of asymptomatic testing that led to the global spread of the virus, and the human rights violations quickly adopted by the Chinese government to control the population.
As of January 25th, 2020, the WHO further recommended avoiding contact with symptomatic people, practicing good hand-washing etiquette, and avoiding unprotected contact with domestic or wild animals. The guidance seemed well-oriented — there was no way to predict the scale of such a virus, despite numerical data suggesting that COVID-19 was spreading faster than we could create tests. As such, the CDC followed suit, recommending those same protocols for our American public health officials and medical practitioners.
Considering the response to the SARS-CoV (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in 2003 and MERS-CoV (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) in 2012, it makes sense that the WHO would be reluctant to initially advise the use of face masks.
With these two coronaviruses, the virus was transmitted through droplets, meaning that the majority of human-to-human transmission is from a sneeze or cough. This guidance is in situation reports 1–35 from the WHO, which were adopted by the CDC soon afterward. A 2004 study in Toronto in response to SARS-CoV outlined that providers and healthcare staff felt burdened by the use of N95 masking procedures, stating “physical discomfort” as a notable upset to their workflow as well as increased incidence of headaches and mental fogginess. Another study from 2006 noted a similar appearance of headaches in healthcare workers. It’s understandable that front-line workers and the consulting science experts would not want similar reports during the COVID-19 era!
The first mention of potential masking was published by the WHO on February 27th, 2020. In an interim guidance report titled “Rational use of personal protective equipment for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19),” the WHO recommends “wearing a medical mask if you have respiratory symptoms and performing hand hygiene after disposing of the mask [and] maintaining social distance (a minimum of 1 m) from individuals with respiratory symptoms.” Additionally, the WHO claimed asymptomatic people do not need to wear a mask, citing “unnecessary cost, procurement burden, and creat[ion] a false sense of security that can lead to the neglect of other essential preventive measures.” They cite a lack of evidence for increased personal protective equipment (PPE) for individuals at low-risk for transmission as a reason not to recommend mask-wearing for this respiratory illness.
As such, this is the guidance that the CDC and U.S. leaders followed.
We supported the WHO so fully that not just our signage reflected that trust — our leaders did too. On the same day the WHO’s document about the use of PPE was published, our sitting U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams tweeted, “Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.”
The clear fervor of our leaders often traveled much farther than the reach of the CDC’s public health messaging. It didn’t matter that the CDC was “still reviewing evidentiary cases,” because the court of public opinion in the U.S. was decided. If trusted scientific leaders were giving such bold and confident instructions, there must be some good scientific evidence behind it!
Right?
On April 1st, 2020, I remember sitting in the middle of the Allegheny Mountains when the governor of Pennsylvania gave the “Stay At Home” order. I had no idea how that would impact me and my work — I lived with eight other girls in a house, all working at the same very rural internship, and we lived adjacent to every other house on the woodland property.
We stayed at home for two days unable to do our work, wondering what the future held for our ability to research, to grow food, to eventually even go home to our families all across the United States.
I was told on April 3rd that even after all the publicity surrounding the lack of need for masks, we would be required to cover our faces whenever we could be in any social contact with others. Since we ordered food from one wholesale place for the whole property, there was little risk of us being exposed to anyone with the virus unless we made the 45-minute journey to town.
On April 3rd, President Trump announced a change in U.S. federal policy about the ever-exploding pandemic — masks should be worn at all times when you come into contact with others not in your household. He seemed to be as confused as the American public.
The CDC was in silent agreement, generating data from case studies to conclusively say that masks would be the correct option for the American population. After all, the WHO had not released anything big or official about the efficacy of fabric or makeshift masks in preventing transmission of COVID-19, so what could the CDC say?
On June 5th, the director of the WHO released official guidance on masking for member states. Although most countries and respective public health agencies had already cast a verdict on masking, the WHO changed their official guidance to include face masking with fabric masks, citing that “in light of evolving evidence, the WHO advises that governments should encourage the general public to wear masks where there is widespread transmission and physical distancing is difficult.” They stick to their guns that these masks should be three-layered fabric, non-medical masks to continue saving critical inventory for healthcare workers and risk groups.
The WHO still asserted that masks are just one way of reducing transmission of the virus—proper methods for hand cleaning, surface cleaning, and social distancing are still paramount in preventing COVID-19 from spreading.
Although masking was just a “piece” of guidance from the WHO and our U.S. political leaders, it was the most notable and tangible change in our daily lives. Why?
Masking created visible evidence of compliance or non-compliance.
Most often, with the obvious exception of visible dirt or grime, you cannot tell if someone has washed their hands. You just hope that after a trip to the bathroom, touching a gas pump, or after tending to a sick child, someone has washed their hands.
We give that same public trust to suspicious-looking symptoms—maybe that lingering cough and sniffle are allergies, maybe the eye redness and bags under the eyes are because they have a newborn at home that keeps them up at all hours of the night, and maybe that pallor is just their natural skin tone.
But masking was inarguably the creator of the in-group and the out-group for compliance.The leering stares of people with custom Etsy three-layer masks judged the defiant glares of those with visible mouths.
On July 14th, 2020, the CDC seemingly “caught up” to the masking guidance not only produced within our own borders, but international guidance. After a case where two unknowingly COVID-19-positive hairdressers wore masks and didn’t spread the virus to their 139 combined clients, the CDC ruled fabric masks to be an effective intervention for reducing transmission of the virus.
How would we have generated that crucial case evidence without the compliance of two women taking steps to follow U.S. leadership guidance, even without the CDC’s solid endorsement of masking practices?
This is a prime example of what will later be discussed — the CDC’s proclivity to produce “data for publication” rather than “data for action.”
As much as science is hard to predict, and the movements and transmission of an ever-evolving virus are similarly hard to predict, we have the CDC and the WHO to be at the forefront of public health measures and messaging. The CDC is not unreliable, just remarkably slow.
The Biden Administration’s Ever-Changing Rules
Unfortunately, even with the introduction of vaccines, guidance flip-flopped as new variants of COVID-19 emerged. This timeline is based on the report by the LA Times in July 2021.
In his first days in office in January 2021, President Joe Biden issued executive orders requiring masking in federal buildings. The CDC followed up by mandating masks in travel-centric environments, making refusal to wear a mask a violation of federal law. This is a new reach in the CDC’s power as a government organization and allows for the setting of a precedent that governmental organizations can create such mandates.
In March 2021, the CDC said that fully vaccinated people can have small indoor gatherings maskless, while unvaccinated people still must universally wear masks for “protection”.
In April 2021, the CDC said that outside, when running or doing activities with natural separation, you do not have to have a mask regardless of vaccination status.
In May 2021, fully vaccinated people were seemingly restored to their pre-pandemic status — impermeable to the virus in the eyes of the CDC. Unvaccinated people are still asked to wear masks.
In July 2021, the CDC reversed that decision in light of the new virulent and highly transmissible Delta variant. They asked that regardless of vaccination status, for everyone to wear a mask.
In late 2021, as the Omicron variant started to spread, local public health officials suggested masking differently or with more effective masks. The CDC did not publish an official guidance about the efficacy of different kinds of masks until mid-2022, now updated through mid-2023.
What Now?
With more objective eyes, the American public can examine ways our government failed and thus fight for solutions to overarching issues revealed in the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Ineffective Messaging
With these variable messages, the public struggled to find solid information to trust. The spread of information allowed more people to gain access to the raw data about the virus, looking at the implementation of public health disease mitigation strategies. Reliable and credible sources seemed to contradict each other, with no highlight or acknowledgment of the inevitable evolution of information. Just as new public health messaging was meant to permeate all spaces, outdated guidance, and mixed messages from federal officials, continuously saturated those spaces with the same intensity.
If public figures and high-ranking officials were the ones to distribute information most potently to the public, it makes sense to shift public health messaging from to a system that entrusts the newest information into the hands of talented and reliable communicators.
For example, in a 2022 study about the effect of social media on the efficacy of public health messaging during COVID-19, Dr. Basche suggests that “public health communication…should be calibrated to make it clear that there is an evolving context. The content of official public health agency social media accounts does not receive as many views as communications posted by popular entertainers, influencers, or, in some cases, even consumers.” It is clear that traditional news sources are not reaching all generations equally, either in quantity of information or speed of reception.
The masking fiasco of COVID-19 has placed the messaging reliability of the U.S. government’s public health systems into question. If a pandemic at this scale were to strike us today, would we be more or less prepared with the distribution systems in place at the CDC?
Now, in the midst of the publication of reviews, journal articles, and oft-constructively critical media pieces, we must evaluate the role of the American government officials and the CDC in their sluggish actions in protecting the American population. The CDC was slow when it needed to gather raw data and generate conclusions, but was quick to implement large-scale “protection” measures that were not even universally scientifically supported.
In a review briefing of the CDC’s ineptitudes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Wallensky, former head of the CDC, notes that much of the organization is primed for “publication rather than action.” Dr. Wallensky’s attitude reveals a reason behind many of the confusing and contradictory public health messages sent out during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It makes sense when you think about the people hired to work in the CDC — the minimum level of education you must have to be considered for an entry-level scientist position at the CDC is a Masters in Public Health, with most employees boasting an additional MD, PhD, or PharmD to boot.
These employees are largely coming to the CDC after working for years in a “publish or perish” environment in academia, where the pressure of a university is to generate and provide perfect science on your first attempt at an experiment. This pressure often generates one of two results: someone willing to risk their reputation to forge data (as we have recently seen with the discovery of amyloid picture forgery in a key research publication about a potential source of Alzheimer’s); or someone so petrified of messing up or getting a null result that they obsess, never stepping out with potentially important conclusions.
With that kind of staff in mind, combined with leadership and research structures that were inept to handle the wave of pandemic that crossed our borders, our nation was a sitting duck. It does not matter how many years some of the CDC employees have been doctors or have researched specific disease patterns if their data is unusable for general public health messages. It does not matter how many letters are by your name if you do not know how to be a team member or lead a team toward a strategic scientific goal.
In retrospect, we see this deficit clearly, examining the ways we, as the American people, need to call for further information and reform.
The first? Reform in messaging tactics.
Studies in many nations judged the efficacy of public health reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although this article specifically is targeted at the information available to Americans during the pandemic, it may be helpful to take into account the reaction and messaging available to other nations. For example, a study was conducted in England that suggested national public opinion and self-compliance rates for COVID-19 public health measures were highest when messaging was based on “self-efficacy” modes, which are messages that suggest that you, as the individual, hold the power to change the course of disease spread. Fear-based messaging came across as a guilt trip with no actionable steps, and moralizing messages were often met with resistance or messaging fatigue.
We see that same trend in America, where initial signage and verbiage suggested the message that wearing masks was not a vital part of the response to COVID-19 for most of the American public. Going off of the WHO’s initial guidance, this response makes sense.
For example, this graphic was used by the CDC on X (formerly Twitter) on February 12th, 2020 to encourage people to maintain healthy habits and prevent infection with COVID-19.
Even between the following two pictures, you can tell why message fatigue became present quickly in the U.S. Other than the added bullet point, you cannot distinguish between the two graphics, leading people to believe they had already seen that message and were inundated with the same message again. The first is from February 12th, 2020, and the second is from March 25th, 2020, both from the CDC.
Other than minor graphic changes, the messaging remained consistent — the real problem is the persistence. The fact that anyone can still access every graphic published by the CDC indicates the new permanence of our social media and websites. The lack of regulation on old guidelines is extremely misleading. If someone were to find the February update anytime after March 25th, they would have no idea that the next step in preventing COVID-19 was social distance.
The CDC’s Power
Other than the messaging issues and variability in recommendations by public health officials, another pressing issue is the structure of the dispersal of scientific information.
As former CDC Director Dr. Wallensky testifies, the CDC needs to be restructured. But she left before she could make it happen, and the aisle is split on what needs to change.
Many Republicans favor a plan to take power away from the CDC, splitting the governmental organization into two for the purpose of narrowing the scope of public health messaging. On the purpose of the agencies, the proposed 2025 Presidential Transition Project suggests that “one agency responsible for public health surveillance work, like data collection on outbreaks, and another responsible for “limited” public health recommendations — with a strict firewall between them.” This split is in response to the ineptitudes in both data intake and appropriate speed in the analysis and distribution of said data.
There is not as strong of a plan for the Democratic side, as they want to funnel more money and oversight into the role of the CDC. The efficacy of throwing large quantities of money at a problem is questionable at best. The CDC lacks a strong internal streamline for data collection and communication, which slows down the collection and reporting of data, and the U.S., in general, lacks about 80,000 public health officials that could boost the abilities of the state and national public health agencies. Analyses by political science specialists suggest that the CDC was more effective in potential pandemics like H1N1 and Ebola because it had more authority to unify national and local health agencies to a common goal — specific disease prevention and elimination. By pouring more funding into the CDC, focusing on adept communication, and ensuring that the CDC does not have to beg for emergency funding to keep the organization running, they propose that the CDC could function more flexibly and effectively.
The Debated Origins of COVID-19
The discovery of deleted emails between Dr. Fauci’s Senior Advisor, Dr. Moren, and the EcoHealth Alliance President, Dr. Peter Daszak, with the presence of Dr. Fauci’s name in the aforementioned emails, has raised questions about the potential that America’s public health hero is engaged in a cover-up.
The American public is pretty familiar with a scandal caused by deleted or “missing” emails, and is no stranger to repeated denial of top government officials trying to save their hide. It makes sense, considering the potential presence of a poignant conflict of interest. This U.S. House Committee document outlines and displays many of the hidden emails between Moren and Daszak.
Notably, in a comment by Dr. Moren, he says that a lab-leaked virus is “false to the point of being crazy” — this statement was quickly criticized by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic’s senior Democrat, Ruiz, suggested that all theories can hold credibility.
While these assertions are speculative, there is merit in investigating further and encouraging accountability for all government officials, especially those holding top positions in public health communications.
The Validity of the Science
The last thing that is left unresolved for the American public is truly the efficacy of the public health guidance we received during the COVID-19 pandemic.
There is room to acknowledge that hindsight is 20/20, and we cannot (unlike the CDC) wait around to draw conclusions when a pandemic is ravaging our nation. Even so, there is debatable evidence on the efficacy of the most tangible of our recommended precautions.
While masks and their mandates seemed to be the talk of the American public, there is questionable evidence that they maintain worthy efficacy in protecting the individuals who wear them — there is no logical lapse in saying that a mask can catch more of the droplets you expel when you sneeze or cough, but the efficacy of recommended masks has been called into question.
In the United Kingdom, Dr. Aodhan Breathnach is an infectious disease physician with the National Health Service Foundation Trust. He published a study in 2023 questioning the efficacy of masks in reducing transmission of the Omicron variant.
Although his sample was observational and based on 40 weeks of data from his hospital’s different wards, the study suggests a need to further investigate the efficacy of masking as a necessary element of COVID-19 continued guidance. The study doesn’t note mask compliance or hygienic mask practices within the mask-required and mask-voluntary wards, but “researchers found that patients admitted to wards where masks were optional were no more likely to become infected inside the hospital than were patients in units where masking remained mandatory.”
Masking may have been a great way to stop the initial spread of a droplet virus, but with changing guidance, changing variants of the virus, and changing vaccination requirements, the cost of providing masks as PPE may not be the best allocation of resources.
Additionally, a compelling review of published studies, which included “randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and cluster‐RCTs investigating physical interventions to prevent respiratory virus transmission,” was published by the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews in 2023. This study suggests that within multiple contexts, either due to a lack of mask efficacy or due to a lack of proper masking procedures even with the mask, the physical barrier of masking seemed to have a limited effect in preventing transmission of COVID-19.
The Cochrane Review also notes that “surgical masks with their cotton‐polypropylene fabric appear to be effective in the healthcare setting, but there are questions about the effectiveness of simple cotton masks,” yet an independent study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute suggests that cotton masks can be effective by absorbing humidity from your breath to effectively filter out viral particles.
The NIST suggests that “under humid conditions, the filtration efficiency — a measure of how well a material captures particles — increased by an average of 33% in cotton fabrics. Synthetic fabrics performed poorly relative to cotton, and their performance did not improve with humidity. The material from medical-procedure masks also did not improve with humidity, though it performed in roughly the same range as cottons.”
Most recently, in a hearing on January 9th, 2024 held by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic from the U.S. House of Representatives, Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted there was a lack of evidence to suggest the need for certain distances for social distancing to prevent COVID-19 and failed to recount sufficient evidence for child masking.
In one question delivered at Dr. Fauci’s hearing, he responds to a question about the basis of six feet for social distance by saying, “You know, I don’t recall. It sort of just appeared. I don’t recall, like, a 4 discussion of whether it should be 5 or 6 or whatever,” then later continuing by saying, “I think it would fall under the category of empiric. Just an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data or even data that could be accomplished. But I’m thinking hard as I’m talking to you.”
In that same hearing on January 9th, 2024, the Select Committee then asks Dr. Fauci about reviewing data behind masking children, considering the WHO recommended against masking under 5 and suggested parental choice in children aged 6 to 11. Fauci responds by saying, “You know, I might have, Mitch, but I don’t recall specifically that I did. I might have.”
With competing scientific narratives, it is easy to see why the American public would push back on regulations and mandates from seemingly shaky data.
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