Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci recently spoke at Tulane University, criticizing the public’s response to COVID-19 and defending the government’s mandates surrounding the virus.
“The thing that needed to be done is that you needed to have physical distancing, which you know, people say lockdown,” he said. “We didn’t lock down. China locked down. We definitely closed a lot of things down. So I think that if you really are fair and stop the finger-pointing–in the beginning, it was absolutely essential.”
“The only way you immediately shut down four to five thousand deaths per day was to shut things down for a while,” he continued, defending the action as the “right choice.”
Fauci added that there became “almost an ideological divide” on the issue of shutting down the U.S. and closing schools.
“One thing is very clear: masks work,” he claimed, listing N95 and KN95 masks.
Fauci also insisted that “next outbreak will be of a respiratory disease that’s easily transmissible, that has a significant degree of morbidity.”
Last year, Fauci appeared in front of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability to testify on COVID-19. When asked if there were any scientific studies supporting the social distancing mandate, he stated, “I was not aware of studies (…) that would be a very difficult study to do.”
Fauci further told the committee that he was “not aware of any evidence supporting the masking of children, and that it’s still ‘up in the air’ whether mask-wearing was associated with learning loss and speech development issues in children,” according to a congressional memo.
