- Said COVID was “small enough to pass through material.”
In an email from February 2020 released under the Freedom of Information Act, Dr. Anthony Fauci wrote that a typical store-bought face mask “is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material.”
Included in the trove of emails, which were obtained by The Washington Post and BuzzFeed News, is Fauci’s response to former health and human services secretary Sylvia Burwell when she asked him for advice about wearing face masks while traveling.
Fauci wrote: “Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection.
“The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you.”
Fauci went on in the email to advise Burwell not to wear a face mask because she was visiting “a very low risk location.” Dr. Fauci was still advising against wearing face masks as late as March 2020, when he told the media, “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”
He later reversed his position after the CDC began recommending that Americans wear face coverings.
Social media networks have long censored and deleted information pertaining to the efficacy of masks, or lack thereof, despite numerous credible studies concluding that they are largely useless at stopping the spread of COVID-19.
A study in Denmark involving 6,000 participants found that “there was no statistically significant difference between those who wore masks and those who did not when it came to being infected by Covid-19,” the Spectator reported.
“1.8 per cent of those wearing masks caught Covid, compared to 2.1 per cent of the control group. As a result, it seems that any effect masks have on preventing the spread of the disease in the community is small.”
