On March 8, 2020, Anthony Fauci told “60 Minutes” that a healthy person had “no reason to be walking around with a mask.” Within a year, he was applauding the idea of wearing two.
The official explanation is that the science changed—that we learned about presymptomatic and asymptomatic spread. Fauci’s own diary destroys that explanation twice, in his own hand, and what it leaves behind is inventory management, sold to a frightened country as medicine.
I pull back the curtain on the mask war in my new book, “Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison”—and I can tell you what the other side of it looked like, because I was fighting it. While Fauci was on television explaining why Americans did not need masks, I was in the West Wing getting them some—the good kind, the N95 kind essential for first responders.
On Feb. 9, 2020—31 days before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic—I wrote a memo to the Coronavirus Task Force warning that China produced about half the world’s N95 masks, was blocking their export, and that “The U.S. therefore faces the real prospect of a severe mask shortage!”
I asked for an export halt, purchase guarantees for every domestic producer at maximum output, and Buy American rules for the masks that cover an American face.
Then the phone rang. On March 12, a Honeywell vice president told me the company could stand up two new N95 manufacturing lines, in Rhode Island and Arizona, if Washington moved fast. Washington does not move fast. So I gave her my word—no signature, no paper.
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Within 24 hours, Honeywell’s trucks, on my word, were hauling production machinery out of Massachusetts. By the end of the first Trump administration, those two manufacturing lines were turning out tens of millions of American-made N95s a month and employing more than a thousand Americans.
That was my mask war. Making masks. Now Fauci’s.
Here is the first thing his diary kills: his alibi for switching his position on masks. Supposedly the guidance changed when science learned that people without symptoms could spread the virus. But in the first days of February 2020, George Gao—the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention—told Fauci directly, in Fauci’s words, “that infected people can be asymptomatic and that asymptomatic people can transmit.”
He knew in the first week of February. He told “60 Minutes” there was no reason for a mask a month later.
Here is the second thing, and it is worse. On June 23, 2020, after a six-hour House hearing, Fauci recorded a run-in with a West Virginia congressman who was “giving me s— about saying early on that we should not wear masks to save them for the HCWs [health care workers] at a time when there was a shortage.”
Read it again. Save them for the health care workers. On Fauci’s own telling, the “no reason” of March 8 was never an assessment of the evidence. It was supply triage. Tell the public not to worry about getting masks—so the masks stay on the shelf for the people who need them, in his judgment, more.
In the same March weeks Anthony Fauci was managing a shortage by misleading Americans about masks, Honeywell’s trucks were rolling toward Rhode Island on nothing but my word, and two factories were preparing to end the shortage he was lying to accommodate. One of us treated it as a production problem and fixed it. The other treated it as a communications problem.
And watch the staircase he climbed. March 31, in the diary: “We probably were too strong in saying masks do not work.” Not the science changed—we were too strong.
By summer: “There’s no doubt that wearing masks protects you.” By autumn: “begging people to wear masks.” By February 2021, two of them.
No reason, to too strong, to no doubt, to begging, to double up—each certainty delivered with exactly the confidence of the one it silently replaced. A scientist updating his communication based on evidence says what he said, what changed, and why. This was a ratchet.
Let me be precise, because flattening this debate was itself the trick. I was never anti-mask; I ran mask production. The mask on those trucks had a federal filtration standard, a fit requirement, and a nurse’s face to protect. What Washington eventually sold under that same four-letter word ran down to a damp and floppy bandanna on a 5-year-old.
And the children paid for it. Fauci’s influence imposed years of face covering on small children at low risk from the disease, without evidence of benefit at that age, while treating the developmental cost to children as not important enough to measure.
Everything I did in that war was supply. What President Trump and I never did was order one free citizen to wear anything.
As for Tony, there is an old line that you can tell when he is lying because his lips are moving. Maybe that is the real reason he wore the mask.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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