Remember when Fauci said masks don't work then changed his mind like overnight and nobody thought this was the least bit ridiculous?
I remember!
One of the most outrageous aspects of the pandemic over the last 2.5 years was not merely that we were told to wear masks even though they really didn’t work, but that we were told to wear masks even though they really didn’t work and even though the experts told us they really didn’t work. It might be easy to forget, but if you recall you’ll remember that public health experts spent the first few months of 2020 urging everyone not to wear masks, then all of a sudden they all decided that we had to wear masks pretty much everywhere we went. It was extremely quick, just a total whiplash.
Perhaps most prominent in this class of flip-floppers was Anthony Fauci, who was emphatically against masks as late as early March of 2020. By the beginning of April he had fully embraced masking. What changed over that time? The official narrative over the past two years has been that, in early March, Fauci was against masks because there was no evidence to support their usage; then, throughout March, he became aware of evidence that demonstrated the efficacy of masks; subsequently, in April, he changed his mind.
This explanation is so fully a part of the COVID narrative that apparently Fauci himself was still claiming it this week while sitting for depositions on a somewhat-unrelated matter:
Of course he couldn’t name any of those “studies:” They didn’t exist. Two months is nowhere near enough time to conduct an efficacious scientific investigation of something as complex and as variegated as mask usage. It’s just ridiculous on its face. I suppose the other explanation is that these “studies” existed beforehand, and Fauci was unaware of them, but then someone tipped him off about the studies and he read them and changed his mind. Does that sound plausible to you? That a 40-year career virologist bureaucrat apparently missed some absolutely slam-dunk data about viral mitigation until, what, a junior staffer informed him of the truth?
This is worth harping on. The entire scientific basis of Fauci’s masking pronouncements stemmed from the assumption that he knew what he was talking about; and that assumption could only have stemmed from the proposition that, in between February and April of 2020, he became privy to some extremely compelling information about masking efficacy of which he had previously been unaware. Without those factors, the entire rational justification for the flip-flop melts away, and the only explanation left standing is that Fauci just kinda thought masking was maybe a good idea for whatever reason and decided to tell people to do it. Which, I mean, it’s pretty obvious that’s what happened. No need to overthink it.
As I’ve written before, masking is really, truly awful: It’s hot, sweaty, itchy, moist, unhealthy, inconvenient, irritating, dehumanizing, embarrassing, and most of all it doesn’t work, all of that effort for a total lack of results. The justification for broad masking rules should have been very high—much higher than, “Eh, I changed my mind, can’t say why, just do it,” which is the only motivating factor that we can readily identify in Fauci. The COVID crisis, of course, ushered in an era of comprehensive credulity in the United States, nowhere more so than in masking, so I suppose it’s not surprising that nobody ever thought to question it very hard.
But we shouldn’t forget what happened here; we should remember that our nominal public health leaders essentially made up scientific policy out of whole cloth, just sort of scattershot without thought for years, that it cost us all very dearly, and that it is still costing us dearly today. That’s something for prosecutors to remember when you’ve got one of these guys in the hot seat and under oath.
I remember when democrats were champions of protecting civil liberties instead of scheming to take them away.