"Even on March 3, he pointed out that they would be useful for infected people to wear to avoid spread, and that they would be useful, at least a little, to protect from droplets."
I don't understand why people see the need to keep defending this guy. He was wrong. Dead wrong. It was patently obvious at the time and he's been called on it from the moment he said it. It made no sense then and of course it makes no sense now.
"Dr Fauci says, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”
First off, just to pick at his statement a little bit for it's obvious ridiculousness, NOBODY thinks masks provide perfect protection. Even the N-95s, right there in their name, only purport to block about 95% of the viruses. Nobody was looking for perfect protection. Anything at all would have been better than what he gave us which of course was bare faced nothing.
Here's the timeline which shows that the WHO was even worse on masks than anyone:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/10/20/is-trump-right-that-fauci-discouraged-wearing-masks/?sh=25b2a7fc4969And I remember experts in Asia basically saying the Americans are crazy not to be wearing masks in public. But what do they know, right?
Sure he reversed his stance later but the main problem wasn't even the month or so that he had Americans spreading the virus everywhere although that was bad enough. Worse was when he finally turned around and admitted he was an idiot, yeah that's right I said it, but when he admitted he was wrong and that's putting it kindly because he was actually as far as a lot of people are concerned just outright lying, but anyway the real problem started then because of course now there was tremendous inconsistency in the message and it gave people the excuse they were looking for not to wear masks as much as they could get away with it.
Some people when the crunch time comes are just totally useless. Unfortunately, he wasn't one of those people. Sadly, he was the type of person who when crunch time comes makes the situation a thousand times worse.
What we've seen with this virus is that our government at every step of the way has been incredibly stupid. And it looks like they are going to continue their trend by opening schools before the vaccinations have gone into effect.
https://apnews.com/article/san-francisco-sues-own-school-district-9fa9cf285326935ce79b86c3c4c56774"San Francisco sues its own school district to reopen classes"
John Hammond: "Don't worry, I'm not making the same mistakes again."
Dr. Ian Malcolm: "No, you're making all new ones."