Consistent with Dr. Fauci’s earlier statements, the peer-reviewed scientific literature has steadfastly refused to support masking the healthy as an effective barrier to viral spread, and Dr. Fauci offered a citation to justify his change of heart. A December 2020 comprehensive study of 10 million Wuhan residents confirmed Fauci’s January 28, 2020 assertion that asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19 is infinitesimally rare.5 Furthermore, some 52 studies—all available on NIH’s website—find that ordinary masking (using less than an N95 respirator) doesn’t reduce viral infection rates, even—surprisingly—in institutional settings like hospitals and surgical theaters.6,7 Moreover, some 25 additional studies attribute to masking a grim retinue of harms, including respiratory and immune system illnesses, as well as dermatological, dental, gastrointestinal, and psychological injuries.8 Fourteen of these studies are randomized, peer-reviewed placebo studies. There is no well-constructed study that persuasively suggests masks have convincing efficacy against COVID-19 that would justify accepting the harms associated with masks. Finally, retrospective studies on Dr. Fauci’s mask mandates confirm that they were bootless. “Regional analysis in the United States does not show that [mask] mandates had any effect on case rates, despite 93 percent compliance. Moreover, according to CDC data, 85 percent of people who contracted COVID-19 reported wearing a mask,”9 according to Gutentag.
Dr. Fauci observed in March 2020 that a mask’s only real efficacy may be in “making people feel a little better.”10 Perhaps he recognized that what masking lacked in efficacy against contagion, it compensated for with powerful psychological effects. These symbolic powers demonstrated strategic benefits for the larger enterprise of encouraging public compliance with draconian medical mandates. Dr. Fauci’s switch to endorsing masks after first recommending against them came at a time of increasing political polarization, and masks quickly became important tribal badges—signals of rectitude for those who embraced Dr. Fauci, and the stigmata of blind obedience to undeserving authority among those who balked. Moreover, masking, by amplifying everyone’s fear, helped inoculate the public against critical thinking. By serving as persistent reminders that each of our fellow citizens was a potentially dangerous and germ-infected threat to us, masks increased social isolation and fostered divisions and fractionalization—thereby impeding organized political resistance. The impact of masking on the national psyche reminded me of the subtle contribution of the “duck and cover drills” of my youth, drills that sustained and cemented the militaristic ideology of the Cold War. Those futile exercises reinforced what my uncle John F. Kennedy’s Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, called “National Mass Psychosis.” By suggesting to Americans that full-scale nuclear war was possible, but also survivable, ruinous investments in that project were justified. For the government and mandarins of the Military Industrial Complex, this absurd narrative yielded trillions in appropriations.
Social distancing mandates also rested on a dubious scientific footing. In September 2021, former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gotleib admitted that the six-foot distancing rule that Dr. Fauci and his HHS colleagues imposed upon Americans was “arbitrary,” and not, after all, science backed. The process for making that policy choice, Gotleib continued, “Is a perfect example of the lack of rigor around how CDC made recommendations.”11,12
Finally, the lockdowns of the healthy were so unprecedented that WHO’s official pandemic protocols recommended against them. Some WHO officials were passionate on the topic, among them Professor David Nabarro, Senior Envoy on COVID-19, a position reporting to the Director General. On October 8, 2020, he said:
We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as a primary means of controlling this virus. We may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We’ll have at least a doubling of child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school and their parents in poor families are not able to afford it. This is a terrible, ghastly, global catastrophe, actually, and so we really do appeal to all world leaders: Stop using lockdown as your primary control method . . . lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle—and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.13
As discussed above, Dr. Fauci and other officials made no inquiry or claims as to whether lockdowns would cause more harm and death than they averted. Subsequent studies have strongly suggested that lockdowns had no impact in reducing infection rates. There is no convincing difference in COVID infections and deaths between laissez-faire jurisdictions and those that enforced rigid lockdowns and masks.14
Noble Lies and Bad Data