The Masks Were Never About Science
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.
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.