WASHINGTON, D.C., January 26, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has changed his tune on mask-wearing once again. This time, he said he supports double-masking or using N95 masks in an interview with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie on TODAY.
Fauci said, “Wearing two masks instead of one is probably more effective to stop the spread of coronavirus.”
“I mean,” he continued, “this is a physical covering to prevent droplets and virus to get in. So, if you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on, it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective and that’s the reason why you see people either double masking or doing a version of an N95.”
This is an about-face from Fauci’s advice back in March in a 60 Minutes interview, where he dismissed masks as useless. “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you are 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 is 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.”
The New York Times jumped on the double-mask bandwagon in a post-inauguration opinion piece that gushed about Pete Buttigieg’s and others’ mask fashion during Biden’s sparsely attended outdoor event. “Double-masking is a sensible and easy way to lower your risk when you have to spend more time around others — in a taxi, on a train or plane, or at an inauguration.” The latest guidelines on the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) make no mention of the efficacy of double-masking.
One day later, in an interview on America’s Newsroom, Dana Perino pressed Fauci about double-masking and vaccinations. Would double-masking, Perino asked, still be necessary after receiving a vaccination? The short answer was yes — or at least until the “overwhelming” population has been vaccinated.
“[J]ust to be doubly sure, there are a couple of reasons to wear masks even after vaccination. One, you want to protect other people in case you have virus in your nasopharynx, and if you look in the community, there is enough virus out there that before we start pulling back on things like public health measures, you want the overwhelming population vaccinated. And as I have said, the calculation — even though it’s still an estimate — would be somewhere between 70 and 85 percent of the population.”
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