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Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies before Senate on Federal response to pandemic, WASHINGTON, D.C., SEPTEMBER 23, 2020Alex Edelman-Pool/Getty Images

December 1, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – A video has resurfaced from nine months ago of U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci stating that masks do not provide the kind of protection against COVID-19 that people think they do and that they may only help in making people “feel” safe.

“There's no reason to be walking around with a mask,”  Fauci told CBSNews’ 60 Minutes in a March 8 interview with chief medical correspondent for CBS News Dr. Jon LaPook.

“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,” said Fauci at that time.

Dr. Simone Gold of America’s Front Line Doctors tweeted on Nov. 30 a video clip of Fauci’s March comments, stating that “for once, I finally agree with Dr. Fauci.”

Gold and her group of doctors have been critical of the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, a response that in the early days of the outbreak was partly fashioned by Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who joined President Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force in January.

America’s Front Line Doctors have held various press conferences in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington D.C. over the past months highlighting what they say should be the proper medically-based response to the outbreak.

Dr. Gold, during a press conference in October, characterized mask-wearing as “completely irrelevant to blocking the … virus.”

“The facts are not in dispute: masks are completely irrelevant to blocking the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” she said.

The doctor encouraged citizens to do their own research about masks, stating that they would “discover that prior to masks becoming political in March 2020, there was never even an attempt at a pretense that masks, let alone bandanas, stop a virus. It’s a complete fabrication. A virus is 1/1000 the size of a hair.”

Dr. Gold cited the New England Journal of Medicine which acknowledged that “masks serve symbolic roles” and are also viewed as “talismans that may help increase health care workers’ perceived sense of safety,” even though “such reactions may not be strictly logical.”

Peer-reviewed research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine last month found that wearing a face-mask did not significantly reduce the spread of COVID-19.

“The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers by more than 50% in a community with modest infection rates, some degree of social distancing, and uncommon general mask use,” the study concluded.

Fauci has evolved over the months regarding his position on citizens wearing masks to fight COVID-19.

He told  NPR's Morning Edition on July 21 that he has “trust in the American people that if we put a strong emphasis on the importance of wearing masks, that we will come around and do that and get that percentage up above the relatively low percentage of people that are using masks.”

By October, Dr. Fauci had completely reversed course on mask-wearing, saying that it may be time to impose a nationwide mask-wearing mandate, something he termed “universal mask-wearing.”

“Well, if people are not wearing masks, then maybe we should be mandating it,” Fauci told CNN's Erin Burnett Oct. 23.

“There's going to be a difficulty enforcing it, but if everyone agrees that this is something that's important and they mandate it and everybody pulls together and says, you know, we're going to mandate it but let's just do it, I think that would be a great idea to have everybody do it uniformly,” he added.

Critics to mask-wearing have highlighted the totalitarian aspect of the mask mandates and have sounded the alarm that such mandates may have more to do with controlling people and conditioning them to accept such control than combating a virus from which the vast majority of those infected make an uncomplicated, 100 percent recovery.