60 Minutes
1 HN recommender · recommended in 13 months, 2020–2022
1:28 · 1.6M views · Mar 8, 2020
A short 60 Minutes clip from March 2020 in which Dr. Anthony Fauci tells Jon LaPook there is no reason to walk around wearing a mask. The full interview includes his concern about mask shortages for healthcare workers.
HN uses it as a flashpoint in arguments about early pandemic mask guidance, with critics citing the headline and defenders pointing to the shortage context.
16 comments from Hacker News
Fauci was never dishonest. That was Trump trying to shift the blame to him. Watch the original clip: this video He literally said that the reason he is advising against masks was because he was worried about shortages.
The contemporaneous statements often mentioned shortages and preserving masks for healthcare workers. This Fauci interview in early March has him saying that he thinks masks aren't necessary at the time but also saying that he isn't against people wearing them (both things together at ~1 minute if you are impatient): this video This CDC transcript doesn't talk a lot about PPE, but it talks about directing it to healthcare workers that are at higher risk: [LINK] I'm sure there's stuff that looks worse if you go back through the 6 weeks previous to that, but early March is when things started to really happen in the US (I remember making a relatively large shopping trip that felt like it put me on the cautious side of things, and then the next week I started working from home). There's a lot of people saying that the government was saying not to wear masks, which is subtly different from saying that people don't need to wear masks, or that masks won't benefit most people. The surgeon general was out there saying they weren't effective for the general public, which is bad but still different from saying not to wear them. And I'm not sure it's entirely fair to attribute his comms failures to the CDC (they might have had a hand in it, who knows, but they don't control the surgeon general). Given how well people do with their masks (I still regularly see people wearing low quality masks incorrectly!), it seems true enough that they should be secondary to things like social distancing.
Have you forgotten that we couldn't buy masks or other medical equipment for months because of China, and everyone, including WHO, Fauci, Obama, etc. were advising people against using masks due to shortage? - January 14, WHO: Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳( [LINK] ) - January 31, Trump suspends travel from China: Proclamation on Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Persons who Pose a Risk of Transmitting 2019 Novel Coronavirus( [LINK] ). A move condemned by many, including WHO and Biden. - February 1, Biden: We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency.( [LINK] ) - Feburary 2, Health Commissioner of New York City: As we gear up to celebrate the #LunarNewYear in NYC, I want to assure New Yorkers that there is no reason for anyone to change their holiday plans, avoid the subway, or certain parts of the city because of #coronavirus.( [LINK] ) - Feburary 24, Pelosi: You should come to Chinatown. Precautions have been taken by our city, we know that there's concern about tourism, traveling all throughout the world, but we think it's very safe to be in Chinatown and hope that others will come.( [LINK] )
>From "hug a chinese" to "masks don't help" one day, and "mandatory masks" the next. Which is exactly what you would expect to happen as we get new data on anything new. The fact that people were excepting the medical community to have prophetic knowledge about a novel virus barely a month after it had been confirmed speaks more to the American public's poor understanding of the scientific process. Side note, but just a reminder that Fauci NEVER said "masks don't work", as much as this gets repeated on social media. He said that they prevent infected people from spreading it to others and did not recommend that everyone wear them: this video And when further data came out about asymptomatic transmission, the recommendations changed. Side note 2: "hug a chinese" and "vaccinated people don't spread COVID" were both from politicians, not the medical or scientific communities. I found plenty of blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels from actual epidemiologists and virologists (such as "this week in virology") who did not say such things. Unfortunately Americans don't really care enough to distinguish between "science communicated by politicians" and "science communicated by scientists". After 2020 and watching as people working in relevant fields - like the podcast above, or "your local epidemiologist" - just got straight-up ignored by COVID deniers, I'm not even sure most of the public even knows how to look up "communication by scientists"...
> I think Fauci fell a beat behind the narrative marching band in March when he said no to masks for the general population, and so had to make up a dumb story in June about how he nobly lied to save PPE for frontline workers in March. Consider this interview, done early March, in which Fauci argues against masks: this video . You don't even have to read between the lines because he explains his reasoning bluntly: "Exactly, that's the point. It could lead to a shortage of masks for people [(healthcare workers)] who really need it." He never at any point thought masks were ineffective. When he did say so in March as you see from this interview, he said it because he was concerned about shortages for medical staff. There doesn't exist evidence with which one can credibly accuse him of committing this sort of revisionism. Bringing up Kramer betrays a lack of familiarity with Fauci's history. Kramer and Fauci eventually came to be very close friends, and Kramer is on record saying Fauci was LGBT community's best friend. Mullis lost his marbles later in his life, sounding fringe views on HIV, astrology and lots of other stuff. His contribution of PCR technique is undeniably one of the great discoveries in chemistry, but he's not an authority on much else.