The on-again, off-again mask sermon from the top U.S. immunologist throughout the two-plus years of the COVID-19 pandemic has come full circle (again).
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been front and center since the virus arrived in America in January 2020, now says the day we can all ditch the face masks could come “soon.”
“As we get out of the full-blown pandemic phase of COVID-19, which we are certainly heading out of, these decisions will increasingly be made on a local level rather than centrally decided or mandated. There will also be more people making their own decisions on how they want to deal with the virus,” Fauci said in an interview with the Financial Times.
Fauci added that he hoped restrictions would end “soon.”
“I hope we are looking at a time when we have enough people vaccinated and enough people with protection from previous infection that the Covid restrictions will soon be a thing of the past,” he said.
But Fauci’s optimism is not shared by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which still urges masks even as a growing number of states, including California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois — all led by Democrats — begin lifting mask mandates.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walsensky said this week that it will not loosen the requirements.
“Right now, we still have about 290,000 cases every single day, and our hospitalization rates now are higher than they even were at the peak of our Delta surge,” Walensky said Tuesday in a radio interview with WYPR’s Tom Hall. “So in this moment — while we are looking ahead and planning ahead, and we’ll continue to evaluate and follow the science — our recommendations are consistent with encouraging students to wear well-fitting masks.”
Still, the White House, acknowledging the fact that Americans are weary of mandates, walked back its previous criticism of Democratic governors altering their mandates, saying states will decided their own regulations.
“These states, I think it’s important to note, they still allow for decisions to be made by local school districts,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in the daily press briefing.
Fauci has flip-flopped on masks, always saying the science supported his viewpoint on whether they are necessary.
Back in March 2020, when the World Health Organization (WHO) was telling everyone it was mostly surface transmission, Fauci declared, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”
“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,” the doctor said on CBS News.
Then last January, Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who served on former President Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force and is now President Biden’s chief medical adviser on COVID-19, said that wearing two masks is likely more effective than wearing one.
“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,” Fauci told NBC News.
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent, and ran the Drudge Report from 2010 to 2015. Send tips to [email protected].