And this is why I'll never trust Dr. Fauci again

I'm sure most of my readers are familiar with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the immunologist who advised President Trump and the US government on how to handle the coronavirus pandemic.  He played a pivotal road in formulating US response to the disease.

He's finally admitted something many of us had suspected all along.  Bold, underlined text is my emphasis.

"Masks are not 100% protective. However, they certainly are better than not wearing a mask. Both to prevent you, if you happen to be a person who may feel well, but has an asymptomatic infection that you don't even know about, to prevent you from infecting someone else," said Fauci. "But also, it can protect you a certain degree, not a hundred percent, in protecting you from getting infected from someone who, either is breathing, or coughing, or sneezing, or singing or whatever it is in which the droplets or the aerosols go out. So masks work."

So, why weren't we told to wear masks in the beginning?

"Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."

There's more at the link, and in this report.

I suspected at the time that this was stupid advice.  After all, almost everywhere else in the world, masks were being insisted upon, to such an extent that going outside without one might lead to your arrest in certain countries.  Yet, here Dr. Fauci and other so-called "experts" were insisting that we didn't really need them.

Now we know that the "experts" were more than happy to lie to us, and thereby knowingly put us in greater danger, in order to safeguard supplies for medical personnel.  We, the "ordinary people", weren't nearly as important, in their eyes, as their own colleagues.  So what if more of us died as a result?  That wasn't their problem.

And that's why one should never, ever take an alleged "expert's" views or recommendations at face value.  We simply can't trust them to be honest.  Too many of them, like Dr. Fauci, have hidden agendas.  He, and others of his ilk, will doubtless protest that they acted for the best, that they had to preserve supplies for health care workers - but then, why not simply be honest?  Why not have government reserve all supplies of the necessary equipment, by law, for health care workers?  It wouldn't make us feel any better about the lack of them, but at least we'd understand the reason for it, and probably (albeit grudgingly) accept it.  However, to lie to us as if we simply don't matter and don't count . . . that stinks to high heaven.

Dr. Fauci has now terminally discredited himself in the eyes of anyone with two working brain cells to rub together.  I hope he's happy with that result - and with being branded, by his own admission, a liar.  So much for his professional reputation, and for public trust in his profession - and so much for public support for government advice and edicts, in the event of another pandemic.  The general reaction to them is likely to be "Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me."




Peter