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Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s former top Covid doctor, has admitted that he was “wrong” on masks.
Unfortunately, he is doubling down in the face of new evidence to the contrary that show masks do not significantly impact viral transmission.
“As of 2020, there was data indicating that you didn’t need to have a mask,” Fauci said in a recent interview. “The data being that there’s no evidence that they protect outside of the hospital. There’s very little infection transmitted asymptomatically. We have a shortage of masks. The data were misleading, but they were there. And they misled me.”
“If I were an infallible person, I would’ve said wear a mask anyway,” he added. “Even if we don’t know those things, maybe I should have done that, but I was not acting on that kind of instinct.”
“Yeah, I was wrong,” he said. “Yeah.”
A new study reveals that even wearing masks in hospitals had no significant impact on Covid-19 transmission during the Omicron wave.
The research team carried out the study at St. George’s Hospital in south-west London during the Omicron wave between December 2021 and September 2022.
During phase one of the study, between early December and June, all staff and visitors were required to wear face masks in both clinical and non-clinical areas. In phase two, between early June and mid-September, surgical mask-wearing policy was removed for the majority of the hospital but remained for staff in high-risk wards.
The result? No statistically significant difference in Covid transmission rates.
“Utilising a robust quasi-experimental approach, we found no evidence that a mask policy significantly impacts the rate of nosocomial SARS-CoV-2 infection with the Omicron variant,” the authors found. “While these data do not preclude a small effect, the real-world benefit of this mitigation measure in isolation is likely to be modest within a healthcare setting.”
“In the context of a surge in SARS-CoV-2 infection (see figure 1), removal of the mask policy was not associated with a statistically significant change in the rate of nosocomial SARSCoV-2 infection in the study group and no post-intervention identifiable trend to suggest a delayed effect,” the authors added. “The control group also found no immediate or delayed change in infection rate.”
The authors provided further information on how they carried out the study.
“We analysed routinely collected infection control data on nosocomial SARS-CoV-2 infection over a 40-week period from a large south-west London hospital using a controlled interrupted time series design,” they noted. “The intervention was the removal of a staff/visitor surgical mask-wearing policy for the majority of wards at week 26 of this period (study group) with a subset of specific wards retaining the mask policy (control group). The nosocomial SARS- CoV-2 infection rate was normalised by the underlying community infection rate identified by unselected admission screening. The Omicron variant was the dominant strain throughout the period of the study. A quasi-Poisson segmented regression model was used for the count data using community infection rate as an offset variable.”
The findings were presented on Thursday at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases in Copenhagen, Denmark.
The new research adds to the voluminous evidence that masking among the general public was ineffective in slowing transmission of Covid-19. The American Institute of Economic Research documented over 25 scientific studies in 2021 that show that masks are “ineffective in reducing transmission” of the coronavirus.
Prolonged masking has been shown to do substantial psychological harm to individuals, and particularly to infants and children. However, medical experts like Dr. Fauci have consistently ignored the social and psychological costs of masking and continue to tout the failed public health policy in defiance of the scientific evidence.
