Dr. Anthony Fauci welcomed back mask mandates regardless of vaccination status on Friday during an interview on Fox News with Neil Cavuto.
“It’s quite understandable,” Fauci said, “why local authorities are now saying, ‘good that you’re vaccinated, but in a situation where you have people indoors, particularly crowded, you should wear a mask.’”
The doctor lauded Los Angeles as a prime example, which re-implemented universal indoor mask requirements this week as cases have risen of the Indian Delta variant. Deaths, however, according to data from the LA County Public Health Department, have not followed the same upward trend.
While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not changed its face mask recommendations since they were relaxed for vaccinated people in May, rising cases have provoked a statist movement to reverse course on reopening — with Fauci once again championing face masks.
The unelected government bureaucrat, who once derided face masks as useless before he wore two for months post-vaccination, has also demanded more vaccine mandates to override personal liberties.
“There should be more mandates,” Fauci said plainly on CNN with Jake Tapper earlier this month.
From the onset of the pandemic, the NIAID director has shown no regard for individual freedoms, becoming the champion of the lockdowns with the mirage of a Fauci- and media-manufactured “scientific consensus” to present the extreme experimental measures as the only option to combat the virus.
On Tuesday, Fauci and Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul sparred once again in a Senate hearing on Fauci’s agency funding gain-of-function research — wherein scientists extract viruses from the wild and engineer them to infect humans to study potential therapeutics, including vaccines — at a Wuhan lab.
Paul grilled the NIAID chief about grant money sent for this form of research deemed so dangerous by the U.S. government it was temporarily banned in 2014. U.S. tax dollars, however, flowed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with high-risk lapses in its safety protocols from 2014 to 2019.
“Fauci, as you are aware, it is a crime to lie to Congress,” Paul said, pressing Fauci on whether the NIAID director would retract prior statements made before Senate lawmakers denying that gain-of-function research had been financially supported by grant money from the National Institutes of Health.
WATCH: Complete exchange between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Senator @RandPaul.
Dr. Fauci: "Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly, and I want to say that officially. You do not know what you are talking about." pic.twitter.com/2wFbAxicI2
— CSPAN (@cspan) July 20, 2021
Fauci, visibly frustrated by a legitimate challenge (unlike what he’s received on the friendly airwaves of CNN and MSNBC), called the senator ignorant and used a technical definition of “gain of function” to evade connection with the research that may have given birth to the coronavirus itself.
“Sen. Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly, and I would like to say that officially. You do not know what you are talking about,” the doctor said, once again denying that the NIH was involved in funding the high-risk research.
The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin, who has carefully followed investigations into the origins of COVID-19, later blasted Fauci, however, for seizing on a technical use of the term “gain of function” to “avoid their own oversight mechanism.” The inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services is currently probing that avoidance.
Hey guys, @RandPaul was right and Fauci was wrong. The NIH was funding gain of function research in Wuhan but NIH pretended it didn't meet their "gain of function" definition to avoid their own oversight mechanism. SorryNotSorry if that doesn't fit your favorite narrative.
— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) July 20, 2021
“What everyone can now see clearly is that NIH was collaborating on risky research with a Chinese lab that has zero transparency and zero accountability during a crisis — and no one in a position of power addressed that risk,” Rogin wrote in a Thursday evening column.
Meanwhile, the 80-year-old NIAID director has continued to demand that Americans comply with sweeping Faucian prescriptions.
