“It is essential as a scientist that you evolve your opinion and your recommendations based on the data as it evolves,” the White House infectious disease expert told the podcast “Sway” that aired Monday.
“And that’s the reason why I say people who then criticize me about that are actually criticizing science,” he told interviewer Kara Swisher of how he was attacked when he shifted position on mask-wearing during the pandemic.
“[T]he people who are giving the ad hominems are saying, ‘Ah, Fauci misled us. First he said no masks, then he said masks.’ Well, let me give you a flash. That’s the way science works. You work with the data you have at the time,” Fauci said in the interview, adding that the evidence and data often changed.
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Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been claimed of not being honest with the American people.
And thousands of his emails that were published earlier this month from his time advising the Trump administration about the pandemic say that he changed his mind about masks and was informed early on that the deadly disease may have been “engineered” and could have originated in a Chinese lab.
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Fauci told a Health and Human Services official in a February 2020 email that: “Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection.”
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But he shifted his speech in April when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance on face coverings, saying they should be worn “in public settings when around people outside their household, especially when social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.”
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Sen. Tom Cotton in an interview Monday on “Fox & Friends” accused Fauci of “acting as a Democratic Party activist in a white lab coat.”
“Why doesn’t he tell us what science – what data backs up the Biden administration’s stupid mask mandate for airports and airplanes? I mean, are you more likely to get the coronavirus at an airport than you are at a shopping mall or an airplane with its massive filtration systems?” Cotton (R-Ark.) said on the show.
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“He’s admitted that he’s changed his advice based on what would be herd immunity levels. Not based on what he thinks he sees in the data but what he thinks the American people are ready to hear. Why doesn’t he just tell us what the facts are?” he said.