We've Been In This A Year, And All Fauci Can Tell Us Is Wear Two Masks?

So, OK. COVID has been out and about since late 2019, and as of a year ago, policymakers were beginning to say we needed to do something. Fine. Since then, the CDC, with state and local jurisdictions, has been flailing about for solutions, ranging from near martial law to laissez faire, but after a year's experience, inclduing red light-green light lockdowns and regional exceptions that amounted to experiments, we still have no idea of how to control the pandemic. It comes and goes as it pleases.

We have several vaccines, but the federal government, at least according to the states, has been bungling distribution. Dr Fauci has been the point man for all this. He's now saying the CDC will maybe sorta-kinda say we've all gotta wear two masks now. But this is classic Fauci:

Dr. Anthony Fauci said there’s no evidence showing two masks are safer than wearing one, despite saying otherwise last week.

“There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s no data that indicates that that is going to make a difference,” Fauci said during a video livestream interview with the American Federation of Teachers.

. . . His comments come after saying last week that wearing two face masks “likely” provides more protection than wearing just one mask.

On February 27, 2000, almost exactly a year ago, the CDC said healthy people didn't need masks at all.

One day after the Centers for Disease Control confirmed the first possible instance of Covid-19 “community spread,” CDC Director Robert Redfield is asked at a hearing on Capitol Hill whether healthy people should wear a face covering and responds, “No.”

Fauci echoed what was pretty clearly CDC policy the following month

A video circulating on social media shows Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), saying “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” Fauci’s remarks were made on March 8, 2020 and do not represent his current stance on face coverings nor the updated guidance issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The "fact check" tries to cover the CDC's rear end by saying it's not current policy -- but the fact is that the CDC changed its policy, and now it looks like it's going to change it again, going from no masks to one mask to two masks, apparently without any scientific support for any of those policies.

I've been moving toward a recognition that Trump was responsible for his own electoral defeat in certain critical ways. One of them was not firing Fauci. The guy has spent a year making wildly unsubstantiated pronouncements, contradicting himself within days, re-contradicting himself a few days after that, which is what we see now. This isn't what we need from public health authorities, but it's what we get.

A recent Republican post mortem suggests COVID was the issue on which Trump lost. Whether any incumbent could have won is a separate question. The problem for the current incumbent is that the CDC has been bungling vaccine distribution, and the message that Fauci is sending is that things are going to continue to be so bad we now need to wear two masks instead of one.

The guy needs to be fired and replaced with a competent public health professional.