“It just makes common sense” that two masks are better than one, Anthony Fauci recently said. Surely, I wasn’t the only one as put out as Harry from Dumb and Dumber: “I should have been wearing an extra mask this whole time?”
Two masks are better than one. It’s common sense, though the thing about common sense is, it’s no substitute for the scientific method. Or, so we have been led to believe.
It’s well known that Fauci, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, did not recommend masks early in the pandemic. Fauci even said that “wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better,” but “it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think it is.”
Don’t blame Fauci. The CDC crafts its guidance based on scientific evidence gleaned from trial and other data. As Joseph Ladapo, associate professor at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, wrote in October, there wasn’t evidence to support masks at the time.
Now, though, Fauci points to the common sense of double-mask efficacy. Perhaps he has his reasons, but Fauci has rather selectively required the “gold standard” of randomized controlled trials, or RCTs, as a means of determining efficacy.
For weeks over the summer, before the news media and before Congress, Fauci demanded that the RCT evidence did not support the use of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment, while some physicians demanded that there was enough circumstantial evidence of its efficacy.
Either way, Fauci drew a clear line at the RCT. Where is it now? Evidence changes, fine, but I would think the evidentiary standard doesn’t. If common sense were all it took from the start, Fauci and the CDC would have begun recommending masks immediately. One mask is better than none — it’s common sense.
Meet the Press host Chuck Todd asked Michael Osterholm, another pandemic star and an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota who advised the Biden transition, about double-masking on Sunday’s program. Osterholm responded:
Whom to believe? It’s obvious that some masks, for their material, are more effective than others and that, provided the space to be more thoughtful, Fauci and Osterholm might discriminate between the types of masks and come to some agreement here.
At any rate, the CDC does not recommend two masks, so it’s probably wisest to defer to its guidance. The problem is, the public doesn’t read CDC guidances. They watch television and scroll online. And because of Fauci’s omnipresence, many will be much more inclined to heed his musings on “common sense” than to read the CDC’s official and wordy standards.
Fauci probably hopes to inspire public trust in health authorities by being everywhere, all of the time. He hasn’t helped the cause this time, so far as I can tell.
