ANTHONY FAUCI/CORONAVIRUS: [Dr. Jon LaPook, chief medical correspondent for CBS News: “There’s a lot of confusion among people, and misinformation, surrounding face masks. Can you discuss that?”]
Anthony Fauci: “The masks are important for someone who’s infected to prevent them from infecting someone else [with coronavirus]… Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks.”
[LaPook: “You’re sure of it? Because people are listening really closely to this.”
Fauci: “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face…
But, when you think masks, you should think of health care providers needing them and people who are ill. The people who, when you look at the films of foreign countries and you see 85% of the people wearing masks, that’s fine, that’s fine. I’m not against it. If you want to do it, that’s fine.”
[LaPook: “But it can lead to a shortage of masks?”]
Fauci: “Exactly, that’s the point. It could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it.”
-Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, via 60 Minutes, “March 2020: Dr. Anthony Fauci talks with Dr Jon LaPook about Covid-19,” YouTube.com, Mar. 8, 2020