No, Fauci didn’t say face masks were a ‘failure’
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar before receiving his first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at the National Institutes of Health, Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2020, in Bethesda, Md. On April 26, 2023, social media users misrepresented comments Fauci made about masks in a recent interview. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, Pool)
CLAIM: Dr. Anthony Fauci “admitted” in a recent interview that face masks were a “failure.”
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. Social media posts are misrepresenting what Fauci said about masks and COVID-19 and omitting part of his response. The nation’s former top infectious disease expert said mask initiatives may have a small impact at the community level, but in the following sentence he said he believes a properly worn, high-quality mask can be effective protection for an individual.
THE FACTS: Fauci, who stepped down at the end of last year from his post as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, remains a polarizing figure online.
In an interview published by The New York Times Magazine this week, Fauci reflected on the U.S. response to COVID-19.
Some social media posts, however, are misrepresenting Fauci’s words about face masks, cherry-picking one sentence from a longer response to erroneously claim that he “admitted” they don’t work.
One tweet claims: “Now Fauci admits masks don’t work after forcing them on kids.”
“So yesterday Fauci publicly admitted masks were a failure,” reads a caption on an Instagram post that received more than 6,000 likes. The post included an image quoting Fauci as saying “masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent.”
But Fauci told The Associated Press in an email that his comments “were taken out of context and distorted.”
The interviewer, David Wallace-Wells, asked Fauci about the national debate over masks, asking whether the “culture-war fights over masking” were “worth it” and citing a randomized trial conducted in Bangladesh to suggest that increased mask use reduced COVID-19 by about 10 percent.
“It’s a good point in general, but I disagree with your premise a bit,” Fauci is quoted as responding. “From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent. But for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it’s not at the margin. It really does work.”
In other words, Fauci was distinguishing between whether mask-wearing initiatives are effective at reducing COVID-19 in a community and whether properly worn, high-quality masks provide individuals with protection.
The Bangladesh study involved providing free masks, of different varieties, as well as encouraging mask-wearing in select villages. The researchers found that mask-wearing increased to about 42% in such villages, whereas about 13% of people wore masks in villages without the interventions. Even without full mask-wearing adherence, the villages with the mask interventions observed a nearly 12% reduction in individuals with COVID-19-like symptoms.
Fauci said in an email that “when you look at a study from a population standpoint you may not account for the fact [that] even though masks are recommended and/or required, many people do not wear them some or all of the time or they do not fit properly.”
“However, I made it eminently and explicitly clear that when masks are used consistently and properly, at the individual level they are highly effective,” Fauci added.
Jason Abaluck, a Yale economics professor and co-author of the Bangladesh study, likewise said in an email that there are two separate questions at hand: Do high-quality masks prevent COVID-19? And do public efforts to increase masking reduce COVID-19? A key factor for the latter, Abaluck said, is whether the initiative works in getting people to actually wear the masks.
Conflation of those issues helped spur widespread confusion about a recent analysis of data from existing trials by Cochrane, a British organization that evaluates research, Abaluck added.
That review concluded that the effects of interventions such as the promotion of mask-wearing were “inconclusive” in terms of slowing the spread of respiratory viruses. But the review didn’t prove that masks don’t work, as some claim.
“Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that ‘masks don’t work’, which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” Karla Soares-Weiser, editor-in-chief of the Cochrane Library said in a subsequent statement. She noted that there are limitations in the evidence, including low adherence to masking in the studies factored into the review.
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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.