Fauci: Properly Worn Masks Are 85-90% Effective

Former NIAID Director and White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday on “CNN This Morning”  that properly worn masks are 85-90 % effective.

Partial transcript as follows: 

KAITLAN COLLINS: Masking was probably one of the most divisive parts of COVID. I think whether or not people wore one, whether they had to wear one. A really striking comment that you made in this interview said “from a broad public health standpoint,” and I’m quoting you now, “at the population level, masks work at the margins, maybe 10%.” You once said a national mask mandate could work. That comment saying, you know, they work at the margins, maybe 10%, I think would raise a lot of eyebrows given so many people had to wear a mask, whether they were on a plane, whether they were in certain public facilities. To hear that they only work at the margins, maybe 10% would make a lot of people ask okay, then why was I wearing a mask for so many times?

FAUCI: You know, Kaitlan, we’ve got to be careful because if you read very carefully what I said, if you look at the broad public health effect, when you have masks that are so-called mandated or supposed to be worn. Because so many people don’t wear them, even though they’re in an arena in which masks are supposed to be worn or they don’t wear them properly. From a public health standpoint on the cohort of people, the effect can be only marginal. As we mentioned, it was ten, 13% or so.

But for the individual who religiously wears a properly fitted mask, the effect is much, much, much better than that. It’s 85, 90 % or more. So we were trying to distinguish between what the broad effect on a population is when you have mask-wearing versus the effect on the individual who religiously and properly wears the mask. There’s a big difference there. That’s what we were referring to about on the margins versus an individual effect of a person.

COLLINS: Yeah, there is a big difference, of course, in like someone like a doctor or someone who’s used to doing this. In hindsight, though, when you look at this, do you think the mask mandates were a mistake?

FAUCI: You know, I. Kaitlan, I don’t want to say a mistake, but I think we really need to remember next time where we’re confronted with this, that when you have a situation where there’s doubt in the minds of some people about whether something works or not, we better try to reach out and be a better explainer of why we feel these things are important. Because whenever, particularly in our country, with our free spirit, which we all embrace, that people being told what to do very often has the opposite effect. That’s what I was referring to in that interview.

COLLINS: Yeah, I know you said a similar thing about vaccine requirements as well.
Fauci’s full answer on the subject from that NYT article was as follows:

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.

But I think anything that instigated or intensified the culture wars just made things worse. And I have to be honest with you, David, when it comes to masking, I don’t know. But I do know that the culture wars have been really, really tough from a public-health standpoint. Ultimately an epidemiologist sees it as an epidemiological phenomenon. An economist sees it from an economic standpoint. And I see it from somebody in bed dying. And that’s the reason it just bothers me a lot — maybe more so than some others — that because of the culture wars you’re talking about, there are people who are not going to make use of an intervention that could have saved their lives.

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