He couldn't have been more wrong, and on both counts no less.
Coronavirus went on to kill far more than flu ever has since 1918, and other "experts" now chalk up those low flu numbers partly to mask-wearing.
USA AWAY, here in Feb 2020:
"If you look at the masks that you buy in a drug store, the leakage around that doesn't really do much to protect you," he said. "People start saying, 'Should I start wearing a mask?' Now, in the United States, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask." ...
Fauci doesn't want people to worry about coronavirus, the danger of which is "just minuscule." But he does want them to take precautions against the "influenza outbreak, which is having its second wave."
Coronavirus went on to kill 346,000 in the USA in 2020, but the flu killed just 700 over the entire 2020-2021 season.
The irony is the experts quoted by Scientific American now attribute the low number of flu deaths to mask wearing and social distancing, both of which Fauci only later embraced to stop coronavirus, but which has now gone on to kill an additional 440,000 despite those measures and mass vaccination:
Since the novel coronavirus began its global spread, influenza cases reported to the World Health Organization from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres have dropped to minute levels. The reason, epidemiologists think, is that the public health measures taken to keep the coronavirus from spreading—notably mask wearing and social distancing—also stop the flu.
Prevalence of COVID-19 in 2020 was just 6.1% of population (20m cases in 328m people) because it didn't really hit the country until March. In 2021 to date, prevalence is higher at 8.7% (28.923m cases in 332m people), about the level typical for influenza in an average year.
Why, when people have been masking, social distancing, and getting vaccinated?
Clearly something(s) has(have) stopped influenza, but the definitive transmission mechanism of coronavirus remains unsolved.
Similarly no one so far has explained how white tail deer populations have become riddled with coronavirus: We do not know how the deer were exposed to SARS-CoV-2.
A new Penn State study is pretty certain hunters are somehow responsible:
“The viral lineages we identified correspond to the same lineages circulating in humans at that time,” said Kapur. “The fact that we found several different SARS-CoV-2 lineages circulating within geographically confined herds across the state suggests the occurrence of multiple independent spillover events from humans to deer, followed by local deer-to-deer transmission. This also raises the possibility of the spillback from deer back to humans, especially in exurban areas with high deer densities.”
But I doubt it's because they breathed on them out there in the woods.
The vectors must be human urine and feces, but to this day no one is focusing on those to explain the continuing crisis.
