This is what an aerosol scientist said when asked about the statement in Dr. Fauci's email.
“Early on in the pandemic, prevention messaging was coming primarily from infectious disease experts who have little to no training in aerosol science,”
Alex Huffman, an aerosol scientist at the University of Denver, told us in an email. “As the pandemic discussion has become more multidisciplinary, scientists and medical professionals of all descriptions have learned from one another, and realized that the narrow, disciplinary perspectives they may have started with were often insufficient to properly address the airborne nature of this particular disease.”
That includes aerosol scientists, who were able to add their expertise to the broader public health debate.
So, as Huffman explained to us, it’s true that the virus might be 0.1 or 0.2 microns and a paper or cloth mask wouldn’t filter something that small. But “viruses don’t fly out of your mouth by themselves. They are encased in droplets,” he said. Those droplets come from the lungs, nose or mouth and include proteins, salts and some viruses.
“It doesn’t matter how big the virus is, it matters how big the droplet is,” Huffman said.
While that may not have been widely understood by public health officials at the beginning of the pandemic, “to Dr. Fauci’s great credit,” Huffman said, “he changed his perspective, learned a little about aerosol physics, and started listening to a broader audience of experts, including aerosol scientists.”
Dr. Fauci is not an omnipotent or omniscient. In February 2020, were there aspects of SARS-COV-2 transmission that Dr. Fauci did not fully understand or appreciate the full significance of? He's said, yes. Not only in terms of aerosols but pre and asymptomatic transmission. When he wrote that email, he might have been truthful, but he was wrong. Leaning on his truthfulness in private communication as evidence of the accuracy of the science dismisses the possibility that, early on, his understanding of this specific science was accurate.
To discount the PPE shortages in the effect on messaging you would need to know when Dr. Fauci started evolving his thinking, and what the state of PPE availability was at that time. By April, CDC guidance had changed, so presumably the change in mask benefits was later in February or March. Was there not still PPE shortages at that time?
I get the feeling that people expect there was a savior in our midst. And if only they had been in charge things would be different. Instead of a lot of people, each with differing understanding of individual puzzle pieces, trying to put together guidance of what we needed to do, that would be effective AND adopted, in an evolving situation with so many others actively trying to make the case everyone was overreacting and anything was unnecessary.
Every couple months we do this blame game with Dr. Fauci as if he was the only one with a platform. There was a whole COVID task force, numerous health officials but their decisions never are questioned to the extent of Dr. Fauci.
