A doctor who advised President Joe Biden on COVID-19 warned Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top Biden administration officials in a newly disclosed text message that wearing cloth masks provided “very limited protection.”
Dr. Michael Osterholm, who was part of Biden’s COVID-19 transition advisory team, told Fauci and other officials, including the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the time, in August 2021, that the government needed to encourage the wearing of N-95 masks, rather than masking in general.
“Note the very limited protection from face cloth coverings,” Osterholm said in the text. He said that he supported masking, “but we must be promoting the use of N-95s, even if not fit tested.”
The CDC recommended masking in 2020 after the COVID-19 pandemic started, prompting mask mandates in schools and other places. The agency promoted cloth masks, in addition to better quality face coverings, citing research it published in its quasi-journal.
Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, leading up to the 2021 text said publicly that cloth masks provided limited benefits and that he favored N-95s.
After Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis threatened to withhold funds from schools that forced masking on children, a reporter during a White House press briefing on Aug. 6, 2021, referenced Osterholm’s comments.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary at the time, noted that Osterholm was no longer a government adviser. She said the Biden administration was relying on medical experts in the federal government for masking. The issue with DeSantis, she added, was that the governor was “preventing schools and teachers and others from protecting themselves and the students in their classroom.”
Osterholm reacted by composing a message to Fauci, then-CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, and several others.
“I’m sending this via text messaging to avoid any FOIA issues,” he wrote on Aug. 8, 2021, referring to the Freedom of Information Act.
A former Fauci adviser just pleaded guilty to the federal crime of defrauding the government by destroying and conspiring to destroy federal records subject to the act, which lets people request government records.
Osterholm, in his message, pointed to a fact sheet from the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists that said with cloth masks, people had little protection against COVID-19.
He told the administration officials that “none of the studies that CDC uses to support its statement as to the significant protection of face cloth coverings stand up to scientific scrutiny” and urged them to “strongly promote” N-95s to the public.
“I am certain one day that one of the take-away findings of this pandemic was the constant [government] emphasis on masking while at the same time providing minimal guidance to the public what effective masking means,” he said.
The message was obtained by The Epoch Times from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who acquired it from the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC’s parent agency. The record was produced in response to Grassley’s requests for documents related to the origins of COVID-19, a spokeswoman said.
Osterholm, Walensky, and Fauci did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
Walensky through 2022 advised schools to keep mask mandates in place. Many states and districts throughout that year rolled back masking requirements. The CDC says on its website now that wearing a mask “offers you an extra layer of protection from respiratory illness” and that “cloth masks generally offer lower levels of protection to wearers.”
Ian Miller, author of “Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates,” wrote on X that the newly disclosed message showed that top experts “knew that cloth masks didn’t work and were already failing to stop or even slow transmission and they kept demanding more mask mandates and forced school and toddler masking anyway.”
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