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It’s an odd day when CNN makes sense.

This past Saturday, CNN host Michael Smerconish confronted Anthony Fauci with a study that showed masking made little to no difference in the course of COVID-19.

“The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illness, including COVID-19, was published last month,” Smerconish told Fauci, explaining that the conclusion was “there is just no evidence that they — masks — make any difference.”

Even the N95 masks were found to “make no difference.”

Fauci retorted with what seemed to be more garbled nonsense, saying that on an individual level they work, but “when you’re talking about the effect on the epidemic or the pandemic as a whole, the data are less strong.”

“This dumba** really wants you to believe that somehow it didn’t work on a pandemic level, but on an individual level, they worked,” Sara Gonzales of “The News & Why It Matters” comments. “Well, no, idiot. Because if they worked on an individual level, they would work on a pandemic larger scale.”

Jaco Booyens, while noting how ridiculous Fauci’s reasoning is, isn’t surprised.

“It’s so on par with their whole message,” he says. “The collective.”

“The individual doesn’t really matter, you know. So the collective is made of a bunch of individuals, and the virus attacks the individual, right. And if the mask doesn’t work for the individual, it won’t work for the collective,” he continues.

Gonzales notes that despite the plethora of information now available, like the study the CNN host brought up, people are still beginning to wear masks again.

“I have seen people start wearing masks again in public. I automatically judge you. I am judging you,” she says, adding,

“Like you’re really, you are really going to do this again.”

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CNN host Michael Smerconish confronted Dr. Anthony Fauci on Saturday over a recent study that questioned the efficacy of face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic.

What about the study?

In January, the Cochrane institute released a new systematic review studying the impacts of “physical interventions” to slow the spread of respiratory viruses. The study concluded that wearing masks “probably makes little or no difference to the outcome” on flu-like or COVID-like illness or laboratory-confirmed flu or COVID-19 compared to not wearing masks.

Oxford epidemiologist Tom Jefferson, the study’s first author, said after the study was published, “There is just no evidence that [masks] make any difference.”

“Makes no difference — none of it,” he explained, speaking of N-95 masks. He said policymakers who enacted mask mandates were “convinced by nonrandomized studies, flawed observational studies.”

What happened on CNN?

Smerconish confronted Fauci about that study and Jefferson’s analysis, introducing it by quoting New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who described the review as the “most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses.”

Fauci, however, refused to budge.

“Yes, but there are other studies, Michael, that show at an individual level, for individual, when you’re talking about the effect on the epidemic or the pandemic as a whole, the data are less strong,” he responded.

“But when you talk about as an individual basis of someone protecting themselves or protecting themselves from spreading it to others, there’s no doubt that there are many studies that show that there is an advantage,” he continued. “When you [look at] the broad population level like the Cochrane study, the data are less firm with regard to the effect on the overall pandemic. But we’re not talking about that, we’re talking about an individual’s effect on their own safety. That’s a bit different than the broad population level.”

Dr. Fauci responds to study that says masks didn’t work

There are several problems with Fauci’s response.

First, he cited “other studies,” but declined to name a single one. Second, he claimed those “studies” show mask efficacy at the “individual level.” But to study the efficacy of masks, participants are placed in two groups — one with masks and another without masks — and the rate of infection between the groups is compared. There is no way to study these outcomes on an “individual level.”

And don’t forget: while Fauci now claims masks are effective on an “individual level,” mask mandates were justified with the reverse logic. Politicians advised people to wear them, even those who did not want or need to wear them, in order to protect others.

Finally, Fauci spoke as though everyone’s risk to COVID-19 is the same. Sure, everyone can contract it. But the pandemic proved that not everyone is equally likely to die from it. The people most likely to die from COVID-19 are elderly people and those who are metabolically unhealthy and have multiple comorbidities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in fact, said that just “over 5%” of COVID-19 deaths include people in which COVID-19 “was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate.” But for people whose death certificate listed COVID-19 and other conditions, “on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death,” according to the CDC.

Still, viewers were simply amazed that a CNN host dared to challenge Fauci directly on the efficacy of masks.

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Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is once again pushing for Anthony Fauci, former director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to face legal consequences for allegedly lying to Congress.

Paul announced Saturday that he had sent an “official criminal referral” to the Department of Justice, citing a Feb. 1, 2020, email wherein Fauci indicated that gain-of-function research had indeed been under way at “Wuhan University” — a private admission that Paul indicated contradicts the former NIAID director’s sworn statements before Congress.

TheBlaze previously reported that the Feb. 1 email, recently released by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, was addressed to Robert Kadlec (then assistant secretary of Health and Human Services), Lawrence Kerr (then director of the Office of Pandemics and Emerging Threats within HHS), Brian Harrison (HHS chief of staff), and Garrett Grigsby (then director of Office of Global Affairs Department of HHS).

In the email, Fauci stated as a “fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection.”

Among the scientists known for their dangerous gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was Ben Hu, an EcoHealth Alliance subcontractor among the COVID-19 patients zero whose work was funded in part by Fauci’s NIAID.

Whereas Fauci was privately willing to admit to elements of the medical establishment that deadly gain-of-function research was being conducted in Wuhan, he told Congress another story altogether.

Fauci told Paul during a Senate hearing in May 2021, “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Fauci doubled down when Paul pressed him on the issue again in July 2021.

Paul asked, “Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11, where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research?”

Fauci answered, “Sen. Paul, I have never lied before the Congress. And I do not retract that statement.”

In addition to suggesting that it was the senator from Kentucky who had been lying, Fauci told Paul, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, quite frankly.”

Exchange between Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci

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It turns out, Paul, a graduate of Duke University School of Medicine and a practicing doctor before his election to Congress, had known what he was talking about.

Lawrence A. Tabak, acting director of the National Institutes of Health, admitted in an Oct. 20, 2021, letter to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), that the NIH had in fact funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.

Concerning Fauci’s own admission that gain-of-function research had been conducted in Wuhan, Paul tweeted Saturday, “This directly contradicts everything he said in committee hearing to me, denying absolutely that they funded any gain of function, and it’s absolutely a lie.”

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This is not the first time Paul has implored the DOJ to hold Fauci to account.

Paul wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland in July 2021, urging him to open an investigation into Fauci’s May 11, 2021, testimony, reported the Washington Examiner. Fauci was never charged.

In response to Paul’s latest announcement, Richard Ebright, a board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, wrote, “Fauci flagrantly and repeatedly violated US-government policies implemented to prevent a lab-generated pandemic, likely caused a lab-generated pandemic, and, to evade accountability for his malfeasance, committed fraud, conspiracy to defraud, and perjury. Prosecution is overdue.”

Since the U.S. Senate cannot bring charges against Fauci, it is up to the Biden DOJ to act.

Extra to allegedly misleading Congress about the gain-of-function research, recently released emails also appear to indicate Fauci worked ardently to set the narrative that COVID-19 was not the accidental byproduct of a leak at the Chinese lab, but rather the result of a natural leap from an animal to humans.

He reportedly went so far as to commission and edit the impactful March 2020 study published in the journal Nature, “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2,” which he used on the national stage to downplay the lab-leak theory.

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