Fauci emailed friend saying masks were ‘ineffective,’ pushed for mandates anyway, Missouri AG says

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt said Friday that during his seven-hour deposition with Dr. Anthony Fauci, new information revealed that two months after Fauci told a friend masks were “ineffective,” he supported mask mandates. 

On Friday, the Show-Me State Republican attorney general tweeted a “tidbit” from his deposition with the outgoing head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases:

“Another tidbit from Fauci depo: In Feb ‘20 he emailed a friend advising her masks were ineffective. Confirmed again on Mar 31. On Apr 3 he’s adamant masks should be worn even though he couldn’t cite a single study to prove it. Mandates followed—Lives ruined.”

“COVID tyranny is born,” Schmitt continued.

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On Wednesday, Schmitt and his counterpart, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, questioned Biden’s chief medical adviser under oath for his alleged role in colluding with Big Tech to control communication about COVID-19 as part of the duo’s lawsuit.

Schmitt and Landry filed the lawsuit in May, accusing top-ranking government officials of working with the giant social media companies Meta [Facebook], Twitter and YouTube “under the guise of combating misinformation” in order to achieve greater censorship.

They are seeking to prove that Fauci worked with Facebook and others to tamp down talk that the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China.

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“Defendant Dr. Anthony Fauci, a senior federal government official, coordinating with others, orchestrated a campaign to discredit the lab-leak hypothesis in early 2020,” Landry and Schmitt said in their brief. “As director of [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases], Dr. Fauci had funded risky ‘gain-of-function’ research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through intermediaries such as EcoHealth Alliance, headed by Dr. Peter Daszak.”

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“Thus, if the lab-leak theory were established, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Daszak could be potentially implicated in funding the research on viruses that caused the COVID19 pandemic and killed millions of people worldwide,” they said.

According to a Wednesday tweet following the deposition, Schmitt said Fauci “knew the Lab Leak theory had merit but it’d come back to him & sought to immediately discredit it.”

In his last White House press conference before he is scheduled to retire after a 50-year career next month, Fauci said, “Every day for all those years I’ve given it all that I have, and I’ve never left anything on the field,” he continued.

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“I gave it all I got,” Fauci added.

Fox News has reached out to NIAID.