> He wasn't hiding it, or lying about it.

This is speculation - you do not have access to the information required to make this statement with certainty.

From my prior message:

>> I enthusiastically encourage you to point out any specific flaws whatsoever in my logic or conclusion, using strict epistemology and trinary (true/false/unknown) rather than binary (true/false) thinking.

Under strict epistemology, one should not state speculation as if it is fact because it may actually be an incorrect statement. From a trinary logic perspective, it is unknown whether he is lying.

If you feel the urge to say we can never know when someone is lying, that is often true, but an important difference in this case is that there is evidence that he could have been lying. One goal of exercises like this is to seek as much truth and clarity as possible (even if certainty cannot be reached). Another goal is to practice control over one's mischievous mind, which is harder than you'd think.

> He explicitly says that buying up masks would cause a shortage for healthcare workers in the interview for 60 minutes in early March.

Correct, he did say that on the 60 minutes interview on March 8, 2020.

He also said:

"...right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks. There's no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel better, and it might even block a droplet, but it is not providing the perfect protection people think it is."

The assertion: "People should not be walking around with masks. There's no reason to be walking around with a mask." seems to be quite counter-intuitive advice considering the topic (a global pandemic) and what Fauci knew at that point in time (my prior post, and some additional detail below).

Katherine Ross from TheStreet.com interviewed Fauci on Jun 12, 2020 (note: this is a later date than the 60 minutes interview) and asked about this earlier confusion:

https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...

In that video Katherine asks: "Why were we told later in the spring to wear them, when initially we were told not to?"

Fauci answers: "Well the reason for that is that we, the public health community, were concerned that it was at a time that personal protective equipment including the N95 masks and surgical masks were in very short supply, and we wanted to make sure that the health care workers who were brave enough to put themselves in harms way to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected, we did not want them to be without the equipment that they needed, so there was not enthusiasm about going out and buying a mask - we were afraid that would deter away from the people who really needed it."

A decently fair simplification of this:

Q: "Why were we initially told not to wear masks?"

A: "We wanted to make sure that the health care workers who were brave enough to put themselves in harms way to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected. We did not recommend that people go out and buy masks because we were afraid that [restrict supply to] people who really needed it."

If the reason they didn't recommend people to wear masks was because they didn't think there was value in wearing a mask (as stated in the earlier 60 minutes video), then why did he say that the reason was to prevent the public from going out and buying out the supply, disrupting it for health care workers?

So that is one motivation for distrust, that the two stories do not add up.

There is also the timeline issues in my prior post, which raises a valid question of professional competence, does it not?

To that information, I will add:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2235342-covid-19-why-wo... (26 February 2020 , updated 11 March 2020 )

> The World Health Organization confirmed a covid-19 pandemic on 11 March. ((This was added on Mar 11 when a pandemic was formally declared.))

> Prepare for a pandemic, says the World Health Organization, as the global spread of covid-19 soars by the hour. It’s not a matter of if, but when, say US health officials. Yet so far the WHO refuses to actually call covid-19 a pandemic. Why? The answer may lie with what kicks into gear when we deploy the P-word. Countries have pandemic plans that are launched when one is declared, but these plans may not be appropriate for combating covid-19 – and the WHO doesn’t want countries to lurch in the wrong direction.

> The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the covid-19 virus already meets two of its three criteria for a pandemic: it spreads between people, and it kills. The third is that it has to spread worldwide. The virus is now in 38 countries – and counting – on nearly all continents, and those are just the ones we know about. How much more worldwide does it need to be?

COVID had already met 2/3 criteria for pandemic status. The first cases in North America were reported in the United States in January 2020. At the time of writing this article (Feb 26), it was constant headline news, and significant numbers of people were asking why the WHO had not yet officially declared it a pandemic (I recall this period very well, there were conspiracies theories making the rounds about why the WHO wouldn't make the call).

3 days before WHO pandemic declaration, Fauci says on 60 minutes: "People should not be walking around with masks. There's no reason to be walking around with a mask."

Subsequently, when questioned about why people were told to not wear masks, he stated that was because they (the health community) didn't want people to go out and buy masks so as to not exhaust the supply for healthcare workers.

Given the evidence, do you believe that it is illogical [1] to have serious concerns with either the medical community's professional judgment, or their truthfulness? (Note that we are dealing only with publicly made statements as opposed to what actually occurred within physical reality which is unknown to us - so we are already being gracious in taking him at his word.)

HOWEVER, I should also add:

a) I don't think the above is any kind of a slam dunk smoking gun against Fauci in any way, even if he was outright lying. But perhaps it can help to see how a different and valid(?) perspective can be taken on the matter even without resorting to conspiracy "thinking".

b) You're a very patient person, so thanks for that.

[1] When I say "illogical", that is to distinguish between your personal feeling on whether this situation is problematic, versus whether someone who does consider it a problem is guilty of a failure in logic, keeping in mind that the topic of conversation is a pandemic.