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Dr. Anthony Fauci said in congressional testimony that he reviewed no scientific evidence behind the specific recommendations for masking children or maintaining 6-foot social distancing before advocating these policies during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The revelations come from the full transcript, released Friday, of Fauci’s closed-door transcribed interview session in January before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. The publication comes days before the former director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is slated to testify in his first public hearing since his retirement in December 2022. (Etzel, 5/31)

“It sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance,” Fauci testified to Congress in a January closed-door hearing, according to a transcribed interview released Friday. Dr. Anthony Fauci characterized the recommendation as “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.” Francis S. Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, also privately testified to Congress in January that he was not aware of evidence behind the social distancing recommendation, according to a transcript released in May. (Diamond, 6/2)

Any common face mask provides significant protection against the virus that causes COVID-19, but N95 masks are most effective at slashing the amount emitted by infected people, according to a University of Maryland-led study released Wednesday. So-called “duckbill” N95 masks scored highest in the study, which measured the exhaled breath of participants who were tested both masked and unmasked to measure comparative outputs of SARS-CoV-2. The inexpensive masks, which have two head straps and a horizontal seam, captured 98% of exhaled virus, according to the study published in eBioMedicine. (Thompson, 5/31)