The thing is, I'm not saying anything about Fauci as such. I'm not joining in Fauci-bashing, and absolutely didn't intend to give that impression.
I'm not in the US, and here the experts were all saying "masks won't help" during the early stages of the crisis. A friend with health-anxiety was telling me "you should stock up on masks" (he started on that as early as February, before the virus had even gotten out of China, as he was convinced even then it 'would go global'), and I was soon quoting back to him what the official experts were saying in the media about masks not being worthwhile for ordinary members of the public. At some point the line suddenly changed (in fact that was around April when that new data came out) , and I have since heard experts ruefully admitting that the original line was largely due to worry about people potentially buying up all the limited stock of n95s.
The other thing is - OK, they either hadn't yet done, or just not yet read, the studies that revealed that people could spread the virus while asymptomatic, and thus didn't know that masks on asymptomatic people would slow the spread of the disease. But, really, given that they didn't actually know either way the value of masks, should they (the science-communicating community rather than the research scientists) really have made their anti-mask statements with such unmerited confidence?
That's a bug-bear of mine in a very general way (not particularly about COVID) - that (junior) professionals who present themselves to the public as 'experts' so often overstate the confidence with which they know something. Because they usually aren't research scientists and haven't necessarily kept up withl the latest literature. Reminds me of all the occassions I've been bullshitted by all sorts of junior professionals in various fields, from medicine to computers to finance. If you aren't certain, either don't claim to be, or go look it up.
(As an aside, they ought to put a hypochondriac in charge of public health procurement - had my friend been in charge the country would have been fully stocked up on all possible PPE equipment back in January)