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Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration chief in the Trump administration, pushed back on the president's inaccurate interpretation Friday morning and stressed that masks are effective in slowing the spread.

\"Masks are not a panacea, but they're going to afford you a level of protection,\" Gottlieb told CNBC. \"In an environment where the alternative is having a raging epidemic that's going to force some kind of economic dislocation, I'd rather try to get everyone in masks and I'd rather try to get them in high-quality masks because we know it's going to slow down the transmission. It's going to have an impact.\"

He noted most studies on the effectiveness of masks have shown that wearing one reduces the transmission of the virus by blocking respiratory droplets.

\"PHOTO:
Evan Vucci/AP
PHOTO: President Donald Trump throws face masks into the crowd as he arrives for a campaign rally at Orlando Sanford International Airport, Oct. 12, 2020, in Sanford, Fla.
>

One of the study's co-authors, Christopher Lindsell, co-director of the Health Data Science Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told CNN in an email Thursday that Trump misrepresented the data.

\"The data suggest that among a group of patients who are already showing symptoms that prompted them to get testing for the virus, there was no statistical evidence of a difference in mask wearing behavior between those who tested positive and those who tested negative,\" Lindsell said.

\"This is very different from the question of whether wearing masks prevents you becoming infected with the virus, and it is also different to the question of how many or what percentage of people who wear masks contract the virus. The study was not designed to answer these questions.\"

Trump's continued false claims come as he pushes for an end to COVID-19 restrictions, repeating on Thursday what's become a mantra to him throughout the pandemic, \"The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself.\"

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