This is the lie he told at the beginning of the pandemic in the US (March 2020):
“there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”
He later admitted to the lie:
“Very early on in the pandemic, in the very early months, before we even had many cases, there was a shortage of PPE and masks for health care providers who needed them desperately since they were putting their lives and their safety on the line every day."
"So the feeling was that people who were wanting to have masks in the community, namely just people out in the street, might be hoarding masks and making the shortage of masks even greater. In that context, we said that we did not recommend masks.”
Fauci lied to try to stop a run on masks so that frontline workers could get them first. He knew that masks could save lives yet decided that lying was better because it might save even more lives with front-line workers, etc....
Most of the other "lies" that the emails "uncovered" weren't lies whatsoever. People read too much into nonsense and draw their own irrational conclusions, but that's not the truth in the case I raise above. Fauci didn't fund the virus, the ingredients email is laughable at best (I would have ignored the loon/quack "doctor" that emailed him also), and Fauci didn't say the virus came from a lab. All of that is sensational nonsense from the anti-Fauci squad (which I'm neither for nor against Fauci).
That being said, Fauci did lie about masks not working in hopes that it would reduce demand on masks, and because of it a handful of people probably died because of it. Did he save even more lives? Probably not, but I can't prove it either way. I also can't prove that it killed others, but it's pretty rational to think that someone might have been protected by a n95 mask and didn't wear it because Fauci lied.