Two things I think are frequently lost in these discussions:

1. When Fauci made his statement about people not needing to wear masks, people tend to forget the context of the situation. At the time, mask manufacturers were caught off-guard and there was a huge run on masks. They were extremely hard to find to buy. Hospitals were running out and having a very hard time procuring the masks that they needed to perform operations. They were actively trying to discourage people from hoarding masks so that medical providers could have "dibs" on acquiring them first.

Once the supply line caught up with demand and they were more easily obtainable, they changed their position—but not because the facts or evidence of their effectiveness changed.

It wasn't just masks to which this flawed logic was applied. When the COVID vaccines first became available, people who were over the age of 65 were given priority on getting them. A bunch of people willfully ignorantly took that to mean that people who were younger just plain didn't benefit from having the vaccine. Nothing could be further from the truth; it benefits them greatly. But with a highly limited supply, we necessarily had to prioritize who got the shots first.

2. When you wear a mask, it isn't particularly effective in protecting you from COVID. Its purpose is to protect everyone else if you have COVID, especially since in the initial stage of infection many people were asymptomatic. As mentioned in comments above, it prevents a 10-foot plume of aerosolized infected saliva from projecting forth from your sneezes, coughs, and even just breathing. The idea is that if everyone is wearing a mask to protect everyone else, then you'll have a much higher level of protection also.

Living in the South of the US, I can't count the number of times I heard chuckleheads explain to me how those masks still let particles through. They couldn't wrap their brains around the point being that those particles for the most part won't be there if everyone is wearing masks. And it's not just COVID that controlled by masks. Did anyone notice that cases of the flu dropped to a fraction of its normal rate of infection where people consistently masked up?

Because of huge sums of money involved if he can hit this hail mary. It sounds like he doesn't give a shit what Doctor Who fans think about him, so why not take the shot?

(Note that I'm not endorsing that mentality, it's asshattery. But I certainly understand why he's doing it, and why others in his position might also take a shot at it even if deep down they know it's not right.)

Why would your battery be drained? Leading up to an outage, you would be using utility power to run your heating and other stuff, not the battery. The battery would only need enough juice to stay charged at full. And because of the way modern battery packs work, that means that it would only charge up at periodic intervals, never letting the capacity get below maybe 80% to 85%. (But could be set arbitrarily high, depending on need given outage frequency and average length.) And that charging would happen during non-peak hours, so there's no extra load on the grid. I have an EV, and that's how I have my car set up today to charge; in the middle of the night when the grid is nowhere near peak load. This "problem" has been solved long ago.

The availability of solar or wind power has nothing to do with this conversation. We were talking about load distribution and how much the grid would be taxed with batteries at people's houses, not energy sources. But just to counter the FUD...

Wind turbines work fine during bad weather if they're properly maintained. Plenty of countries with more bad weather than we have generate plenty of wind and solar power, including places like Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Germany.

What you're likely thinking of is the problems that Texas had in 2021 due to a freak ice storm. A bunch of right-wing nitwits got all over television and the internet to decry how unreliable wind power is, when in fact, it was natural gas that took the heaviest hit in failing to supply enough power. Windmills actually worked much more reliably during that snowstorm. (Citation)

As for solar, it can be impacted, but it's rather unusual for it to be. It has to be really cold or a really heavy snowfall, because the surface of solar panels generally are warmer than the surrounding area, meaning that snow generally melts off of it quickly. Also, solar panels are typically mounted at an angle, which induces snow to slide off of them. And even panels that are partially obstructed generate decent amounts of power. (Citation) Again, in practical use, this is a non-issue.