Mask on, mask off. That as the name of the game for ANTHONY FAUCI at JONATHAN KARL’s book party Tuesday night at Café Milano. As gawkers tried to snap pictures of him indoors not wearing a mask, America’s doc would put it on and take it off depending on whom he was around. SALLY QUINN — who’s known Fauci since his days as a young NIH doctor, when he inspired a love interest in one of her erotic novels — asked him why he was at a party with a mask in hand, not on face. “I said, ‘You seem pretty ambivalent about your mask’ because no one else was wearing one,” Quinn told Playbook. “He said, ‘I just decided that if anyone came up that I didn’t know, I would put my mask on.’”

Quinn added that “paparazzi” were surrounding Fauci trying to get that “gotcha moment” of the Covid czar without a mask on. Guests had to show proof of vaccination to enter the party. “He was being safe,” Quinn said in his defense. “He knew everyone was vaccinated. If it was someone we knew, he would trust them, and if it was somebody else, he didn’t.” Another guest observed Fauci’s mask on/mask off dance, but said that the mask was firmly on when he came to the rescue of a guest who had collapsed. We reached out to Fauci via NIH but didn’t hear back Thursday night.