Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb claims “nobody knows” where the six feet of social distancing separation recommendation came from.
Gottlieb, in an interview with CBS’s “Face The Nation,” indicated the rule was arbitrary and not necessarily based on current science.
“Nobody knows where it came from. Most people assume that the six feet of distance, the recommendation for keeping six feet apart, comes out of some old studies related to flu, where droplets don’t travel more than six feet,” he said.
Gottlieb indicates that the initial recommendation was 10 feet, but ultimately became three feet based on an actual study.
“When it became three feet, the basis for the CDC’s decision to ultimately revise it from six to three feet was a study that they conducted the prior fall,” he explained. “So they changed it in the spring.”
Gottlieb served as FDA Commissioner between 2017 and April of 2019.
Former FDA commissioner @ScottGottliebMD calls CDC’s six-foot distancing recommendation “arbitrary” and “a perfect example of sort of the lack of rigor around how CDC made recommendations.” pic.twitter.com/2Xf4vrz6Ec
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) September 19, 2021
Six Feet Of Social Distancing Was Arbitrary
Gottlieb indicates it was the Biden administration that asked the recommendation for six feet of social distancing to be lowered in an effort to allow schools to open.
Noting the initial recommendation of 10 feet, the former FDA chief pointed out how the media would have been apoplectic if the former President had tried doing the same thing.
“So the compromise was around six feet. Now imagine if that detail had leaked out. Everyone would have said, ‘This is the White House politically interfering with the CDC’s judgment,'” he explained.
Gottlieb added, “The CDC said 10 feet, it should be 10 feet, but 10 feet was no more right than six feet and ultimately became three feet.”
The six feet of social distancing rule was utter nonsense. pic.twitter.com/rqCafq6SpA
— Ian Miles Cheong @ stillgray.substack.com (@stillgray) September 20, 2021
Dr. Fauci Says Teachers Still Need to Keep Their Distance
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, argued back in March that the six feet of social distancing still applied to teachers in the classroom.
“So, now children, as long as they continue to wear masks, will be in school at three feet,” he explained at the time.
“That doesn’t mean from the teachers, because they still have to be six feet from the teachers, and the teachers still need to be six feet from each other,” Fauci added. “But the children, three feet from each other, is going to be okay from now on.”
Got it?
Dr. Anthony Fauci to @GStephanopoulos: “Wear masks all the time when you’re outside. Social distancing, six feet at least. Avoid crowds…There’s no question about that so that’s something that’s not really arguable.” https://t.co/JgCvhTifYS pic.twitter.com/hf4nrSqr0M
— Good Morning America (@GMA) July 28, 2020
Fauci has said he argued with former President Trump about keeping social distancing rules in place early on in the pandemic.
“We argued strongly with the president that he not withdraw those [social-distancing] guidelines after 15 days but that he extend them—and he did listen,” Fauci said.
Trump let the social distancing recommendations expire shortly thereafter.
Dr. Fauci: “Connecticut has maintained the very important things to stay ahead of the virus–universal using of masks, avoiding crowded places, maintaining six feet distance and good hand hygiene.” pic.twitter.com/j7ypTmUGSy
— Governor Ned Lamont (@GovNedLamont) August 4, 2020
Left-wing media slammed President Trump for ignoring social-distancing recommendations.
A Slate column last August accused Trump of getting thousands of Americans killed by not following such guidelines.
“The president’s most decisive contribution to the death toll was his resistance to public health measures known as ‘mitigation’: social distancing, school and workplace closures, and cancellations of large gatherings,” they wrote.
Multiple outlets last year tried to solve the mystery of where the guideline came from.
Business Insider notes that the six feet guideline came from a study that is now 80 years old.
This piece originally appeared in ThePoliticalInsider.com and is used by permission.
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The 6 Foot social distancing isn’t real science based upon peer-reviewed research, empirical data or RCT’s (the gold standard of medical scientific studies)….
It’s arbitrary and manufactured to sound like legitimate science but it isn’t.
The actual science research requires that effective social distancing be a minimum of 23 feet outdoors and over 30 feet indoors. Anything less and it doesn’t work, it’s purely a placebo making you feel like you did something.
that the guidelines suggesting that it’s somehow helpful to keep a six-foot space between healthy people, even outdoors, is not based on science, but just an arbitrary suggestion we’ve been conditioned to accept without evidence.
And your gut feeling would be right. There’s a reason that “social distancing” wasn’t a buzzword common to the American lexicon prior to 2020. There’s very little science behind “social distancing” at all.
“It turns out,” Julie Kelly writes at American Greatness, “as I wrote last month, “social distancing” is untested pseudoscience particularly as it relates to halting the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. On its website, the CDC provides no links to any peer-reviewed social distancing studies that bolster its official guidance.”
[https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/13/six-feet-under/]
6′ Social distancing fake science…
[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/social-distancing-coronavirus.html]
A 2006 paper titled “Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza” was used in advocating for the lockdowns. Its primary author was complex system analyst Robert J. Glass. His 14-year-old daughter, Laura M. Glass, is also listed on the paper. As it turns out, the paper was partly based on his daughter’s high-school experiment. Laura, with a little help from her dad, made a computer simulation of how people interact in social situations. That’s right: you can credit the lockdowns in part to a teen girl’s science project.
This is where the renowned doctor and epidemiologist Donald Henderson comes in. Dr. Henderson was involved in a 10-year international effort to eradicate smallpox throughout the world. Smallpox is the first human disease ever to be eradicated. Dr. Henderson passed away in 2016. In 2006, he and three other professors from Johns Hopkins wrote a paper responding to the Glass paper. As you might have guessed, they strongly disagreed with Robert Glass. They believed that such extreme measures would have severe social and economic consequences. The following mitigation measures are how Dr. Henderson believed that a pandemic or epidemic should be handled.
A response to the Glass Paper [aka 6′ social distancing]
[http://www.upmc-biosecurity.org/website/resources/publications/2006/2006-09-15-diseasemitigationcontrolpandemicflu.html]