{"id":117698,"date":"2021-09-20T14:46:10","date_gmt":"2021-09-20T18:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=117698"},"modified":"2021-09-20T14:46:10","modified_gmt":"2021-09-20T18:46:10","slug":"former-fda-commissioner-says-social-distancing-rules-were-arbitrary-and-made-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=117698","title":{"rendered":"Former FDA commissioner says social distancing rules were arbitrary and made up"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who was Commissioner of the FDA from 2017 until 2019, is a current Pfizer board of directors member, and a contributor and guest to both CNBC and CBS gave an interview to CBS’s Face the Nation yesterday. In it, he pointed out what many of us have been skeptical about from the start. Namely, that the government has no fucking clue what they’re doing. According to Dr. Gottlieb, both the Trump Administration and Biden Administration have been playing political games as they all lecture us to “Follow the science.”<\/p>\n

Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), admitted during an interview on Face the Nation that the six foot social distancing rule recommended by public health officials for months on end was actually \u201carbitrary in and of itself,\u201d and he noted that \u201cnobody knows where it came from.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking with Face the Nation\u2019s Margaret Brennan, Gottlieb discussed the rules and risks early in the pandemic, explaining that the Trump administration shifted its focus to the impact lockdowns and rules would have on the economy and children.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy view is that they were sold on the idea that you weren\u2019t going to be able to really affect the spread and that anything you did was just going to have so many repercussions in terms of impact on children who might not be in school. Impact on the economy, that the costs were worse than the disease,\u201d he said, explaining that schools were a \u201cperfect example of the lack of effective policymaking.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo the single reason why most schools remained shut was because the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) was telling them they had to keep kids six feet apart,\u201d he said. \u201cIf- if CDC has said you can only- you have to keep kids three feet apart, then a lot of schools would have been able open.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd in fact, when the Biden administration wanted to open schools in the spring, this past spring, they got the CDC to change that guidance from six feet to three feet,\u201d Gottlieb continued, admitting the original guidance was \u201carbitrary\u201d and had unknown origins.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe six feet was arbitrary in and of itself, nobody knows where it came from,\u201d he said. \u201cThe initial recommendation that the CDC brought to the White House and I talk about this was 10 feet, and a political appointee in the White House said we can\u2019t recommend 10 feet.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody can measure 10 feet. It\u2019s inoperable. Society will shut down. 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\u2019s judgment,\u201d he continued:<\/p>\n

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. But when it became three feet, the basis for the CDC\u2019s decision to ultimately revise it from six to three feet was a study that they had conducted the prior fall. So they changed it in the spring. They had done a study in the fall where they showed that if you have two masked individuals, two people wearing masks, the risk of transmission is reduced 70% with masks if you\u2019re three feet apart. So they said on the basis of that, we can now make a judgment that three feet is an appropriate distance. Which begs the question if they had that study result in the fall? Why didn\u2019t they change the advice in the fall? Why did they wait until the spring?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Those decisions, he added, easily undermine Americans\u2019 confidence in advice from public health officials.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is how the whole thing feels arbitrary and not science-based. So we talk about a very careful, science-based process and these anecdotes get exposed, and that\u2019s where Americans start to lose confidence in how the decisions got made,\u201d he added.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Arbitrary and non-scientific. Here’s my reaction:<\/p>\n

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 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who was Commissioner of the FDA from 2017 until 2019, is a current … Former FDA commissioner says social distancing rules were arbitrary and made up<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[220,484,97,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-floggings-will-continue-until-morale-improves","category-covid-19","category-its-science","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=117698"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117699,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117698\/revisions\/117699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=117698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=117698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=117698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}