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Gottlieb: 'Nobody knows' origins of six-foot social-distancing recommendation
"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," Gottlieb told Brennan.
Gottlieb also said that the CDC's initial social-distancing recommendation was 10 feet.
"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.' 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," Gottlieb said.
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Gottlieb told host Margaret Brennan that the recommendation was arbitrary, saying that the Biden administration asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to change its guidelines from six feet to three feet in an effort to re-open schools last spring.
"But 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. So they changed it in the spring."
Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a recent interview with CBS News that the CDC was never prepared to handle a crisis on the scale of COVID-19, and that the U.S. government suffered from "a failure of vision" since the start of the pandemic. The agency thought to be the gold standard for public health is better equipped for data analysis than decisive action, he said.
"I think it's very difficult for an agency to have this self-awareness that they don't have the capacity to respond the way they're being asked," Gottlieb said in an interview with Margaret Brennan, "And I think it's very difficult for an agency to self-organize differently in a setting of a crisis."
"They're not a logistical organization. CDC has a very retrospective mindset," Gottlieb said. "It's a high-science organization that does deep analytical analysis of data that's oftentimes out of sync to when the decisions need to get made."
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I think that the public health establishment as a whole has taken a hit in the setting of this pandemic. And this isn’t just a sort of Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal thing. I think that there’s a lot of people around the country who feel that the advice they got from public health officials wasn’t precise, changed, wasn’t- wasn’t formulated in a way where it was sort of immutable, wasn’t carefully explained, wasn’t propagated in a way that it could be assimilated into people’s lives. You know, how do I wear a mask? What mask should I wear? When should I wear a mask? When not? And things changed. And so people were confused by it and lost confidence in it. And I think that there’s going to be- part of the dialogue we have around how do we prepare better for the next pandemic, I think, unfortunately, is going to also be a discussion of what role should public health agencies and public health officials play and how much should policymakers really be overseeing what they’re doing in the setting of a crisis? Should they really be in control?
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Blindly following the Science was a mistake we need to correct before the next pandemic
originally posted by: canucks555
I've noticed that a lot of folks here have a problem with "science"
Science is the reason you're able to make your threads stating that science is dumb.
Jesus did not create your computer. Or the internet. Science did.
originally posted by: canucks555
I've noticed that a lot of folks here have a problem with "science"
Science is the reason you're able to make your threads stating that science is dumb.
Jesus did not create your computer. Or the internet. Science did.
originally posted by: GravitySucks
Until we have something better to replace it with, it's what we've got.
Do you have a replacement in mind? Anarchy, perhaps?
originally posted by: dandandat2
originally posted by: GravitySucks
Until we have something better to replace it with, it's what we've got.
Do you have a replacement in mind? Anarchy, perhaps?
Why is it an all or nothing proposition?
I don't think the former FDA Commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb is suggesting we replace the scientific community all together and replace it with anarchy.
It sounds to me that he is suggesting that the scientific community is not equipt to lead during a pandemic; that we need civic leaders to lead and the scientific community to be a voice at their table.
originally posted by: TauPhiLambda
Virus floats in the air. I seriously doubt 6 feet makes any difference, especially indoors where air circulation is low. Air is very well mixed indoors. 3 feet. 6 feet. 10 feet. Makes very little difference.