Why the 6-foot rule was not corrected when it became clear that it was wrong

How politics corrupted the science during the pandemic and deprived Americans of their freedom

Reference: https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Fauci-Part-2-Transcript.pdf

Anthony Fauci said in a private hearing whose transcripts have only recently been released that the “6-feet rule” that was so important in shaping business closures, school closures, lockdowns, etc. during the pandemic that the rule “just sort of appeared” and was not based in science.

This has been met with a flurry of derisive commentary in the press.

Let’s be clear though. The six-foot rule may have been reasonable at the very beginning of the pandemic. But the issue with the six-foot rule is that there was neither transparency, nor were public health officials responsive to changing evidence.

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Now, back to the article…

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Fauci’s claim is not a real revelation either; we have known that the 6-foot rule is unscientific for a really long time. The 6-foot rule was the result of a misunderstanding that the virus was transmitted by droplets. Yet notwithstanding the World Health Organization’s longstanding public statements to the contrary, it was well-understood by aerosol scientists by February 2020 that COVID-19 was transmitted by aerosols. It took until 2022 for the WHO to finally acknowledge these data and publicly state that COVID-19 is transmitted predominantly by aerosols.

The 6-foot rule, in other words, was bunk very early into th epandemic, based on the wrong theory—the droplet theory—of COVID-19 transmission.

Other countries chose an entirely different rule: 3 feet. These included China, France, Denmark, Hong Kong, and others.

And it wasn’t even originally a 6-foot rule, either.

As Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, said in a September 19th, 2021 interview: CDC originally proposed 10-foot rule, but this was overruled by a White House political appointee.

So they settled on the 6-foot rule as a kind of compromise, while other countries went with a 3-foot rule. And they could have gone with 10.

It was never about science. The authorities just wanted to be seen to be "doing something".

But consider what would happen if the establishment changed the 6-foot rule, once it acknowledged that it had no legitimate basis. If one considers the implications, one will understand why the 6-foot rule was not updated.

Consider what reducing the rule or doing away with it altogether would entail: schools and businesses would be able to open. The rationale for lockdowns would be seriously weakened. Suddenly people would ask: wait, if the six-foot rule is not true, then why are we locking down?

So the 6-foot rule, once it was in place, was not reversed because it would have been politically inexpedient to do so.

Consider this recent interview clip with Paul Offit, where he admits that the reason Fauci wanted universal vaccination was that he was concerned that uptake would be much lower if vaccination was age-targeted:

Here, Offit is saying that Fauci communicated science and created policy based on how the population would react: his goal was to manipulate behavior rather than tell the truth.

It is not unimportant, either, that there were no studies showing that Fauci was right: nobody really knows whether universal vaccination recommendations lead to greater uptake than age-targeted ones.

Nor, as it is now clear, did Fauci take into account the blowback to trust in vaccination once they realized that Fauci was not being honest with them.

In every place during the pandemic, rather than simply telling the truth and allowing the public to decide what it wanted based on its own values, the establishment said whatever it believed would manipulate the public into doing whatever the establishment believed would be best.

This, of course, contradicts two of the central tenets of public health ethics: informed consent and autonomy.

Let’s pivot back to the 6-foot rule. The authorities did not abolish the 6-foot rule as soon as it became clear that Covid was not transmitted by droplets, because such an abolition could undermine the credibility of other social distancing measures that were already pre-determined, such as school or business closures.

In a word, the refusal to revise the rule as more evidence came in was a nakedly political reason that sought to deprive Americans of their freedom in the name of public health.

The 6-foot rule was presented as hard-and-fast science. Yet it wasn’t.

The 6-foot rule should have been adjusted and re-communicated as soon as we knew that the 6-foot rule probably had no impact.

But it wasn't adjusted and re-communicated once we had that knowledge for political reasons: precisely because the 6-foot rule was the basis of these policies.

The authorities did not want to admit that the 6-foot rule was wrong because it would call into question the legitimacy of their preferred policies, which were already under attack.

Thus the public continued to receive what was misinformation by that point, because the authorities had a broader agenda to push about Covid policy.

In sum:

Appropriate science communication must respect the autonomous decision-making of the public and the representative political process in the United States.

The 6-foot rule was not re-communicated as soon as new evidence came in because the public health authorities wanted to deprive American citizens of their political representation and their freedom.

This is the central problem and why people are rightfully upset about recent revelations about the rule.