You still bump into the stickers from time to time: “Six Feet of Distance.” It’s weird and anachronistic at this point. No one pays any attention anymore. Still, it would be nice to know where this came from. Oddly, we don’t really know.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was asked this question last week in U.S. House hearings on the COVID-19 response. Incredibly, he didn’t really know how that came about.
“It just sort of appeared,” he told the subcommittee, which was an unusual answer since he otherwise said 100 times that he couldn’t remember anything. Here, however, he concedes there was never any science behind it.
That’s extremely peculiar. This rule governed all social interaction for more than two years. It wrecked every manner of things, made people feel diseased and isolated, made meetings impossible, and gave rise to a whole ritual of interaction that was utterly alien to the normal human way, including elbow bumps and water-gun baptisms.
It was why schools were so delayed in reopening. They couldn’t guarantee that students would stay apart. It’s why airports were so crowded. Everyone was trying to avoid everyone else. It’s why park benches were roped off, why restroom stalls were operating at 50 percent, and why you couldn’t hold weddings and funerals. This stuff was enforced at all levels of society.
And yet, here’s the “nation’s leading infectious disease scientist,” who took charge of the pandemic response saying, that he has no idea where the idea came from.
She quoted Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
“It never struck me that six feet was particularly sensical in the context of mitigation,“ he said. ”I wish the C.D.C. would just come out and say this is not a major issue.”
Ms. Anthes wrote that the origin of the six-foot distancing recommendation is something of a mystery.
“It’s almost like it was pulled out of thin air,” said Linsey Marr, an expert on viral transmission at Virginia Tech University.
“Lower physical distancing requirements can be adopted in school settings with masking mandates without negatively affecting student or staff safety,” they concluded.
Nothing happened. We were stuck with six feet. Once it became an enforced ritual, nothing mattered. Now, we know that not even Dr. Fauci knows where it came from.
But come on. Someone had to order this. Who did it? Some low-level bureaucrat? Someone yet unnamed? Whoever it is knows who he or she is. A lot of people know. But no one is speaking up. It seems like there should be a way to get to the bottom of this.
Most likely, it resulted from nothing but irrational germophobia and a made-up way to satiate that impulse. But consider this: one person’s personal eccentricity thus became a rule for the whole nation and world, without a single study—to say nothing of a vote or opinion poll. It was just cray cray on mega-steroids, and yet some vendors became very rich printing signs and stickers for millions of businesses, churches, airports, and schools around the country.
It probably happened like the sudden mask mandate in St. Louis this month. Some low-level bureaucrat said it should be done and it was done. There was outrage all around, which is very good news. Beautifully, the whole thing was repealed in 24 hours, and the person who caused all this to happen was ridiculed and denounced. How dare she presume to tell everyone else what to do?
Well, that kind of thing ruled us for more than two years, just bureaucrats making stuff up. Some of it was impractical but it was also very expensive and damaging. For example, the Plexiglas that suddenly went up everywhere actually trapped pathogens into smaller spaces and inhibited ventilation, in contradiction to their other mandates. Arguably, this mandate made the spread worse.
It certainly didn’t mitigate the virus.
It seems as if all these edicts were sort of busy work to keep us alarmed and occupied with stupid antics until the virus arrived. That’s why Dr. Fauci didn’t care about them. It’s why the CDC wasn’t particularly interested in the supposed science behind any of this stuff. There never was any science. It was nothing but the imposition of irrational capers on the population to mark time until the great vaccine arrived. To top it off, the vaccine didn’t work!
Looking back—and many people don’t want to look back because it’s too painful—it seems as if the whole of the public was sold a bill of goods in the name of science. It was baloney no matter which way you slice it. Some of us knew it at the time and called it out. We were denounced, attacked, and censored for saying so.
Is it any wonder that government, media, and science generally are in complete disrepute today, across the whole population and all over the world?
This is why there needs to be some discovery and accountability. We need to know where this stuff came from. It didn’t come from the air or clouds. It was a decision made by human beings, somewhere and based on something. We should know what it is.
If Dr. Fauci doesn’t know, who does? The CDC has had three heads during this time: Drs. Robert Redfield, Rochelle Walensky, and now Mandy Cohen. They should tell all they know. If they don’t know, they should name the names of others who they think might have done this. Then, Congress should ask those people and get them to say who they think it is. We should do this with every single idiotic protocol issued during that period, whether six feet, masks, sanitizer, one-way grocery aisles, church closures, Plexiglas, and anything else.
This stuff traumatized the nation and the world. It broke everything. Now, we have doors flying off airplanes, only to find out later that the manufacturer had to lay off a lot of mechanics during lockdowns. We have political upheaval in Ecuador, which had very hard lockdowns that demoralized everyone. We have huge absenteeism in public schools everywhere because the kids can no longer be bothered to go to class. We have a massive shortage of actual workers who know how to do stuff because they gave up and retired.
The lockdowns and everything associated with them utterly broke the world. The COVID-19 response set the whole of the civilized world on fire. At the very least, we’re owed an explanation for all this, starting with six feet of distance. If we can’t get to the bottom of where this came from, there’s no hope for sorting out the rest of the rigamarole. The investigations have to start somewhere. They shouldn’t stop for at least five to 10 years!
