The rule of six feet of distance between people came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March 2020. Dr. Anthony Fauci has again conceded that there really was no science to back it up. And that strikes many people as outrageous.
Why should this matter? Because it was that rule that kept the schools closed. It led to domestic capacity restrictions. It was the basis for why restaurants could only be half full. Chairs and even urinals in public places such as airports and train stations blocked off every other chair. It was the reason for the mail-in ballots, imposed and implemented without the security that had traditionally governed the practice.
It simply isn’t possible for a normal society to function under those conditions. In fact, I cannot think of any case in the history of government in which an edict on this scale was ever issued. One might suppose there was some basis for it but actually not really.
It was born on model exercises that date back to 15 years earlier. The models just assumed that transmission of any pathogen would be dramatically curtailed under these rules.
In congressional testimony, however, Dr. Fauci dealt handily with the question surrounding the topic. As he always does, he deflected to the other bureaucracy. It wasn’t his rule, he said, same as his answer for every other question. Though he seemed to be in charge of everything, drilling down on specifics always ended up creating the impression that he was nothing other than a science pundit.
National Public Radio has now taken to calling him the “83-year-old retired researcher.” How could Republicans be so mean to him?
In congressional testimony, Dr. Fauci explained that early on, it was believed that the virus was spread through droplets. In hammering out the six-feet rule, the speculation was that droplets do not reach very far. But there was a question about how far. Three feet is probably too few, but 10 feet is too many. So they chose something in between. The same happened in most countries in the world.
Yes, it was madness, especially when it turned out that this coronavirus spreads just like one would expect from a coronavirus. It spreads via aerosols, perhaps not exclusively, but that is the main way. Therefore, this distancing rule probably didn’t make much difference. It was not rooted in science.
In 2020, this was all thrown out, and the science became nothing more than an intuition. The same was true of other guidelines such as toddler masking, Plexiglas, one-way grocery aisles, new and used pen buckets, grocery and mail washing, and other practices based more on crazed germophobia than on any evidence.
Still, there is something that bugs me about this whole line of questioning. It is indeed interesting to know—which everyone should have known back then—that none of this stuff was scientific. But let’s just do a hypothetical. What if it was good science? Does that mean that it should have been imposed on society?
The right answer is no. We have a Bill of Rights for a reason. No government and no public health authority should be empowered to cancel church services or stop you from holding weddings, celebrating holidays, having house parties, visiting your grandmother in the retirement home, traveling to and from another state, or otherwise running your business as you see fit.
The watchwords of a free society are rights and liberties. It so happens that these are also the principles that best fit with the best science. But even if that were not true, we still have rights and liberties.
The question that has still not been clearly answered is this one: Even if there were some evidence basis for all the things that happened to us in 2020 and 2021, how did it come to be that all the freedoms we took for granted for essentially the whole of our lives came to be overthrown in a matter of days? What precisely were the mechanisms in place that shut the coroners’ offices, courts, small businesses, schools, and churches and grounded the cruise ships?
How precisely did this come to be? For that matter, how is it that the CDC was in charge of changing the whole U.S. system of voting and recommending instead mail-in ballots as it did on March 12, 2020? The same agency went with a rent moratorium and browbeat everyone to close all congregate settings.
We know the broad outlines of how it happened. An emergency was declared. The CDC was a lead agency, and it was backed by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, and FEMA. The bureaucrats had a field day writing regulations, which were then passed on to state health departments, which sent them to counties, which sent them to city managers and HR departments in corporations. All these were amplified by media, including radio, TV, and newspapers. This cascade seemed pretty much unstoppable. Voices that tried to take issue with the protocols were shouted down and then censored.
It was unclear at the time if we were facing laws, legislation, or mere recommendations and guidelines. Even now, it’s hard to find anyone or any agency that’s willing to take full responsibility for what happened. Even the CDC claims that it is in no position to dictate the law of the country, but its every word was taken to be law by lower orders of governments that pointed to the CDC as their authority. When that started to lose credibility, the next step was to point to the World Health Organization as the go-to authority.
We really need to be asking the fundamental question: How is it possible that liberty itself came to be so fragile? We also need to know how it came to be so broken so suddenly. There is surely an element of mass psychology at work here, as Mattias Desmet has said. But even that wasn’t unleashed entirely by accident. There is more going on here. That’s the part we need to know.
Congressional investigators haven’t even begun to look at this problem. And yet it is the one that most people are asking. After all, this was the period in which American life took a dramatic turn. We got mail-in voting as the norm, which seemed to be decisive in the presidential election. The dollar has lost 25 cents of value. Ill health is pervasive. The government is out of control in size and scope. The learning losses among the young are like nothing else on record.
It turns out that losing liberty in the guise of implementing science has been disastrous. If even it had turned out so poorly, we need systems of government in which rights and liberties aren’t overthrown with scientific speculations, even valid ones. Putting science ahead of human rights is not how the West was built.
