It seems that the policies of maintaining a 6-foot distance and masking for children were not based on scientific data. Please correct me if I am misinterpreting this testimony.
In such circumstances, just being familiar with the latest related science, and the fundamental concept of science, qualifies you to take your best (informed) guess. Making kids wear masks made sense in absence of data that showed it wasn't effective, because it's been so effective with other, similarly airborne-transmissible diseases.
> The “6 feet apart” social distancing recommendation forced on Americans by federal health officials was arbitrary and not based on science.
Again, "we could wait to conduct studies whether 4 feet is good enough, or 9 feet is required; or we could take our best shot since thousands of people are dying each day", and base our decisions on scientific data previously collected, in extremely similar pandemic/transmissible-disease contexts, even if it might imperfectly match the present scenario.
You don't need to collect evidence for everything you choose not to be doing, all you need is evidence that the status quo is not worse than any other (known) alternative.
In any case, my point was that you can't make decisions based on evidence when you are faced with a new situation for which there is no (reliable) evidence. In these cases some other approach is needed.
In fact, average people have the ability and humility to do basic ground-level checks that authorities and academics almost never do - a simple ability to step back and say "does any of this even make sense in the context of my own life and what I'm observing?"
All of this "advanced" knowledge of supposed-experts often clouds their judgment and just equips them with sophisticated reasoning ability to give themselves undeserved confidence in their own self-deception, grave errors and misunderstandings.
"The best science we have available during this medical emergency suggests that increasing distance reduces transmission for similar diseases, so we are going to recommend people maintain a 6-foot distance."
to
"unmitigated police power [...] authoritarian and despotic."
The 6-foot "rule" was only a recommendation, not a law. You were entirely free to ignore that recommendation. Not sure where the police are coming in to this?
6-foot distance was not just a recommendation it became this bizarre ritual divorced from reality with no actual scientific rational.
Yes it was:
> The guidelines are not mandatory
source: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cdc-school-reopening-guida...
It’s misleading to pretend that this wasn’t so and that the CDC had no idea that governments were making their recommendations mandatory.
That is exactly what is being asked. What previously collected scientific data?
It does. That sort of requirement is why people respect science and wanted to rely on it in the first place.
What you're arguing here is not that Fauci was doing science, as he clearly wasn't - pulling ideas out of thin air isn't science. What you seem to be arguing here is that science wasn't of any use for making decisions because the process is too slow.
That might well be correct. But in that case there was no basis for governments to do anything at all, as the question wasn't in the political realm either (nobody had campaigned on it in an election for example). Which means they should have just left individual citizens to their own devices.
You probably won't like that conclusion, but the alternative is to destroy the meaning of the word science. If it isn't a deliberative process in which you do what's needed to establish reliable world models then it's nothing at all, and there's no reason anyone should care what "scientists" say as they are little more than witchdoctors.
But it's still an estimate, and saying "trust the science" as if the science was settled is going too far the other direction.
I don't have a problem with people doing the best they could with what they knew. I object, on one hand, to the claim of certainty, and on the other hand, to the rejection of best estimates as being purely unscientific.
We've all read the transcript but to repeat it:
Majority Counsel: “Do you recall when discussions regarding, kind of, the at least a 6 foot threshold began?”
Dr. Fauci: “You know, I don’t recall. It sort of just appeared. I don’t recall, like, a discussion of whether it should be 5 or 6 or whatever. It was just that 6 foot is—”
Majority Counsel: “Did you see any studies that supported 6 feet?”
Dr. Fauci: “I was not aware of studies that in fact, that would be a very difficult study to do.”
It's not obvious how this could be any clearer. He states unambiguously that it wasn't a best estimate based on science, whether contemporary or pre-existing. Science doesn't even get a look in here. He didn't even know where the number came from. It became global policy but nobody can figure out why or how. He even seems to reject the idea that the question can be answered scientifically at all.
Well, sure. He was doing his job as a government employee, and right then the job wasn’t to do science and spend the next five years doing a comprehensive study on the virus. It was to make policy recommendations based on science in the sense of “drawing on his many years in the field, and decades of science around the transmissions mechanisms of other, similar diseases” and then to make a guess, yes. All scientists do this, often. Your chemistry teacher in high school made you wear googles when you were mixing liquids even though she didn’t have a paper in Nature definitively showing that the stuff you were mixing that day was even that bad to splash into your eye.
> What you seem to be arguing here is that science wasn’t of any use for making decisions, because the process is too slow.
No, you are arguing that, by insisting that rigorous multi-year studies unequivocally demonstrating the efficacy of masks, specifically with regard to this novel coronavirus that nobody had seen before, would be the only “science” based way to come up with a recommendation, and anything else is “pulling ideas out of thin air”.
I am arguing that all the science around viral transmission generally, influenza, bird flus, mask densities, aerosol spread of saliva and particles, etc. — although yes, not as good as a solid peer reviewed study delivered by scientists from the future who showed up in a time machine — generally is, and I think was in this case also was, of considerable use.
It’s an emergency. Millions of people are dying. It’s spread across the whole world. All any human being can do in that situation is form a hypothesis based on similar, but not perfectly similar, previous experiences. And I think it is obvious to anybody not being intentionally obtuse that the people we want making those guesses, based on the science around other seemingly-similar diseases, are the experts who know the science around those previous diseases, and the efficacies of various methods of prevention, etc., rather than some random guy like me who’s good at writing software and making omelettes, but not familiar with any of the scientific literature around viruses.
And then yeah, obviously modify those guidelines and recommendations (or sure, even laws) as the scientific process continues and better data becomes available.
Yes, it's understandable why you believe that Fauci and other public health officials must have been basing their rules on prior experience. That's what reasonable people would do, it's what reasonable people would expect others to do.
Unfortunately, what we're saying and even what Fauci is clearly saying in this transcript is that they didn't do this.
To repeat: yes, we want scientists to give their best advice (with reasonably accurate confidence ratings) based on their prior experience even if there's no time to do an in depth study right away. That's exactly why people are mad. Public health people said that's what they were doing - relying on their knowledge of the past to inform the present - but it wasn't.
If you review the pre-COVID science on respiratory viruses (like I did) you'll find that what it said was:
1. Lockdowns won't work. SARS-1 could move between buildings on air currents. People have been observed to spontaneously get a cold even when entirely isolated and with no exposure to anyone else who was sick or any contaminated objects (see [1] for an example).
2. Border controls won't work.
3. There's no evidence masks would work (so in science we assume the null hypothesis of no effect).
4. Vaccines also won't work. Coronaviruses mutate too fast and evolve beyond any immunity.
5. Scientists don't understand the epidemiology of respiratory illness and can't model them successfully.
6. Past coronavirus pandemics ended when the virus mutated into a more infectious but less serious form.
The literature was very depressing. Nothing worked and nobody understood why not. In other words: there's a fundamental theoretical gap and no pre-existing understanding of any value, also, no time to try and obtain that new understanding. Therefore science was of little use during COVID.
People like Fauci, who are paid nice salaries because they claim to be scientific, are very strongly incentivized to not conclude this. It's the old saw about getting a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. People want to hear that the experts have it all under control. They don't want to hear "the scientific understanding to date can't help us". Yet, that's what true scientists should have said.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-inf...
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/graisondangor/2021/09/19/cdcs-s...
There is not '6 feet is safe, 5 feet is not' because it is about probabilistic particle movement in air.
The primary takeaway from this transcript is that republicans decided to waste another 14 hours of Fauci’s time.
I of course would not have said that we could have reduced covid infections by following the steps you suggest. But governmental mandates need to take into account both sides of the ledger. If having kids in school could have prevented massive learning loss and not resulted in significant additional deaths/hospitalizations, then that's something worth considering.
What do you and Jim expect to learn from a scientific study? That 12 feet is better than 6 feet?
I’d like to hear from each of you what you hope to learn, and why you think it would have been worth intentionally infecting people with covid-19, as that’s what would be required for a conclusive scientific study.
I don't know anyone named Jim, nor am I saying we need to have definitive studies before giving out guidance. However, if we are going to give out guidance that ends up requiring schools to space out kids' desks in a way that makes it impossible for many of them to open, I think that guidance should either be grounded in science or admitted to be a best-guess. This is about transparency and honest, which are especially important when the government issues mandatory rules that upend life as we know it.
The best evidence of this is still the nearly controlled experiment that happened on the Diamond Princess cruise ship early on, which was completely ignored afterwards due to what it showed.
Hundreds of thousands of people spent days in our hospitals. If PPE was not effective, every doctor and nurse in the country would have been sick by week 2.
Masks had no effect. This isn't a lie. Look at any graph of cases from any country you care to pick, then try and draw a line where mask mandates were added or removed. You won't be able to, because even when a whole population was forced to start wearing a mask overnight there was no inflection in the graphs. The point of everyone wearing masks was to slow down the growth in those graphs, or even put it into reverse. Yet nothing happened. This is absolute proof that they did not work.
That's why the argument for masks always ends up relying on invalid lab studies using mannequins, or self-reinforcing models that just prove their own assumptions, or arguments of the form "people just didn't wear the right kind of masks". When you look at what was actually tried, the ground truth data doesn't show any effect.
Regarding doctors and nurses, they are trained in how to wear PPE and are much more likely to do so appropriately than civilians or (especially) children. PPE can be effective against COVID, but probably 1-5% of civilians wore masks according to protocols. Wearing a mask incorrectly might help, but AFAIK there are zero studies on this.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9123350/
These findings indicate that countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage.
There are literally no correlations anywhere to be found. No impact on case numbers (the goal!) and no link between compliance and outcomes. That's because masks cannot stop an aerosolized gas from entering the body, it just goes through or around them. Aerosolized agents can also enter you via the eyeballs, which is why real gas masks also protect the eyes:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9631193/
Especially easy for SARS-2 because the cornea has the ACE2 receptors the virus uses to enter cells:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7293510/
This sort of thing is why masks have no effect and at first health officials said that. They were right. But governments wanted to do something, and that was something, so public health "scientists" swiftly fell into line and overnight "the science" was suddenly saying the opposite.
That's quite the historical revisionism.
Between flip-flopping reccomendations, ineffective mandates, and functionally shutting the whole country down, I find it hard to believe someone believes the measures taken during the pandemic were "minimally invasive" or "common sense".
At times, public discourse felt more like some war between political factions than a country dealing with an inconvenient highly-infectious virus.
I will never forget the cult-like fanatacism surrounding the virus and vaccines from my peers during that time (went to an extremely liberal high school). Its even more insane how quickly those people just stopped caring entirely after lockdown ended and the news cycle moved onto the next Biggest Thing Ever, of the week.
With all the data now, we see that COVID affected older and less healthier population. They had no idea at that point, conclusively so always erred on the side of caution. All this house investigation is a Republican witch-hunt.
That was always going to be the case. Less old and healthy people were carriers.
Given the choice of widespread admittance of children to hospitals vs inconveniencing them with masks, they'd always choose the latter option. With the benefit of hindsight, there are always things to blame but this investigation is a hackjob.