News sites are full of news that Anthony Fauci, the US President’s medical advisor from 2021 to 2022, has admitted to fabricating the social distancing rules that were implemented during the Corona pandemic – leaving a distance of 6 feet between people – and that there is no knowledge behind it. Is this news true?
The truth is that the news is not accurate, and was distorted in a way that suggests that Fauci provided false information and advice.
The truth of his statements is the following:
Where did Fauci make his statements?
Dr. Fauci, former director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made his comments during testimony at a House subcommittee hearing on the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the origins of the virus.
The hearing was Fauci’s first public testimony on Capitol Hill since his retirement from government service. It has become contentious at times as Republicans have grilled Fauci on a wide range of topics, including the basis of public health recommendations during the pandemic and the use of email by public health officials.
Fauci also detailed some of the threats he and his family have received in the wake of the pandemic.
When did Fauci make his statements?
Today is Monday, June 3.
What did Fauci say?
Dr. Anthony Fauci explained that the social distancing guidelines – leaving a distance of 6 feet (about 180 centimetres) – between people that were given during the beginnings of the “Covid-19” pandemic did not come from him, but from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“It actually came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” Fauci said. “It was responsible for these types of guidelines for schools, not me.”
Did Fauci say there is no science behind these guidelines?
Fauci, who has repeated these guidelines during the pandemic, once said there was no science behind it, but he meant there were no clinical trials to back it up.
“It had nothing to do with me because I did not make the recommendation, and saying ‘there was no science behind it’ means there was no clinical trial behind it,” Fauci said. (Any experiment conducted on humans).
He continued that this does not mean that the recommendation was wrong or not based on data, but rather it was based on previous studies on respiratory diseases and the spread of droplets, not including a study on “Covid-19”, which of course did not exist before.
He added that he believes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used droplet studies years ago as the basis for the 6-foot guidelines.
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first supported the idea of 6 feet of “social distancing” for people who had to be close to others during the pandemic, scientists believed that larger contaminated droplets would fall from the air quickly and could not travel farther than 6 feet.
At the time, the World Health Organization recommended that people maintain a distance of one meter, or 3.3 feet, between themselves. But even as early as 2021, scientists began to realize that the coronavirus was transmitted through the air.
Social distancing measures in the United States have been particularly stringent, as other countries have adopted shorter distances; The World Health Organization has set a distance of 1 meter, or just over 3 feet.
The experts concluded that it was almost as effective as the 6-point mark feet would deter infection, and would have allowed schools to reopen more quickly.
“The 6-foot rule was probably the single most costly intervention recommended by the CDC that was applied consistently throughout the pandemic,” Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner, wrote in his book about the pandemic, “Uncontrolled Spread.”
Were the distancing measures against Corona wrong?
Experts agree that social distancing has saved lives, especially early in the pandemic when people had no protection against a new virus that was infecting millions of people.
A recent study published by the Brookings Institution concluded that behavioral changes to avoid infection with the Coronavirus, followed by vaccination later, prevented about 800,000 deaths in the United States.