Despite the selective amnesia Dr. Anthony Fauci was laboring with this month while testifying before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, a fascinating detail emerged from the testimony, a summary of which was released to the public on Wednesday. According to lawmakers who were there, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and former chief medical adviser to the president — the man who once equated himself with science itself — offered a stunning concession that the six-foot social distancing edict “sort of just appeared” out of nowhere and was likely not based on scientific data.
Many have argued this for years. Twelve months after the first coronavirus guidelines were issued on March 9, 2020, Tucker Carlson pointed out what a report in the British Medical Journal had contended six months earlier: Social distancing rules that “stipulate a single specific physical distance between individuals to reduce transmission” originate in flawed research from the late 19th century and a longstanding framework that simplistically “dichotomizes respiratory droplets into two sizes.”
So how did this quackery suddenly become trusted “science”? Revisiting the critical February to March 2020 time frame, including Fauci’s emails from the period, provides some insight.
On Feb. 5, 2020, Fauci sent a note to Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases and early incident manager for the Covid response, asking whether a Wall Street Journal article from Feb. 2 had misquoted the CDC. The article referred to the virus’ ability
