Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb Criticizes ‘Lack of Rigor’ in Early CDC Covid Guidelines, Says 6-Feet Rule Was ‘Arbitrary’

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on Sunday that there was “a lack of rigor” in how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention created its initial guidance on Covid-19, specifically calling out the 6-feet social distancing rule as “arbitrary.”

“The six feet was arbitrary in and of itself,” Gottlieb said during an interview on CBS’ Face the Nation. “But if the administration had focused in on that, they might have been able to effect a policy that would have actually achieved their outcome. But that policy making process didn’t exist, and the six feet is a perfect example of sort of the lack of rigor around how CDC made recommendations.”

He went on to say “nobody knows where it came from.”

“Most people assume that the six feet of distance, the recommendation for keeping six feet apart, comes out of some old studies related to flu, where droplets don’t travel more than six feet,” he said. “We now know Covid spreads through aerosols. We’ve known that for a while, so how operative is that?”

Gottlieb recounted that the CDC originally wanted to make the distancing recommendation 10-feet, but were told by a White House official that it would be “inoperable” and “society will shut down.”

However, he noted that “10-feet was no more right than 6-feet” and the CDC ended up revising the guidelines to three-feet in the spring. That revision, Gottlieb said, came after a study conducted the prior fall found that the transmission risk between two people, three feet apart, both wearing face masks, would be reduced by 70%.

“Which begs the question, if they had that study result in the fall, why didn’t they change the advice in the fall? Why did they wait until the spring?” Gottlieb said. “This is how the whole thing feels arbitrary and not science-based. So we talk about a very careful, science based process and then these anecdotes get exposed, and that’s where Americans start to lose confidence in how the decisions got made.”

In the interview, Gottlieb also encouraged mask-wearing and denounced restrictions preventing businesses and communities from instituting mask mandates.

Watch above, via CBS.