Former FDA Chief: Social
Distancing 'Didn't Work as
Well as We Expected'
Town Hall,
by
Bronson Stocking
Original Article
Posted By: Judy W.,
5/4/2020 1:14:28 PM
On CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday, former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said social distancing and other mitigation measures put in place to stop the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus don't appear to be working as much as public health experts had hoped.
"When you look across the country, it's really a mixed bag," Dr. Gottlieb explained.
The former FDA chief said while New York is really driving the national statistics, other areas of the country are continuing to see a rise in the number of coronavirus cases.
"[W]hen you back out what’s happening in New York ... around the nation, hospitalizations and new cases
Reply 1 - Posted by:
earlybird 5/4/2020 1:23:55 PM (No. 400545)
What OP said. Apparently FORMER FDA chief Gottlieb didn’t get that memo. He is sort of nibbling around the edges in his statement…
The commissioner stopped short of declaring the mitigation efforts a failure but said the numbers don't reflect the results that experts were hoping to see.
"While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it's fair to say it didn't work as well as we expected. We expected we’d start seeing more significant declines in new case and deaths around the nation at this point, and we’re just not seeing that," Gottlieb said.
Unimpressive. Adds nothing. But he couldn’t say “I don’t know”, could he….
13 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
Vaquero45 5/4/2020 1:30:09 PM (No. 400559)
As Robert Heinlein said: "Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why.
Then do it."
26 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
EQKimball 5/4/2020 1:37:04 PM (No. 400573)
In 1968 the Hong Kong Flu (notice it was named for the place of origin) killed more than a million people worldwide, including 100.000 in the U.S. It never occurred to anyone, including those of us who contracted it, that the country should shut down or even institute social distancing. President Johnson was not blamed and did not call daily press briefings that would have kept the story on the front page every day. The symptoms (sore throat, headache, runny nose, fever, chills, fatigue, joint pain, muscle ache) could be severe. I have never been sicker. Likely because we did not isolate ourselves and therefore developed herd immunity to the strain, daily life went on, at that time including massive antiwar protests in major cities across the U.S.
27 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
DVC 5/4/2020 1:42:38 PM (No. 400582)
Keeping the subways open in NYC was a brilliant move.
13 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
Sunhan65 5/4/2020 1:50:22 PM (No. 400597)
Love the Heinlein call out, #2. Another might be, "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." - Robert A. Heinlein
10 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
msjena 5/4/2020 1:53:00 PM (No. 400602)
Maybe because there was no social distancing in nursing homes, jails or ships?
7 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
Vaquero45 5/4/2020 1:59:45 PM (No. 400609)
Heinlein also said: "Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge, the more likely they are to think so."
Sounds like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx to me.
17 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
lakerman1 5/4/2020 2:18:03 PM (No. 400621)
are the new cases coming from old people in Nursing Homes? If so, provide better screening of employees and visitors in Nursing homes. Let others live free.
5 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
Proud Texan 5/4/2020 2:22:05 PM (No. 400626)
I am sure it had nothing to do with perventing people from getting sunlight and fresh air, two of the medicines there are.
5 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
GoodDeal 5/4/2020 3:27:58 PM (No. 400681)
The keyword here is the FORMER commissioner. Apparently, he has resentments and needs to do some badmouthing as payback for hurting his little ego by letting him go. I suggest his alcoholism is playing a big part in him acting out on his anger. NY is driving the statistics on incompetence being the normal at all levels. Post virus analysis will prove NY was the worst of the worst in how things were managed.
5 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
caljeepgirl 5/4/2020 3:47:21 PM (No. 400695)
Sounds to me like a few goalposts are being moved around to fit desired narratives.....a little sleight-of-hand while the folks aren't paying attention.....
4 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
Rather Read 5/4/2020 4:08:10 PM (No. 400711)
I had the Hong Kong flu and I remember two things. One - I was sick as a dog and two - the school closed for a few days since so many teachers and students were ill, but as soon as we got better the school opened and we had to make up the lost days. Businesses stayed open.
4 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
worried 5/4/2020 4:09:10 PM (No. 400713)
Where does he come up with the 100,000 deaths, when the CDC figures are around 38,000? The media keeps exaggerating the number, and very few challenge them. Oh, yeah, they count any deaths as caused by the virus, even if the victim didn't have it. Anything to try to hang it on Trump!
3 people like this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
jj1319 5/4/2020 4:32:45 PM (No. 400734)
It seems to me that social distancing has worked rather well. Early on, the projections were several hundred thousand dead. We are currently under 70,000. That is a remarkable reduction, no matter how you slice it.
2 people like this.
Reply 15 - Posted by:
MickTurn 5/4/2020 5:02:37 PM (No. 400768)
NO Schiff Sherlock?
Where do these morons come from anyway...Oh Yea, Lib Universities!
"...don't appear to be working as much as public health experts had hoped."
Should be
"...don't appear to be working as much as public health IDIOTS had hoped."
0 people like this.
Reply 16 - Posted by:
walcb 5/4/2020 5:09:35 PM (No. 400772)
What OP said. The virus is endemic why would deaths decrease? The only objective to all of this cause of the economy to collapse was to reduce the peak not to reduce overall incidence. My only hope in this strategy was that a treatment regime would be developed which appears to have happened but for some reason is not widely reported.
2 people like this.
Reply 17 - Posted by:
red1066 5/4/2020 5:10:48 PM (No. 400774)
Social distancing was fine when the so called experts told us not to wear masks, but now that everyone is wearing masks, social distancing seems uncalled for. The whole reason to social distance was because sneezing and cough droplets would spread the virus up to six feet. Now with masks on, plus the warmer weather, the coughing and sneezing droplets stops pretty much at the mask.
1 person likes this.
Reply 18 - Posted by:
earlybird 5/4/2020 5:30:49 PM (No. 400788)
Re #10, do we have a link to verification of his alcoholism? I haven’t seen anything on that anywhere else…
2 people like this.
Reply 19 - Posted by:
Heraclitus 5/4/2020 6:09:08 PM (No. 400818)
News flash mid-day here in NH: death toll rises. ...by 2. TWO. We're up to 86 deaths.
We feel sorry for those who have lost loved ones, whatever their age.
At least our NH Governor, Sununu, is relaxing controls, although we've never been under a strict stay-at-home edict. Nevertheless, great harm has been done and is being done.
The virus is bad. But the hysteria, causing panic amongst those who should have been thinking and questioning instead of pushing the STOP button, grinding this great intricate complex economic engine to a stop, while the gears of unintended consequences crush and spit out people's lives and hopes and others whose non-covid illnesses left them die untreated. And meanwhile, petty tyrants strutting around the country are demonstrating just how easy it is to ignore the Constitution. BETTER vote them OUT.
I will quote again from Billy Clinton's Surgeon General, "We're all gonna die of somethin' some day."
1 person likes this.
Reply 20 - Posted by:
PESSIMIST 5/4/2020 6:33:03 PM (No. 400837)
LYING by Gottlieb. Conscious LYING.
The purpose of "flattening the curve" was never to eliminate deaths from the virus. It was to stretch out or slow down the progress of infections, so hospital systems wouldn't be overwhelmed by a rush of cases all at once. That has been triumphantly accomplished. New York City wasted a visit from a gigantic Navy hospital ship and the creation of a 2,000-bed facility out of its now-gutted Javits convention center. Maybe 50 of 3,000 beds jointly provided by these operations proved necessary! Hospital ICU units have plenty of space everywhere in the US. We're giving away ventilators to Ecuador.
To reemphasize the point -- no one ever said the lockdown of the economy could or should be expected to lower/cap the COVID case toll. Just spread cases over time, to make sure the hospitals weren't flooded. THEY WEREN'T and AREN'T.
Now the goal posts have been shifted. The shutdown, we're now told, is to stop the virus altogether. No leaving the cellar forever (or until the day, a vaccine is created.)
In 1957, with a population of 172 million, we lost anywhere from 60,000-100,000 lives to the Asian flu (the 60K estimate is actually considered low, an outlier.). This would be equivalent today to 120-200,000 lives lost today; the most dire estimates are that we''ll only reach 100,000 from the Coronavirus in the next three months. In '57, no shrill voices like Gottlieb were around to demand that we wreck our economy.
What is his (their) motive?
2 people like this.
Reply 21 - Posted by:
DCGIRL 5/4/2020 7:01:45 PM (No. 400848)
Agree with you #20!!
1 person likes this.
Maybe we are just part of a social experiment. We can go to the hardware store that is really busy, the grocery store, the liquor store, the dollar store, Wally World, the fast food drive thru, and that's okay. None of them lost their jobs. Construction on I-4 never stopped. But, going to any legitimate job or church is bad. We have been had.
0 people like this.
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We were told that the social distancing was to flatten the curve so the hospitals didn't get overwhelmed. That was done so well that hospitals are going out of business for lack of customers, since they're not allowed to do elective procedures. Did the public health experts have another goal in mind? We know it wasn't supposed to lower the total cases, just spread them out over time.