The law is not a guide for what you should not do. It's a guide to what you can get away with. Information is still information, despite the recent paradigm change to attention markets and spectacle over substance. A case in point: the CDC rolled back PPE requirements for health workers.
From the Reveal report, "31,000 and counting", by Jennifer Gollan and Elizabeth Shogren:
"On March 10, facing a massive national shortage of personal protective equipment, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had downgraded its guidance, opening the door for hospitals to provide only surgical masks to health care workers treating confirmed or suspected COVID-19 patients. The announcement marked a dramatic departure from stricter CDC guidelines issued in February, which called for the use of N95 respirators or even more protective gear because it was unknown how the novel pathogen spread."
The details of this are simply that pressure from Congress and the Executive branch, as well as the "healthcare" industry, was successful in convincing the federal agency responsible for medicine in America that it was necessary to relax safety standards for those in direct contact with people who are sick and dying from The Virus.
It had been the thinking of the CDC early on, that the highest standard of protection would be necessary until it was known just how The Virus spreads. Now that the standard has been rolled back, it has also been determined "aerosol" is definitely a vector of transmission: it's in the air, in the rooms, in the hallways. This means a normal surgical mask is not adequate protection from the coronavirus. And, it's not required by the CDC or OSHA.
The American Hospital Association mounted an aggressive "Action Alert" campaign to stop Congress from adding language to another bill, Families First Coronavirus Response Act, about which the AHA's "Action Alert" titled, "Contact Your Representative and Ask Them to Urge House Leadership to Withdraw Provision in Coronavirus Funding Package," said:
This provision is tied to the SARS virus, which has been scientifically proven to be transmitted through the air ("airborne"), in addition to spread through droplets and on surfaces. Protecting health care workers from SARS required N95 respirators for routine care.In contrast, COVID-19 by all current evidence is droplet and contact spread, and thus does not require N95 respirators during routine interactions between health care providers and patients.
Translated: The Virus is not yet known [is now known!] to spread through the air, so AHA urges the CDC to reduce the standard to a level of protection for frontline health workers below that required for the previous epidemic of SARS. Because, said AHA, "...there should not be conflicting, duplicate or unnecessary regulatory burden placed on hospitals".
This campaign was successful in blocking the additional protections against airborne pathogens that the bill would have required. This, of course, places enormous obstacles in the way of changing that standard again, now that The Virus is known to transmit through the air.
The basis for the rollback is now crystal clear: to protect hospitals and other industry stakeholders from legal exposure for disobeying health and safety standards required by the OSHA and the CDC, by dumping the safety standards. This is exactly like the President's logic, when he asserts with a straight face that testing causes cases.
To keep the hospitals from being sued for not providing the basic necessities of safety. And to hell with the most vulnerable workers in the fight, and their patients, and you, and me.
