Scathing Letter to the FDA from Personal Protective Equipment Experts
Team Rationality colleague Megan Mansell is among other PPE experts who have written a letter to the FDA, which you can read here, or across this thread below.
Here are their concluding words…
The CDC has built a series of recommendations for masking that are inconsistent with the technical and medical literature. The policy and procedural recommendations exaggerate the benefits, while ignoring the limitations and harms, especially for children and the general population. In addition, the CDC has taken a policy position of "it might work" and "it can't hurt and use selective and weak observational data in the place of actual controlled scientific study to justify inappropriate recommendations for masks and face coverings.
Recently, the CDC has deployed a respiratory protection policy (i.e., masks to N95s) that dismisses the key principles in any Safety and Health program regarding the use of respirators - namely the Respiratory Protection Program. There is no mention of potential risks if the respirator is not properly used or fitted correctly. Moreover, it is clear that respirators are not intended for use with children. In our profession, if PPE and respiratory protection guidance was to ever be delivered without risk identification, fit testing, and training, we would be liable for putting personnel in a high-risk scenario, which is what the CDC is doing with their policy.
We would ask the CDC to accept these basic industrial hygiene facts that we have presented, update their public guidance accordingly regarding the issue of droplets vs. aerosols, stop confusing the public regarding the effectiveness of masks, and stop implying respirators are acceptable for children, and to be given generally to the public.
In addition, it is clear the CDC knows, or should know, that gaps between the face and mask are a major problem for real mask effectiveness and could never have met our industry's requirement of 90% relative risk reduction.
The CDC is doing enormous damage to science and scientists by allowing politics to dictate public health policy rather than actual science. Increasingly, and for good reason as we have illustrated, the public does not trust the CDC and its science; this must change.
We recognize that it is easy to judge from afar and know that you and your team are under tremendous stress during this period. Our desire is to see the CDC and our country succeed in these efforts. As such, instead of just being critical, we want to offer our time to your organization to find solutions together. We would be willing to collaborate in the creation of a competent plan that will be based on the Hierarchy of Controls and will be tailored to various work and living environments. We will also help develop data points we can use to monitor and measure this program to enable proper adjustments as needed.
where was this 2 years a go?
Link to letter says file is in owner's trash