If the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had begun last year with social-distancing guidelines of three feet instead of six, schools might not have closed, which harmed children in incalculable ways. It wasn’t just kids, either. The effect was, as Mark Alexander wrote last week, “wrecking the U.S. economy and millions of American lives.”

Nevertheless, the CDC officially announced Friday its new guidance of just three feet between students. Still, adults must remain six feet apart and masks should remain mandatory. Of the six-foot diktat, Dr. Scott Gottlieb wants to know, “Where’s the science?” He answers his own question: “Nobody knows for sure.” That’s reassuring.

In any case, the CDC’s shift, as dramatic as it actually is in practice, is almost beside the point. The real point is that the CDC is focused on social distance and social “equity.”

It wants people to remain, er, separate but equal.

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky pledged Friday to prioritize “equity” in “everything we do” at the federal government health agency. “I can promise you as long as this team of people are here, as long as I am here, we will bake into the cake of everything we do our commitment to equity, to science, and to bring back the health to the American people and to keep it there.”

Walensky’s vow came on the occasion of a visit to the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters by President Joe Biden and President-in-Waiting Kamala Harris. The two were there to exploit last week’s terrible murder spree in Atlanta, falsely blaming racism for political gain. And the director of the CDC promised to extend this grotesque divisiveness to healthcare.

“Equity” is perhaps the definitive guiding radical leftist principle for the Biden administration. But as our Douglas Andrews wrote in January, “Equality and equity aren’t the same things. Not even close. The root of the former word is one of the self-evident truths embedded in our Declaration of Independence. It refers to the state of being equal, especially in status, rights, and opportunities. The latter word, however, refers to systems and institutions that are ‘fair’ and ‘just.’” The biggest problem is who decides.

When you presuppose that every person (of pallor) and every institution in America is racist, as Team Biden does, the “solution” is to tip the scales against “oppressive” whites. Thus, every policy decision — including edicts from the CDC — is made by a career bureaucrat obsessed with counting by race.

That already happened with the CDC’s early vaccination plans, and the Biden administration has worked to double down on that racist approach. It’s never enough, though. A CDC report last week purported to find that “equity in access to COVID-19 vaccination has not been achieved nationwide.”

The CDC aims to fix this by hiring a vaccine equity czar. That man is Demetre Daskalakis, whom The Washington Post immediately describes as “a top HIV/AIDS doctor and gay activist.” He loses points for being white, but maybe you can’t always check off all the intersectionality boxes.

We just have two questions: Was this racism Donald Trump’s fault for delivering vaccines in record time but doing it in a racist way? Or was it Joe Biden’s fault for having built a vaccine plan from scratch, as he falsely claims? Biden can’t have it both ways.