Comment by mapt

The FDA, however, is not regulating the spread of the 800 other known species of oral bacteria as well as presumably numerous unknown ones, which do cause some known harm. The extreme suspicion of commercially introduced anthropogenic agents seems a bit ridiculous in both natural ecology and the human microbiome. Prove this compound conclusively safe, but not these other ten million compounds we're just going to allow to run wild. Or for competitors - rely on the 'proof' of safety established in the 1920's or the 1970's before we had any idea whatsoever what we were doing scientifically. Or just rely on doctors/dentists unsupported first-principles advice - we've never demonstrated scientifically that floss works, for example.

We should all be quarantined, all the time, by this criteria. Regulatory bodies have a great cognitive bias towards fictional 'purity' of systems that are in actual scientific fact, messy and routinely contaminated in various ways.