Caution.
They were supposed to be issue this days ago but evidently had a rethink before putting it out. The CDC has taken heat lately even from respected members of their own field for being too cautious in incentivizing vaccines. Vaccinated people are going to want to do stuff now that they’re immunized, Scott Gottlieb recently reminded them. Tell them that they can’t do much of anything and you’re inviting the public to ignore the guidance. But tell them that they can do anything they want, i.e. an immediate return to full normalcy, and there may be unintended consequences. In the end the agency chose the Goldilocks option, or what passes for one in a hyper-cautious public-health bureaucracy. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky announces fully vaccinated people can gather indoors without masks in small, private settings. pic.twitter.com/Jyxg9J62L3 The Recount (@therecount) March 8, 2021 To sum up: Those who are vaccinated are allowed to: Visit with other fully vaccinated people indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing. Visit with unvaccinated people from a single household who are at low risk for severe disease indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing. Refrain from quarantine and testing following a known exposure to COVID-19, if asymptomatic. The “full normalcy” option would have encouraged vaccinated people to do anything they want to do. Go to restaurants and theaters! Travel extensively! It’s 2019 again! The CDC didn’t want to do that because the available data suggests that vaccinated people *can* transmit the virus to those who are unvaccinated, although at lower rates than an infected person who hasn’t had their shots can. Encourage vaccinated people to mix freely with the unvaccinated in public settings and you may seed an outbreak. Beyond that, the public-health brain trust is forever worried about the risk-management signals it sends to the general public, knowing how eager Americans are to socialize again. If the advice to vaccinated people was to return to full normalcy, some unvaccinated people would revert to full normalcy too. That’s not what the feds want to see when we’re still several months from herd immunity. The ultra-cautious approach would have advised vaccinated people to socialize with each other and only with each other. No exceptions. You can have your vaccinated friends over for dinner but the risk of transmitting the virus to an unvaccinated person is too great to allow the immunized and unimmunized to mix.
