The CDC flip flops on masks yet again, now says k-12 schools and VACCINATED people must wear masks again.

 

A doctor at Walter Reed getting a vaccination. US Secretary of Defense photo.

The CDC has updated its masking policy and will now recommend universal masks for k-12 students and masks for vaccinated people in areas of high transmission of the Coronavirus. ABC News. The CDC claims that some vaccinated people may still carry and transmit the disease. They also recommend school aged children to mask up regardless of vaccination status or the fact that children are much less susceptible to the disease. The decision is a major flip-flop from the CDC as they had just recommended that vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks and as recent as a couple of weeks ago said that no changes were likely. 

My Comment:

Basically nobody is happy with this CDC flip flop. The response I have seen has been almost universally negative, though for different reasons. The worst of the worst blue check marks on twitter are yelling at the CDC for ever having dropped the mask mandates in the first place and smugly commenting that they never stopped wearing masks in the first place. But those people are the minority.

A lot of people that got the vaccine, myself included, are furious about this. Getting the vaccine was supposed to be our ticket out of this nonsense and now we are bringing it back? It's stupid. The tiny chance that I could transmit the coronavirus to someone unvaccinated is, quite frankly, not my problem. People are adults and are allowed to weigh the pros and cons of getting vaccinated and risking exposure. Everyone who wants the vaccine now has had plenty of time to get it and if they don't want it that's fine (and there are actual valid reasons to not get it, regardless of what the media says). But it's not my damn fault if they get sick. Just like it's not their fault if the vaccine fails and I get a breakthrough case. 

People are also upset that this decision will undermine the trust in the vaccine. After all, if the vaccines actually work, why on earth would you need to mask up? People will obviously assume that the vaccine doesn't work if you can still spread the virus to others after taking it. For a government agency that is all in on vaccinations, this is working against their stated goals. What person who is cynical or distrusting of the vaccine get it now? 

The constant flip flopping on this issue has massively eroded trust in the CDC and the medical community in general. I still remember the early days of the outbreak where they were saying "masks don't work and you are a bad person if you use one because our doctors and nurses need them". And then they were like "lol, just kidding you gotta wear a mask now". Then they said, "lol, you don't need a mask anymore if you are vaccinated" and followed it up with this final flip flop. Is it any wonder why people don't trust them anymore?

The CDC recommendations are for masking up in areas with high transmission (which is 100 cases per 100,000 people). That does not include my area of Wisconsin which has hardly any recent cases. But I am sure that we will be made to suffer under these guidelines anyways. I have already heard rumors at work that we will be forced to mask up again, even though our companies vaccination rate is over 70% (and a good portion of the rest have natural antibodies). 

That being said, I really don't expect people to comply with this. I know I personally won't be wearing a  mask unless I absolutely have to. If a store requires it I will shop somewhere else and will only shop at a store that requires masking if I have no other choice. And even then I will only mask up if confronted, if only because I have sympathy for the poor retail workers and security guards that have to enforce this nonsense. 

Speaking of retail workers and security guards, it's going to be a rough time for them. Having to enforce the whims of the CDC seems like a very good way to invite violence on yourself. I predict many of them will just ignore the new mandate and won't try to enforce these rules. 

As for the school recommendations, it just seems like utter lunacy to me. Kids under 12 are essentially immune to the virus with only very sick kids dying from the disease. I am aware of zero cases where a small child has died from Coronavirus without some kind of major underlying issue. Older students and teachers can get vaccinated and even if they don't they are are a dramatically reduced risk as well. It makes zero sense to mandate masks, especially since I believe these efforts are going to damage the development of these kids over time. 

The good news is that even a lot of state governments are starting to go "enough is enough". Florida and Nebraska are already saying that they won't be going along with any new mandates and I think a lot of local officials are going to say the same thing. And if the government really tries to push this nonsense I believe that we will start to see major protests, like the ones we saw in Europe and Australia last weekend, all across the United States. I'm generally opposed to protests as a rule but even I am ready to grab a sign and start yelling at these CDC fools. 

The worst thing is that I still don't think we really have good science on whether or not masks are effective. All pre-Covid studies said that masking was mostly pointless and only really effective if you use N-95 medical masks. The science is even less clear than that on surgical and cloth masks, and it's not like it has gotten any clearer since then. And it's also very clear that basically all medical studies on the Coronavirus are politicized to the point where their recommendations are useless.