From News Nation:
“CDC announces fully vaccinated
people can largely ditch masks indoors”
In a major step toward returning
to pre-pandemic life, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention eased
mask-wearing guidance for fully vaccinated people on Thursday, allowing them to
stop wearing masks outdoors in crowds and in most indoor settings. “Today is a
great day for America,” President Joe Biden said during a Rose Garden address
heralding the new guidance.
The new guidance still calls for
wearing masks in crowded indoor settings like buses, planes, hospitals, prisons
and homeless shelters, but will help clear the way for reopening workplaces,
schools, and other venues — even removing the need for masks or social
distancing for those who are fully vaccinated. “We have all longed for this
moment — when we can get back to some sense of normalcy,” said Dr. Rochelle
Walensky, the director of the CDC. The CDC and the Biden administration have
faced pressure to ease restrictions on fully vaccinated people — those who are
two weeks past their last required COVID-19 vaccine dose — in part to highlight
the benefits of getting the shot.
The country’s aggressive
vaccination campaign has paid off: U.S. virus cases are at their lowest rate
since September, deaths are at their lowest point since last April and the test
positivity rate is at the lowest point since the pandemic began. Walensky
announced the new guidance on Thursday afternoon at a White House briefing,
saying the long-awaited change is thanks to millions of people getting
vaccinated — and based on the latest science about how well those shots are working.
“Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor
activities – large or small — without wearing a mask or physically distancing,”
Walensky said. “If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things
that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic.” The new guidance comes as
the aggressive U.S. vaccination campaign begins to pay off. U.S. virus cases
are at their lowest rate since September, deaths are at their lowest point
since last April and the test positivity rate is at the lowest point since the
pandemic began.
To date about 154 million
Americans, more than 46% of the population, have received at least one dose of
the COVID-19 vaccines and more than 117 million are fully vaccinated. The rate
of new vaccinations has slowed in recent weeks, but with the authorization
Wednesday of the Pfizer vaccine for children ages 12 to 15, a new burst of
doses is expected in the coming days. Just two weeks ago, the CDC recommended
that fully vaccinated people continue to wear masks indoors in all settings and
outdoors in large crowds. During a virtual meeting Tuesday on vaccinations with
a bipartisan group of governors, President Joe Biden appeared to acknowledge
that his administration had to do more to model the benefits of vaccination. “I
would like to say that we have fully vaccinated people; we should start acting
like it,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, told Biden. “And that’s a big
motivation get the unvaccinated to want to to get vaccinated.” “Good point,”
Biden responded. He added, “We’re going to be moving on that in the next little
bit.”
The easing guidance could open
the door to confusion, as there is no surefire way for businesses or others to
distinguish between those fully vaccinated and those who are not. Walensky said
the evidence from the U.S. and Israel shows the vaccines are as strongly
protective in real-world use as they were in earlier studies, and that so far
they continue to work even though some worrying mutated versions of the virus
are spreading. The more people continue to get vaccinated, the faster
infections will drop — and the harder it will be for the virus to mutate enough
to escape vaccines, she stressed, urging everyone 12 and older who’s not yet
vaccinated to sign up. And while some people still get COVID-19 despite
vaccination, Walensky said that’s rare and cited evidence that those infections
tend to be milder, shorter and harder to spread to others. If someone who’s
vaccinated does develop COVID-19 symptoms, they should immediately put their
mask back on and get tested, she said. There are some caveats. Walensky
encouraged people who have weak immune systems, such as from organ transplants
or cancer treatment, to talk with their doctors before shedding their masks. That’s
because of continued uncertainty about whether the vaccines can rev up a
weakened immune system as well as they do normal, healthy ones.
^ The CDC tends to be one step
behind what Americans are already doing. It is good that they changed the mask
rules for the vaccinated, but that still doesn’t help the ordinary American who
has to deal with all the confusion where they live or travel to (since every
State, County, Town and Business can have their own rules.) ^
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