On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a major update to pandemic guidelines. In the announcement, Director Rochelle Walensky said, “Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing.” After more than a year of caution, this is wonderful news. The pandemic is effectively over, and the credit should go to the vaccines.
Since the pandemic has become yet another political issue, there has been some vaccine hesitancy. But 46.6% have received at least one dose of the vaccine, and 35.8% are fully vaccinated. While other nations are ahead of the United States in the race to be fully vaccinated and close to herd immunity, the country is still doing well.
Encouraging vaccines is the main goal, so there should be no behavior that appears to contradict the message. But up until this point, too many have behaved as if vaccines would not change our pandemic trajectory. This includes members of the Biden administration.
President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and many others have been fully vaccinated for months now. Yet when making appearances, there they are, masked and around other masked adults.
This has always given the impression that being fully vaccinated means nothing. The entire point of an accelerated process to create, manufacture, distribute, and administer a vaccine is a return to normalcy. If the Biden administration and other politicians wish to encourage vaccinations, they must act as if they work. Because they do. In other words, mask guidelines for fully vaccinated adults should not have been in place until Thursday. Being cautious for a period of time is one thing. Performative nonsense propelled solely by politics, and not science, is quite another.
The lifting of mask guidelines for fully vaccinated adults has been met with excitement and relief. Some wonder why this realization took so long. Still others, including those in positions of power who have supposedly clung to science all along, actively resist the change. According to the New York Times, “governors of Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Virginia, and the mayors of New York City and Washington, D.C., all Democrats, said they were taking the new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under advisement before adopting it.”
Never mind that per the data, the vaccines are doing what they should both for individuals and for the population. These governors, not a single one of them a Republican, actually prefer partisan politics to established, real-word results. After Thursday’s news, the hashtag #MaskOn appeared on Twitter. There’s every reason to believe this type of hyperactive caution has been spurred on in large part by the behavior of those who claim to follow science but reject it when it doesn’t suit their political brand.
During an interview at the end of April, Biden said wearing a mask while fully vaccinated is “a patriotic responsibility for God’s sake.” In the few weeks since then and before the guidelines were updated, nothing has magically changed. The effectiveness of vaccines has been constant and known. If anything, the president and others in the spotlight have a duty to spread the truth, not partisan-fueled fear.
https://twitter.com/dcexaminer/status/1388130287519891457To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with wearing a mask if one personally desires to do so. And those who are immunocompromised or who cannot get a vaccine for medical reasons should continue to wear one and not be ridiculed. But wearing a mask when one is fully vaccinated is wholly unnecessary. It always has been.
Kimberly Ross (@SouthernKeeks) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog and a columnist at Arc Digital.
