The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has all sorts of recommendations that the vast majority of adults ignore altogether: Don’t eat cookie dough or raw meat. If you’re a woman who is not on birth control, don’t consume any kind of alcohol. Don’t smoke a cigar — ever.
But the pandemic changed that. Now, the CDC’s guidance is gospel, especially in blue states and cities. Is it any wonder, then, that the agency has no intention of giving up its newfound power?
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky confirmed during a closed-door hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee this week that she has no plans to change or loosen certain guidance on masking, specifically in school settings.
“Our guidance currently is that masking should happen in all schools right now,” she told lawmakers.
Even after being pressed to explain the scientific study on which the CDC’s school masking guidance has been based, a study that has been proven worthless by experts, Walensky refused to agree to a guidance update. She admitted the Arizona study has “limitations” but continued to insist that “masks are preventing … disease and preventing that transmission, and because of that, we are able to keep our schools open.” She offered no evidence to back this claim.
Finally, Walensky admitted what most of us have known for the past few years: “I will also say that guidance is just guidance, and all of these decisions, we’ve continued to say, have to be made at the local level. As cases come down dramatically, we have deferred our guidance to the local jurisdictions.”
In other words, states and cities are free to take the CDC’s recommendations with a grain of salt, just as they always have, and empower individual citizens to decide what is best for their health. If a person wants to buy a tub of raw cookie dough from the store and eat it all, he is free to do so, even if this goes against the CDC’s guidance. For the same reason, parents should be free to decide whether they want their children to wear masks at school.
That’s called basic risk assessment, and it’s something the CDC has never been good at. So why are we still granting it so much control over COVID policies?
