CDC’s New Outdoor Mask Guidance Is a Joke

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Source: National Review.

When pandemic hysteria first began, I posted a link here in the Forum to the CDC’s dedicated Covid-19 information page. Not long after that, CDC botched the roll-out of its diagnostic assay, disrupting early case incidence reporting. Months later CDC published new guidelines for cause-of-death reporting that made fatality statistics dubious in some ways. Early in the pandemic response, CDC recommended against wearing face masks, now it is recommending that even vaccinated people wear them outdoors.

I regret my early endorsement of the CDC as a source of reliable public health information. I get it that mistakes happen, but the CDC doesn’t seem to make understandable mistakes in a context of scientific norms. Some other factor (politics?) appears to be driving the show.

Published by John Todd Roberts

Published

14 thoughts on “CDC’s New Outdoor Mask Guidance Is a Joke”

  1. Wasn’t the original “don’t wear masks” order a response to the fact that we have outsourced our capacity to produce anything other than airliners and weapons, and we were unable to get even medical workers the PPE they needed?

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  2. The initial recommendation to NOT wear masks was not based on individual or community risk, it was to prevent private hoarding that could deplete the supply needed by health care workers. So, it is irrelevant to continued mask use.

    I strongly recommend vaccination, with whatever vaccine you can get. If you are a woman with a history of blood clots or inflammatory disease, I’d say hold out for Pfizer or Moderna, but for men and most women, J&J is a lot safer than risking the disease. So, get vaccinated when you can. Once you are, your risk of serious disease is effectively over.

    I am committed to wearing masks in public places not for my own safety but to protect others who have not been vaccinated from the very low risk of getting it from me. But there are limits to that.

    Once everyone who wants to get vaccinated has had the opportunity to get it, and the only remaining unvaccinated people are those who have chosen not to get vaccinated, I have to assume they have chosen to get the disease and I am free from any obligation to protect them(with the exception of those who are immunocompromised or who are caretakers for those who are, when seeing them I will continue to mask)

    But there has to a goal post. Once the risk of getting the disease is limited to those who have chosen to accept that risk, I am going back to life as usual.

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    2. What do you make of the NR writer’s statement, “Earlier this month, the CDC itself reported that out of a universe of 66 million individuals who were vaccinated at the time, just 5,800 got the virus. That’s less than 1-in-10,000.”?

      It suggests to me that vaccinated persons present almost no risk to themselves or to others.

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      1. First, I don’t know how they could determine how many got asymptomatic but still weakly spreadable infections.

        And for some, even very low risk is excessive. For example, a friend of mine’s husband had a heart transplant. We are all vaccinated, but even so, I will continue to wear a mask when I visit.

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        1. WSJ provides an account of the finding:

          https://www.wsj.com/articles/cdc-identifies-small-group-of-covid-19-infections-among-fully-vaccinated-patients-11618490232?mod=hp_lead_pos7

          Assuming the data is good, the puzzle represents a choice between virtually zero risk, which vaccines confer and actually zero risk, which no vaccine can confer. Why wouldn’t virtually zero risk be sufficient to relax public face mask policies more than the CDC has done?

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          1. The question is really ‘risk of what?’

            Risk of a serious infection? Zero

            Risk of a minor but noticeable infection? 5 to 15%

            Risk of a transmissible infection? Who knows? It is likely brief and minor, but still real. It would be good to know,

            Risk of an asymptomatic infection that is not transmissible? Also unknown.

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          2. Another little tidbit that seems to be overlooked is the long haul Covid survivors, who are mostly younger, that deal with health issues for several months following “minor” infections.

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  3. Any article that refers to the public servants doing their best to protect everyone in a nearly unprecedented public health crisis as “pezzonovantes” has clearly been written by a pretentious jackass and not to be taken seriously.

    To save you the trouble of googling this obscure insult it is a derisive term for a person who acts like a big shot but is actually insignificant.

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  4. While I wear masks in indoor settings, I rarely wear one outside unless I know I will be in close proximity to groups of others like a line and that has been the order in Va for some time anyway. I never heard a CDC recommendation to wear one outdoors but I did recently see an article that it is no longer recommended for vaccinated people to need one outdoors, even in small groups, except in huge crowds like crammed concerts.

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