Just two weeks after Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky said “now is not the moment” to lift mask mandates, the agency decided the moment had arrived — and some are questioning the timing of the announcement given Democrats’ current political woes.
On Friday, the CDC issued new guidelines declaring more than 70 percent of Americans free to stop wearing masks, social distancing, and avoiding crowds, reported the New York Times. This is a major departure from previous guidance, under which 95 percent of counties in the nation were deemed high-risk and therefore in need of such measures.
According to the Times:
The recommendations no longer rely only on the number of cases in a community to determine the need for restrictions such as mask wearing. Instead, they direct counties to consider three measures to assess risk of the virus: new Covid-related hospital admissions over the previous week and the percentage of hospital beds occupied by Covid patients, as well as new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people over the previous week.
Based on these three factors, counties can calculate whether the risk to their residents is low, medium or high, according to the agency, and only areas of high risk should require everyone to wear a mask.
The new guidelines also apply to schools, a major reversal for an agency that has been recommending universal in-school masking since July.
“We want to give people a break from things like masking when our levels are low and then have the ability to reach for them again should things get worse in the future,” Walensky said Friday. “We need to be prepared, and we need to be ready for whatever comes next.”
In other words, don’t trash your masks yet. If the Biden administration decides it’s politically safe to demand widespread masking again in the future — say, after the November elections — it won’t hesitate to do so.
Right now, though, the administration is “working on a pandemic exit strategy that would help Americans live with the virus,” wrote the Times.
They have good reason to do so. Democrats in general, and Biden in particular, are sinking in the polls, and Americans are fed up with COVID restrictions and the destruction they have caused. A recent memo from Impact Research, a Democratic consulting firm, recommended that Democrats “declare the crisis phase of COVID over and push for feeling and acting more normal” — but not before claiming credit for bringing this situation about. It also called for acknowledging that the virus is here to stay and ceasing all talk of “restrictions and the unknown future ahead.”
“If Democrats continue to hold a posture that prioritizes COVID precautions over learning how to live in a world where COVID exists, but does not dominate, they risk paying dearly for it in November,” said the memo.
Little wonder, then, that some observers are suspicious of the timing of the CDC’s announcement, coming as it did just days before President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, which is scheduled for Tuesday.
Johns Hopkins researcher and bestselling author Dr. Marty Makary, for example, tweeted, “Interesting timing for CDC to announce eliminating their masking & distancing orders for children & the ‘vast majority’ of Americans — a new war, hrs after a Supreme Court pick is named, late on a Friday afternoon, and 2 business days before a SOTU speech.”
Kerry Dougherty, a talk-show host on Norfolk, Virginia, radio station WNIS, had this to say: “No thinking person in the U.S. believes the CDC is anything but an arm of the Biden administration and the latest idiocy about masks is timed perfectly for the SOTU. #DefundTheCDC.”
The CDC’s constantly changing advice is making it ever more difficult for anyone to pretend its guidelines are based on science rather than politics. As the Times pointed out, “A study published by the C.D.C. on Friday suggested that about half of those who tested positive remained contagious after five days — the length of isolation that the agency currently recommends.”
“Obviously,” observed BizPacReview, “‘the science’ has changed with an emphasis on it being all about political science now with the CDC being little more than an arm of the Democratic Party.”
