The CDC magically discovered new science just days before a desperate President Biden is set to give his State of the Union address.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which had been stubbornly refusing to revisit its nonsensical masking guidance long after most states had abandoned it, magically discovered new science just days before a desperate President Biden is set to give his State of the Union address.
Not only was this predictable, but it was predicted by me in this space a few weeks ago. While the CDC would no doubt argue that the situation is better now and so it supports more de-masking, NBC had previously reported that the White House was pressuring the CDC to offer new guidance ahead of the speech. With the crisis unfolding in Ukraine on top of Biden’s mounting political problems, he was desperate to be able to cling to something.
So here we are.
Under the new guidance, the CDC shifted from using raw case totals as a trigger for mask mandates. The thresholds for high/substantial/moderate/low transmission were based on an arbitrary standard that the CDC had developed in the early stages of the pandemic, when testing was a fraction of what it is now and thus fewer cases were being detected. Also, at the time, there was no vaccine available that allowed individuals to reduce their risk of developing severe Covid.
Under the new guidance, the CDC is shifting to another arbitrary set of thresholds to determine whether a given county is low/medium/or high-risk; only now, more weight will be given to hospital capacity. The new system doesn’t make much sense either, because there is no strong evidence to support the idea that mandating masks in indoor settings would lower the number of people hospitalized with Covid.
So on the one hand, this is good news because it will tangibly allow masks to come off the faces of millions of children who live in areas that have been religiously following CDC guidance. But it also leaves the door open to a permanent masking regime, if we assume that there will be future surges of different variants of Covid.
The timing of the announcement should disabuse people of the notion that CDC decisions are driven by anything more than politics.