CDC Covid Guidance Update: Same rules for jabbed and unjabbed healthcare personnel
CDC guidance for healthcare workers explicitly states vaccination status makes no difference with regard to masking. This implicit admission that the shots don’t stop the spread should be the death kn
Georgi Boorman
September 27, 2022
You may have already heard that the CDC “quietly” removed the recommendation for universal masking in healthcare facilities last week. But there’s more to the updates that represent a significant walk-back not just on the importance of masks, but the efficacy of the Covid jabs in “stopping the spread.” First among the bullet-point summary at the top of the revised guidance for healthcare personnel is an update to “note that vaccination status is no longer used to inform source control, screening testing, or post-exposure recommendations.”
“Source control,” the guidance states, “refers to use of respirators or well-fitting facemasks or cloth masks.” The implication here is that the difference in the ability of vaccinated and unvaccinated people to spread the virus is deemed to be so small that the source control guidance is exactly the same for both categories.
The CDC’s decision to codify the irrelevance of vaccination status to the use of masks bears implications (at least, if the government were trying to be intellectually honest and consistent) for non-healthcare workers as well: if vaccination is functionally irrelevant to controlling the spread of the virus in healthcare facilities, where vulnerable people are far more prevalent and personnel work literally on patients, then it should be considered irrelevant for everyone else, too. In January, CDC Director Rochelle Walenskey admitted publicly that while she believed the shots provide protection from “severe illness and death,” "...what they [the vaccines] can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.”
Amazingly, this admission came just days before the refusal of the Supreme Court to stay the vaccine mandate for facilities that receive funding from Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services. Walensky's admission should have put the CMS mandate to bed. It didn't, but the CDC's new guidance for medical personnel that treats the vaccinated and unvaccinated equally substantially weakens the SCOTUS majority's reasoning for the federal vaccine mandate for healthcare workers. The majority opinion for that decision states: “Congress has authorized the Secretary to impose conditions on the receipt of Medicaid and Medicare funds that ‘the Secretary finds necessary in the interest of the health and safety of individuals who are furnished services.’”
The opinion further states, "That determination [to mandate the vaccine] was based on data showing that the COVID–19 virus can spread rapidly among healthcare workers and from them to patients, and that such spread is more likely when healthcare workers are unvaccinated." If the CDC is now treating vaccinated and unvaccinated exactly the same in terms of source control, this is an implicit admission that the entire rationale for the CMS mandate is, at best, on life support. Moreover, the CMS mandate never required boosters, even after broad acknowledgment from infectious disease experts that a primary series received nine months ago is no longer protective against infection with SARS-COV-2 (if it ever really was?).
This new guidance from the CDC should also bury the long-standing and irrational requirement for foreign air travelers to receive the primary series. Again: where’s the consistency? Where’s the booster mandate? Or better yet, if we granted that travel restrictions make any difference at this point: proof of antibodies as a substitute for getting the jab, as is done in Europe and Israel? But more importantly, how many relatives and loved ones have been unable to enter the country due to this requirement that makes absolutely no difference to the spread of the virus? It already permeated the entire country and is easily transmissible by the jabbed and unjabbed alike.
To maintain such a requirement is more a political statement than a rule that “follows the science.” It’s the same here as it has been in Canada, where last year, their transit authority was scrambling to come up with a plausible rationale for a vaccine mandate that Trudeau had already ordered. There is none. It’s all political, purely a way to punish those who didn’t, as Trudeau said, “do the right thing.”
The new guidance also strikes a heavy blow to the case for vaccinating children, which has been understood by many parents as helping protect vulnerable adults. Kids themselves are at very low risk from severe Covid and most are already estimated to have gotten the virus. Getting the jab "for grandma" has no basis in the current data, which shows rampant viral transmission over the past year despite high levels of vaccination.
The CDC’s latest update is just more evidence that Covid restrictions are all a sham. They can say whatever they want at this point, and I’ve little doubt it will make zero difference to mandates that were issued based on what they said last month, or last year, or the year before. This is how bureaucracies rule. They issue diktats based on the convenient information at the time, but there is no impetus on their part to do anything different whatsoever when “the science changes.” Consider how long Californian cities have kept mask mandates after witnessing intense waves of Covid infections that were just as bad, if not worse, than waves that happened in cities and counties without mask mandates. Rest assured the vaccine passports would have stuck around for a decade or more based on the outdated claim that the shots stop infections had the outcry against them not been so great. Consider how the Ad Council has worked with the CDC to produce ads that claim the jabs “protect grandma,” long after it was known the shots don’t stop the spread.
This is not about “the science changing.” CDC can’t or won’t keep up with the real data analysis and studies that have been dropping over the last two years. This is about easing back into something closer to “the old normal” without admitting they were wrong. Time will tell whether they will do the same backtracking with their strong recommendations that everyone get the Covid jabs, and everyone get the bivalent booster. The high-profile, polarizing nature of the pharmaceutical product and their aggressive pro-jab position make it much, much more difficult to reverse course, even if they wanted to. I certainly would not expect any significant rollback under the current administration.