'The right decision wrongly handled': Inside the Biden administration's abrupt reversal on masks

[DonViejo]

Lena H. Sun, Tyler Pager, Yasmeen Abutaleb, Annie Linskey 12 hrs ago

During her opening statement before a Senate health committee Tuesday, Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was adamant that the Biden administration’s masking and social distancing policies remained sound.

“While we continue to have community transmission,” she told a bipartisan panel of senators who were respecting the social distancing rules of the moment as their masked staffers looked on, “we must also maintain public health measures we know will prevent the spread of this virus: mask hygiene, hand hygiene, and physical distancing.”

Even under hostile questioning from Republican senators, including Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Walensky ticked off a series of statistics to support the CDC’s current guidance. She noted that only a third of the country was fully vaccinated, stressed the high rates of cases in many counties and ended with a vague comment that the agency works to review and update their formal advice.

Left unsaid by Walensky was that she had already made a decision the night before — approving a recommendation Monday from CDC officials to significantly overhaul its guidance to no longer require fully vaccinated individuals to wear masks or physically distance in most cases. As she batted away questions from senators demanding to know when Americans could ditch the masks, scientists back at the CDC were performing one last scrub of the data and studies to identify the roughly 700 CDC webpages that needed to be updated with the new guidance.

The revised guidance — which was not publicly announced until Thursday — marked a dramatic turning point in the nation’s 14-month battle with the coronavirus pandemic and sent the clearest signal yet the country could begin returning to normal. It was a significant acceleration of the schedule President Biden had set earlier in the month, saying that he expected the country to move toward normalcy on July 4, when he hopes that 70 percent of the country’s adult population will have at least one shot of the vaccine.

But the huge policy turnaround caught senior White House and administration officials, medical experts, elected officials and business leaders completely off guard, and prompted some physicians to criticize the move as premature. Some Democratic governors were angered by the White House’s rollout, arguing the move effectively passed the buck to states and businesses to implement the new rules without any assistance.

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/e2-80-98the-right-decision-wrongly-handled-e2-80-99-inside-the-biden-administration-e2-80-99s-abrupt-reversal-on-masks/ar-BB1gLNLP

[Hugin]

1. A question and an observation from this article...

"Even under hostile questioning from Republican senators, including Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Walensky ticked off a series of statistics to support the CDC’s current guidance."

Observation, there was and is tremendous political pressure from the Right to lift the CDC masking guidance and the continuation of the policy was being strenuously defended by the CDC Director.

"... a recommendation Monday from CDC officials to significantly overhaul its guidance to no longer require fully vaccinated individuals to wear masks or physically distance in most cases."

Question, which 'CDC officials'? Why aren't they named? This is a clear case of 'some people say', without accountability. Except, of course for the Biden Administration and the CDC Director. It stinks.

[CentralMass]

2. What a cluster f..k.

[Scrivener7]

3. It's the CDC's policy, not the Biden administrations. What is THAT nonsense??

The CDC has fucked up regardless of which administration is in office.

The article itself said the Biden administration was not informed and disagreed.