His administration might, but Biden himself is not. He’s been wearing a mask outdoors until now, which is decidedly NOT following the science.
CDC stated in their guidance that they do not know how long the vaccine will be effective nor how effective it will be against variants.
As such, this seems to leave open the possibility that you could be protected one day and then vulnerable the next.
Further my understanding is that the vaccine is like a watch being water-resistant not waterproof . Exposure to enough concentration of particles could overwhelm the body’s immune response.
Finally as a father of 2 kids under 4, I need to do right by them. If they got sick, I would ask myself if I could have done more. Wearing a mask indefinitely is in the cards for me regardless of being vaccinated or interacting with other vaccinated people whom I cannot account for their risk tolerance and behavior.
This might have been true previously but is it now? Massachusetts has one if the highest vax rates and at this point CVS is offering shots to walk-ins. Pretty much every person who wants one has had the first shot; the only ones left are those who don’t care that much.
One interesting thing. Meijer, a major Superstore here in Michigan, and around the Midwest, said they will still be requiring masks in their stores for the time being.
With kids the big exception.
The governor here in Washington has not yet lifted the mask mandate. I heard a worker at the gym tell another patron that the governor is sending letters to businesses explaining what the requirements are for that particular type of business. I passed several stores en route to the gym: all still had their “Masks required” signs up.
I’m curious as to whether any businesses are requiring masks in the 11 states with negligent governors, i.e., governors who didn’t issue mask mandates,
Well as for Michigan, the Governor( A D in an R legislated majority state ) did announce and state health system withdrawal of the mask mandate as of Saturday morning . But Meijer made their counter announcement almost immediately
news coverage of their announcement
If all states they are in change mandate officially, then they may change company wide as well.
I think many posters are just looking at the extremes. I am a conservative and am frankly embarrassed by the anti-vaxxers on my side. They are very, very stupid in that respect. But this guideline is not about them. It is about the ten to twenty percent of people in the middle, possibly slightly hesitant about getting a vaccine that the promise of no more masks in public will push them to get vaccinated. That is a benefit to all of us. Yes, some people will lie, some will print off fake vaccine cards and so forth; but I think something like this, which frankly we should have done weeks ago, will get many, many more people vaccinated.
I know posters here are responsible, but when you are crafting public policy, and I said this a year ago, you can’t trust people as a whole to be responsible. People bring their own life experiences and personal prejudices into things. You can’t expect people to wear masks forever. As I said in the other thread, people are social animals. We look at a person’s face. Are they smiling, frowning, snarling, biting their lip? We can’t go without that feedback forever. And some people simply will not. And I think for whatever (when it is ultimately determined) minimal benefit we get from wearing masks we will find that the carrot approach to get more people vaccinated will have proven far more beneficial.
That social part can’t be underestimated. An attorney I work across from in court dropped her mask and smiled and I was taken aback. I hadn’t seen the bottom part of her face in a year, nor her smile in a year. Nothing sexual about it, but here is this person I have spent several days per week with and had not seen that for a year. It was very satisfying in a way that I cannot describe, and again it wasn’t sexual. Humans need that stuff.
I hope you’re right. But how many of the people who won’t get vaccinated don’t wear masks either? If the vaccination rate was continuing to climb as steeply as a few months ago, I’d be in favor of waiting. But now those who did get vaccinated are being held hostage, in a sense, by those who refuse and who seem to be keeping us from herd immunity levels.
So maybe spread in the unvaccinated is what we need. A few unlucky idiots will get sacrificed so the rest will finally get it and get vaccinated. It might save lives in the long run.
And the sacrifice is purely voluntary.
Just from my experience, for whatever that is worth, there are people who complain that this is too new, only approved on an emergency basis, etc. and they just want to wait. Again, I think that is pretty stupid. But, they aren’t rabid anti-vaxxers. If you tell them, “Hey, you can resume your normal life if you get these shots!” then that middle can be pushed.
To your second point. Yes, I agree. At what point is that not on the table? We now have CDC guidance that life can return to normal if you are vaccinated. We have vaccines. Come and get them for free. If you choose not to, and you get sick and sadly even die, well, what more can we do? I don’t want to see anyone die, but as you said, we can’t be held hostage because some people are foolish.
I don’t know where to put this, but this thread seems appropriate, since this discussion is about whether the current state of vaccination brings us back to normal. I’m a big fan of Bill Maher (I know some will disagree, but please disagree somewhere else) and I look forward to his show every Friday. Yesterday’s show was cancelled, and here’s why.
The show continues to COVID-test everyone involved every week, and a couple of days ago Maher tested positive. Thing is, he is fully vaccinated. But he is asymptomatic, as one would expect – or one would at least expect a vaccinated person infected with COVID to show minimal symptoms and not require hospitalization.
But it shows that a vaccinated person can become infected to the point of testing positive. What this says about how transmissible the disease is from a vaccinated person is a currently unknown key question, but the network is quite correctly taking no chances. What it does show, in my view, is how important herd immunity is and how important it is to lower the R number by maximizing the number of people vaccinated. Until we have a really low R number, it would seem appropriate to keep masking.
If an HIV vaccine, 92% effective, was released tomorrow, how many of y’all, would stop using a condom?
I still think it’s too soon to declare victory on vaccine access. It’s simply not the case that everybody who wants to be vaccinated has gotten fully immunized. My state in particular (Pennsylvania) dragged its feet a long time to open up access to everybody. I had to drive for 2 hours into a very rural conservative county to get my first shot on April 17th. I’ll be be fully immune by the end of May. But If I didn’t have access to a car, and didn’t have the time to drive to the middle of nowhere, there would have been no way in hell I could have gotten vaccinated as soon as I did.
Yes. This. A million times this.
I’m the father of three, from seven down to 18 months. And the person primarily responsible for the care of an 88-year-old man with a history of diabetes and COPD (as if just being 88 wasn’t enough of a risk factor).
Yeah, I’m going to be excessively careful.
If it also meant even if I got HIV, I’d have a less than 1% chance of hospitalization and an even lower chance of death? And if incidence of HIV in the population was very low and dropping? Yes.
The only issue is what is an acceptably low level of HIV/COVID in the population. That’s the one I am grappling with.
The CDC knows about breakthrough cases. The CDC, I presume, is smart enough to know that human nature isn’t fundamentally honest. I trust that all those conditions and more have been taken into account in releasing this new statement. They’re not a bunch of idiots. I trusted them before; I trust them now. They know a hell of a lot more about this than me or a bunch of strangers on the internet.
I don’t think that’s relevant; because nobody catches HIV just by going to the grocery store, or even by going to concerts. Most people get to choose who they have the required type of contact with, and can investigate that person’s degree of vaccination / other preventative measures as much as they choose.
And nobody has ever lied about their HIV status.
Of course they have. That’s why I said ‘investigated’ and not just ‘asked the person.’
Concerns about the honesty of one’s partner cover a whole lot of ground. Some people are more worried about this issue than others, in areas ranging from ‘are they already married?’ through ‘are they of age?’ and into ‘do they have a history of beating up their partners?’, as well as ‘might they be lying about their disease status with respect to any of a number of diseases?’ My point is that most people get a significant degree of choice in how careful they’re going to be about any of these issues with regards to their sexual partner(s); but nobody gets a significant degree of choice about who they’re going to share the grocery store aisle with, and many get only minimal if any choice about who they’re going to share their workplace with.