On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued huge news: If you’ve been fully vaccinated, you can stop wearing a mask. Now, health experts are expressing concern about the new rule and telling Americans to proceed with caution. The CDC’s new guidelines come with a few caveats. Americans must follow the rules of local businesses and mask up on planes, trains, buses, and other transit. But for the most part, vaccinated people can go back to the way they lived life before the pandemic. What these broad recommendations don’t account for, health experts say, is how much COVID-19 is spreading in a given community versus how many people are vaccinated. I remain concerned that we will see summer surges in states with low vaccine rates… but again, those states were largely unmasked to begin with. ????♀️????♀️????♀️ But – at some point, people can do unsafe things ***as long as*** it doesn’t endanger the rest of us. — Megan Ranney MD MPH ???? (@meganranney) May 14, 2021 The problem is the way the recommendation bifurcates Americans into two health statuses: vaccinated and unvaccinated. There are people who do not want to get vaccinated and the new guideline may alienate unvaccinated Americans. The hope is that the recommendation will incentivize unvaccinated Americans to get vaccinated. But that may not be the way it works out. “These guidelines rely on unvaccinated people to keep masking, and to be forthcoming about that status,” writes pediatrician Daniel Summers, in an opinion piece for The Daily Beast . “If you believe the same people who think Naomi Wolf is making good sense about the vaccines are going to cough up the truth to a maître d’ before taking their seat at a restaurant, please see me about a hot new purchase opportunity for shares in a diamond mine.” Doctors and health experts are worried there may be COVID-19 case spikes in areas with low vaccine rates and higher case numbers
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The CDC’s new masking rules don’t mean you can unmask just yet