LISTENING TO THE RATIONAL discourse of Dr. Fauci on the confusion about the change back to recommending masking he makes complete sense on the basis of science and the experience of epidemiologists but it never took into account that a very large percentage of people aren't going to understand any of that. What they hear is that the most respected and most respectable authority in the United States on this is "flip-flopping" and they are not going to understand the reality that this was already built into what the CDC was doing when it recommended relaxed requirements for those who are fully vaccinated.
This reminds me of the previous epidemic of HIV-AIDS surrounding safe sex and, especially, after the first effective treatments for the effects of having the virus came in and the need for practicing safer sex was announced to be over by scum like Andrew Sullivan. Conservatives are always one of the soft spots in public health and in many other things which require maturity and self-restraint and unselfish behavior. Though there are many in the center and on the "left" who can match them in that. Those in the media are the most dangerous of that soft spot in this pandemic.
I hope that the CDC and the Biden administration understand that you can't go back and forth on something like this because no matter how well you explain it, you're going to lose those who won't understand or don't want to take the bother to understand or who may understand but want to game things for their own, selfish purposes. The explanation that Dr Fauci and his colleagues give need to do more than be technically correct and scientifically and logically sound, they have to take into full account all of those things from inability to understand to full understanding by those who want to game things for the most vile of purposes, like all of the Murdoch minions who have been vaccinated but encourage other people to be paranoid about the vaccine and stupidly macho in their refusal to take public health advice and even requirements seriously. And at this point it's pretty much everyone who works in that building protected by the FOX-Murdoch vaccine passport.
Note: I knew watching the footage of the attempted putsch of January 6 and listening to the testimony would really get to me and it did. I'm not ready to write about it, anything I added would be totally inadequate compared to the testimony of the four police officers who started the hearing and the video evidence that was presented. I'm overwhelmed by that.
To be fair (though I don't completely disagree with you), if the CDC had told the vaccinated to keep wearing masks people would have scremed "THEN WHY GET VACCINATED! IT'S ALL A SCAM! THERE'S MICROCHIPS IN THE NEEDLE!"
ReplyDeleteWhich, yeah, they did anyway. Damned if you do/damned if you don't situation. When you're in the leadership position, which is to say the responsible position (CDC is rather like a church pastor: all the responsibility, none of the authority. They can't mandate nationwide mask usage, for example; just suggest it.), you quickly learn no matter what you do, it's the "wrong" decision.
I agree nobody is listening to Fauci explain the Delta variant changes the game from the alpha strain that was dominant when CDC said you can lose the mask if you got the jab. Two things happened, maybe causal, maybe coincidental: people stopped getting the jab and dropped their masks anyway ("But the CDC said we could!"), and then Delta became the strain so virulent even vaccinated people can pass it on to the unvaccinated (apparently that was much less likely with Alpha).
I actually heard a doctor quoted, in an NPR report yesterday, that CDC had "been behind the 8 ball" the whole time on this subject. I thought "a) hindsight is 20/20, and b) like you could do it perfectly?"
I mean, there are still people out there convinced covid is a hoax or that the reports on the deaths/hospitalizations are just fake news meant to distract from stealing the election from Trump and/or (this person held both views, contrary as they are to each other) to keep him from being re-elected.
I don't know how anyone wins in that situation except to insist we take care of each other. Which is pretty much Biden's line, in public at least (Trump's attitude was "Screw all y'all, take care of ME!").