CDC guidelines for vaccinated are too cautious, but they hint at normalcy

Several weeks ago, when national surveys suggested that a sizable portion of the U.S. population had no intention of getting vaccinated against COVID-19, I wondered why public health officials were not incentivizing the shot.

Get your vaxx, get back to normal seemed like a catchy PSA.

Yet despite a bounty of research that suggests vaccinated people are far less likely to transmit the virus to others, (the job that masks and distancing have supposedly been doing for almost a year now), political and public health leaders continued for weeks to insist that masks, distancing and quarantines were necessary even for vaccinated people.

This suggested a striking lack of confidence in the vaccines’ efficacy and an unsurprisingly tonedeaf message that “normalcy” as we once knew it will always be beyond our grasp.

That changed last week (kind of), when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidance for the fully vaccinated, saying they can now safely gather unmasked and without distancing themselves from certain people in very specific situations.

To be clear, the new guidance isn’t really a reason to get excited, even if the research that motivated it is.

The guidance is incremental, sometimes confusing and, like so many elements of the public health response to the global pandemic, insufficient and long overdue.

But it does acknowledge that the vaccines prevent serious illness and death and even neutralize the virus variants that only weeks ago prompted health officials to warn that we may be on the cusp of a deadly fourth wave.

This is a big deal, and not just because it makes Dr. Anthony Fauci’s comments that masks will probably be needed well into 2022 seem just a wee bit behind the science curve. (Especially since all signs point to a vaccine glut by spring.)

The new CDC advice also seems to accept, however subtly, that there is truth to the long-held belief that children are neither particularly threatened by nor vectors of this disease.

Why else would the agency tell people like vaccinated grandparents that they can interact freely indoors with unvaccinated grandchildren?

Who’s going to tell the schools?

There are some galling omissions in the new guidance worth noting.

It does explicitly state that if you are vaccinated and have “been around someone who has COVID19, you do not need to stay away from others or get tested unless you have symptoms,” reinforcing the belief that the vaccines not only prevent serious disease but inhibit transmission.

Yet the guidance fails to address the cause of fully vaccinated people who desire to visit COVID-positive loved ones in the hospital, which continues to be forbidden in many hospital settings.

Such stringent visitation policies have been one of the more inhumane byproducts of the pandemic.

Given what the CDC now appears to believe about fully vaccinated people, it should speak clearly on hospital visitations, since hospitals rely on its guidance to develop procedures.

As many people have noted, the CDC also failed to update its travel guidance for the fully vaccinated, and still discourages nonessential travel, which even some experts believe is overly-cautious, given what we know about the relative safety of air travel in particular.

It’s worth noting that even as the gap between CDC guidance and public policy (such as Texas’ lifting of mask and capacity restrictions) has grown, businesses and the public have generally erred on the side of caution, maintaining the practices that public health officials have recommended.

But as more people get vaccinated and case numbers continue to fall, it will become easier for people to ignore outdated public health advice.

I daresay, it will become incumbent upon them to get back to normal.

The CDC and public health leaders surely know that, as do the people who are awaiting a declaration that the pandemic is over. That kind of finality isn’t coming, but some kind of normalcy is. And the public seems to be a few steps ahead.

Take legendary Fort Worth honky-tonk Billy Bob’s Texas, which hosted a sold-out concert with 3,000 in attendance on the day the state mask and capacity mandate ended. Billy Bob’s still kept capacity at 50% and recommended masks, but it did not require them.

A big crowd enjoying some great live music at Billy Bob’s: It doesn’t get much more normal than that.