
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday unveiled sweeping changes to its COVID-19 guidance in an effort to “streamline” its recommendations, which thus far, have been supported by anything but actual science.
The announcement that the CDC was going back on almost all of its ridiculous restrictions came just days after the Biden administration said it planned to, once again, extend the emergency declaration for COVID-19.
“This guidance acknowledges that the pandemic is not over, but also helps us move to a point where COVID-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives,” the CDC’s Greta Massetti said in a press release.
Here are the biggest changes to the CDC’s guidance:
- Unvaccinated people now have the same guidance as vaccinated people. (In other words, they won’t be discriminated against because vaccines do not work.)
- Those who are exposed to the virus are no longer required to quarantine regardless of vaccination status. (It was never scientifically sound to force quarantine on healthy people, nor was it good for children, schools or businesses.)
- Students may stay in class even if they’ve been exposed to COVID-19. (This is probably a good thing since we established five minutes after the CDC made this recommendation it was harmful to children.)
- Contact tracing and routine surveillance testing of symptomatic people are no longer recommended in most settings. (We’re getting close to election season, so this one definitely needed to go.)
Of course, the CDC’s guidance comes after more than two years into the COVID pandemic — after tens of thousands of Americans lost their jobs for refusing to receive a vaccine they knew didn’t work and/or violated their religious beliefs.
Massetti told reporters Thursday the recommendations are being revised to simplify the myriad of federal COVID-19 guidance into an easier “framework.”
The more logical explanation is that they’re being revised because a midterm election is approaching and the powers in being know they have no chance of winning if they leave these ridiculous restrictions in place. Plus, they can attribute the drop in restrictions to a President whose approval rating has bottomed out.
According to The New York Times, the CDC has been working for months on its new guidance, and is making changes now because “vaccination and prior infections have granted many Americans some degree of protection against the virus, and treatments, vaccines and boosters are available to reduce the risk of severe illness.”
Of course, the CDC is not going to admit they were wrong the entire time and caused even more damage than the virus did, so they have to throw some credit to subpar COVID vaccines, “natural immunity,” and COVID treatments that cause rebound COVID.
“I think they are attempting to meet up with the reality that everyone in the public is pretty much done with this pandemic,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota.
Experts cautioned the pandemic has not ended and more stringent measures may be needed in the event of new variants or future surges.
A new variant is not likely to emerge until after the election in November.