First we were told, most publicly by Fauci in February 2020, that masks won't protect you from the COVID virus. Wash your hands, we were told. Fauci lied to us because PPE was in short supply and was needed by hospitals. They were trying to conserve supplies for hospital workers, because masks work in hospitals, you know.
After the first hospitalization wave subsided, masking gradually became cool again. People wanted to get out and about, so wearing a mask and practicing social distancing became the default position. The authorities realized this would help to keep a lid on things while vaccines were developing.
America divided over this politically, to state the obvious.
When the vaccines began to roll out in late December, the same psychology took over. The vaccine, like a mask, became a ticket back to normalcy. At first, however, the CDC had said a mask would still be necessary after vaccination, but eventually bowed to pressure from freedom advocates, and to overcome the vaccine hesitancy into which the advice to keep wearing a mask kept feeding. The authorities finally relented in May after vaccination enthusiasm had peaked in April and declined quickly, and said the vaccinated could in fact retire their masks after all.
This was too little, too late.
The share of population dosed at least once moved fewer than ten points from mid-May to July 4th, from 47% to 55%.
The Biden administration severely undershot its goal of 70% vaccinated by July 4th. It completely miscalculated that vaccine enthusiasm would peak in mid-April.
But now, two months since May, the CDC today is back to saying that masking is necessary after vaccination, ostensibly because the India variant is so virulent that even vaccinated people could still catch it and transmit it.
Talk about poking the hornets' nest.
The real reason is that breakthrough cases at elite levels are calling attention to a wider spread phenomenon everyone knows about anecdotally but can't quantify because the CDC in May conveniently refused to count all the breakthrough cases like it counts cases generally. These vaccines are failing all over the place in the basic sense of preventing illness.
Of course, this isn't going to convince anyone to get vaccinated, because vaccines are supposed to prevent illness, and if they aren't, well, why bother?
These aren't real vaccines like the childhood vaccines are real vaccines. Their power peters out quickly and people can and do get COVID-19 anyway. At best these are therapeutic medications which might turn out to be appropriate for certain people, but certainly not as a panacea for the whole nation.
NBC actually did a pretty good story laying out many of these details, here, draped in the usual propaganda.
The future outlook, unfortunately, remains very uncertain.
