White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki is now crumpling under the pressure over the new mask guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and she is resorting to simpy classifying the guidance as nothing more than a “determination” from “public health officials” and she is leaving any public data or evidence completely out of the picture.
The Background
The CDC released new guidance on Tuesday that explained that fully vaccinated Americans that reside in regions that still have a high transmission of COVID-19 should still mask up regardless of their status.
Previously, the CDC guidance said that fully vaccinated individuals would have the ability to “resume activities that they did prior to the pandemic, without wearing a mask or physically distancing.”
What Was Psaki Asked?
It was Tuesday’s press briefing at the White House that Peter Doocy asked Jen Psaki why the Biden team continues to recommend that fully vaccinated Americans keep wearing face masks if everyone in the Biden team agrees that the COVID-19 vaccines are effective.
There is one implication and implication only that we can take from all of this: frankly, if members of the Biden Administration keep insisting on re-enacting these face guidelines, then whether they like it or not they are sowing a lot of distrust in the vaccines.
“If it’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated, still, then why do vaccinated people need to put the masks back on?” Doocy asked.
In response, Psaki totally collapsed, and the best that she could offer was simply to go ahead and re-affirm Doocy’s thesis that unvaccinated individuals are driving up the COVID-19 cases, thereby making the mask guidelines quite confusing. However, Psaki really didn’t address Doocy’s question.
“Well, Peter, first of all, I would say again— just to go back to this chart, which I will handily point to again: If you are vaccinated, if you are vaccinated, your life— it can save your life. And I think the clear data shows that this pandemic is killing, is hospitalizing, is making people very sick who are not vaccinated. That still continues to be the case, regardless of what the mask guidance looks like,” Psaki said.
Doocy asked again, “But if the vaccines work, which this sign says that they do, then why do people who had the vaccine need to now wear masks — the same as people who have not had it?”
This time the best that Psaki could do was simply deflect to “because we said so.”
“Because the public health leaders in our administration have made the determination, based on data, that that is a way to make sure they’re protected, their loved ones are protected,” she told Doocy. “And that’s an extra step, given the transmissibility of the virus, that people — that they’re advising people to take.”
Yes, Jen Psaki went ahead and reaffirmed that the overwhelming majority of COVID-19 cases are among those who have not been vaccinated, she collapsed when she explained that vaccinated people still carry some of the viral load.
‘The Associated Press reports the following:
Most new infections in the U.S. continue to be among unvaccinated people. So-called breakthrough infections, which generally cause milder illness, can occur in vaccinated people. When earlier strains of the virus predominated, infected vaccinated people were found to have low levels of virus and were deemed unlikely to spread the virus much, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said.
But with the delta variant, a mutated and more transmissible version of the virus, the level of virus in infected vaccinated people is “indistinguishable” from the level of virus in the noses and throats of unvaccinated people, Walensky said.
The face masks are intended to stop that transmission, Walensky explained.
Either way, Biden’s Gatekeeper needs to figure out how to stay on point and not totally collapse. The American people deserve better leadership than this, especially during a pandemic!