The Washington Post reported on a leaked CDC document last night. Yikes:
The document is an internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention slide presentation, shared within the CDC and obtained by The Washington Post. It captures the struggle of the nation’s top public health agency to persuade the public to embrace vaccination and prevention measures, including mask-wearing, as cases surge across the United States and new research suggests vaccinated people can spread the virus.
The document strikes an urgent note, revealing the agency knows it must revamp its public messaging to emphasize vaccination as the best defense against a variant so contagious that it acts almost like a different novel virus, leaping from target to target more swiftly than Ebola or the common cold.
It cites a combination of recently obtained, still-unpublished data from outbreak investigations and outside studies showing that vaccinated individuals infected with delta may be able to transmit the virus as easily as those who are unvaccinated. Vaccinated people infected with delta have measurable viral loads similar to those who are unvaccinated and infected with the variant.
“I finished reading it significantly more concerned than when I began,” Robert Wachter, chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, wrote in an email.
[…]
The document presents new science but also suggests a new strategy is needed on communication, noting that public trust in vaccines may be undermined when people experience or hear about breakthrough cases, especially after public health officials have described them as rare.
Matthew Seeger, a risk communication expert at Wayne State University in Detroit, said a lack of communication about breakthrough infections has proved problematic. Because public health officials had emphasized the great efficacy of the vaccines, the realization that they aren’t perfect may feel like a betrayal.
“We’ve done a great job of telling the public these are miracle vaccines,” Seeger said. “We have probably fallen a little into the trap of over-reassurance, which is one of the challenges of any crisis communication circumstance.”
The CDC’s revised mask guidance stops short of what the internal document calls for. “Given higher transmissibility and current vaccine coverage, universal masking is essential to reduce transmission of the Delta variant,” it states.
There’s a whole lot of finger pointing going on over this. The CDC is being blamed for lifting mask mandates in the first place. But seriously people, the super-spreaders were never wearing masks and Delta would have taken off here anyway, just as it did in the UK. People said it would happen and it did.
Nobody knew exactly how virulent any of the variants would be and it was hoped that people would get quickly vaccinated and stomp them out. That didn’t happen because the right is actively rooting for the virus so they can vindicate their Dear Leader and their people are refusing to do anything to stop the spread. They just won’t do it.
Kevin McCarthy’s “argument” says it all:
Without that evidence released though, this week’s mask announcement triggered fierce pushback among many conservatives, including House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy who claimed the CDC’s decision relied solely on research from India that wasn’t peer-reviewed.
But that claim is misleading. The CDC indeed cites research from India on viral loads as adding to global concerns about transmission post-vaccination. The agency, however, also makes clear that other research and additional studies were under way. And at no point does the CDC cite the research in India as the sole justification for its new mask guidance.
“These early data suggest that breakthrough delta infections are transmissible,” the CDC said of the research in India. “Unpublished data are consistent with this, and additional data collection and studies are underway to understand the level and duration of transmissibility from delta vaccine breakthrough infections in the United States and other settings,” the CDC wrote in a science brief posted online.
McCarthy’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the misleading allegation, which was echoed by other Republicans on Twitter.
“Remember what I said about public health officials losing our trust?” tweeted Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw.
There is nothing but the cult for these people. And it is a death cult.