Catch me up here. Under what condition can border security review the contents of your phone messages?

And we all laughed and laughed, and went on playing by the rules of the old world.

Five years into a pandemic and NOW the CDC has fucking teeth?

Same. Who needs sus vaccines when our God-given unattractiveness will protect us?

The article was written by norovirus.

Too sick to cook, they all went to Applebee’s instead.

I dunno but I just had a great idea for a gender reveal party.

You mean preemptively compromising with the bad-faith opposition isn’t a winning strategy?

Really that was the focus of my original comment. I get the vaccine whenever I’m eligible, and I don’t at all believe reducing bad outcomes is useless. But many people remain confused, and I think misinfo is only part of the reason. PH didn’t figure out how to communicate clearly.

Also, even if the vaccines reduced transmission, telling people to stop masking while the virus was still circulating goes against established public health “multilayer protection” practices. Walensky went a year and a half without mentioning masks at all. The political pressure was palpable.

I also have (likely naive) faith that had the CDC focused on straight talk and what the science at the time was saying — and not trying to make people feel better — we might actually have seen better public health outcomes. We needed clear information, not hand holding, to counter misinformation.

Maybe there’s some whitewashing going on. The Health Matters column in TIME (11/25 issue) contains a quote from an infectious disease specialist, Dr. Yvonne Maldonado of Stanford, to the effect that vaccines were never intended to stop transmission. (Article isn’t online yet but I’ll keep checking.)

It’s good they’re promoting vaccination, though at this point it seems like a losing battle. My issue was the CDC’s announcement that fully-vaxxed people could tear off their masks and pretend it was 2019 again. The vaccines were never intended to prevent transmission, only to moderate outcomes.

At some point the whole “meet people where they are” approach to public health will mean doing absolutely nothing to promote public health.

5/13/2021 should be remembered as the day the CDC abandoned its public health mission in favor of politics and “messaging”.

May 13, 2021. CDC says vaccinated individuals don’t need to mask. Biden gives a speech to drive the point home. Omicron hits a few months later.

www.npr.org/2021/05/13/9...