Fauci FINALLY says 117.6 million fully vaccinated Americans can ditch their masks outside - two WEEKS after CDC said it was safe in announcement that exaggerated the risk of outdoor spread If you are vaccinated, you don t have to wear a mask outside, Dr Anthony Fauci told CBS This Morning on Thursday
Fauci has been reluctant to say masks can come off, despite CDC guidance saying fully vaccinated can safely go without masks outdoors, except in crowds
It comes as the share of American adults fully vaccinated against COVID-19 rises to 45%
Experts criticized the CDC early this week for exaggerating the risk of outdoor transmission as being less than 10 percent when it is likely less than one percent
White House defended the administration s medical experts as a north star
Jen Psaki went on defense after Republican senators tore into CDD Director Rochelle Walensky during a hearing Tuesday on the pandemic response How we we ve approached things is that we believe that health and medical experts should be our North Star, Psaki said
She said she understood people were tired of masks but rules must be followed
Lawmakers claimed the CDC has provided inconsistent and confusing guidance
They fumed at the agency head for the the failure to relax mask and other guidance despite mass vaccinations and dropping infections
The Centers for Disease Control Prevention (CDC) is facing pushback on its outdoor COVID-19 transmission statistic, which, though technically is true, is extremely misleading, The New York Times said.In its
A Misleading C.D.C. Number
We have a special edition of the newsletter on a misleading C.D.C. statistic.
A Miami Beach officer confronting a man without a mask last year.Credit.Saul Martinez for The New York Times
May 11, 2021
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines last month for mask wearing, it announced that “less than 10 percent” of Covid-19 transmission was occurring outdoors. Mediaorganizationsrepeatedthe statistic, and it quickly became a standard description of the frequency of outdoor transmission.
But the number is almost certainly misleading.
It appears to be based partly on a misclassification of some Covid transmission that actually took place in enclosed spaces (as I explain below). An even bigger issue is the extreme caution of C.D.C. officials, who picked a benchmark 10 percent so high that nobody could reasonably dispute it.
Last month, the CDC said less than 10% of all coronavirus transmission is occurring outdoors
Health experts
argue that the true risk is believed to be below 1%, and may even be as low as 0.1%
New York Times David Leonhardt criticized the agency for publishing guidelines partially based on mischaracterized data
Among the research the CDC cited in defense was a study that found 95 of more than 10,000 cases in Singapore occurred outdoors
However, the Singapore Ministry of Health did not classify them as outdoors and many of the cases occurred in enclosed outdoor places