Has the COVID-19 “war” changed with the Delta variant, as the CDC’s leaked documents declared? Not really, former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb told CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning. Parsing out the data from the clickbait, Gottlieb points out that the vaccines make the kind of breakthrough transmission cited by this study relatively rare, although perhaps more asymptomatically prevalent than the CDC acknowledged before now.
Therefore, the fully vaccinated are not a big vector for transmission. Nor did people think that the unvaccinated could never transmit the virus in the first place. The big issue is the unvaccinated, who keep choosing to pose a risk to themselves and others, and masking the vaccinated won’t mitigate that risk:
Gottlieb offers common-sense guidance for the vaccinated. If you are in close contact with uniquely vulnerable individuals, including the unvaccinated by restriction (such as small children), take precautions to protect them. Mandating masks for everyone makes no sense at all, in large part because it’s not protecting those who can’t protect themselves. The mandates are clearly intended to protect those who won’t protect themselves, and that’s a recipe for perpetual masking — which people aren’t going to tolerate anyway.
-READ MORE
