What The CDC Will Likely Say In Their New Guidelines For Vaccinated Individuals
Dr. William Schaffner is a Professor of Preventive Medicine in the Department of Health Policy as well as a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Schaffner has been answering questions non-stop regarding the Covid-19 vaccines and what vaccinated individuals can and can’t do now that more Americans are receiving their doses.
“I try to answer as many of those questions as I possibly can, because these are very thoughtful people. These are the people who are trying to do the best in these circumstances,” Schaffner said regarding vaccinated individuals who are two weeks past their second dose of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines.
So far more than 82 million vaccine doses have been given out in the US, which is prompting many Americans to question what they’re able to safely do as the nation waits in this middle grey area of getting people vaccinated and waiting to achieve herd immunity. “I think people need practical advice about how to go about their everyday lives. I think without guidance, people may make decisions that are not informed,” said Julia Marcus, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard.
The Biden Administration claims that they’ve been working on these guidelines for weeks now and are expecting them to be released this upcoming Thursday. An official working within the administration claimed that a draft of the new guidelines have “likely been sent to the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services so that staff there could be aware ahead of time what has been discussed.”
“I don’t envy the writers of those guidelines. You can paint some pictures with a fairly broad brush, but people want to apply general guidelines to specific life, and that gets very, very nitty gritty. There’s no way to capture everything,” Schaffner said.
“Vaccines offer really good protection and help prevent the spread of Covid-19, but the vaccines are not total armor. People still need to make informed decisions about risk.”
Guidelines need to encourage vaccinated individuals to remain vigilant and continue to follow health and safety procedures for the most part while we wait to achieve herd immunity. “We don’t want people who are not fully vaccinated to think that everything has been lifted and already we can put things behind us, and the pandemic is over, because it’s not. There were more than 64,000 newly diagnosed cases of Covid-19 in the US just on Thursday,” the White House official explained.
Vaccinated individuals will likely be able to gather in very small groups together where social distancing will still be recommended. Everyone will still have to wear masks in public and act as if the pandemic is still as severe as it’s been within the past year, because it still is in some parts of the world and nation.
Dr. Anthony Fauci also reinforced that vaccinations are not a “free pass to travel” and only essential travel should occur for vaccinated individuals. The Biden official explained that “It’s impossible to get to a high level of detail right now. We can’t predict every situation that human beings will be in. What we can do is give principles for people to think through. It will give people the means to think through it and then they can choose what level of risk they wish to take.” The CDC will likely be officially releasing these guidelines next week.
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
