Vaccines Are Great. Masks Make Them Even Better.
America’s split with masks turned out to be a brief hiatus. After getting their shots in the spring and early summer, many people figured they could dump their face coverings for good—a sentiment the CDC crystallized in May, when the agency gave fully immunized people its blessing to largely dispense with masking, indoors and out. Yesterday, the agency pivoted back, recommending that even fully vaccinated people wear masks under certain high-risk circumstances, including in public indoor spaces in parts of the country where the virus is surging, Director Rochelle Walensky said in a press briefing. (She specified places where new case numbers exceed 50 per 100,000 people in the past seven days; that currently includes about two-thirds of U.S. counties.) With an ultra-contagious SARS-CoV-2 variant rampaging, face coverings are being called upon to once again supplement the protection offered by vaccines.
The CDC’s decision, which many public-health researchers have been anticipating for weeks, might look like a flip-flop or a fumble, someBut to me, and the experts I talked with, (or simply keeping them on, as many people have) is not some shameful regression to the dark ages of the pre-vaccination era. Nor is it an indictment of the COVID-19 vaccines, which are doing an extraordinary job of curtailing the global burden of disease. Instead, it’s a doubling down on two defenses that we knowwork, and work well
