I'm not even mad at that hit on coronavirus handling, tbh. It's becoming kind of increasingly obvious that the admin wasn't really prepared for a new wave and despite all the talk about variants, didn't really have any alternative plans drawn up in case a new variant demonstrated vaccine resistance, or was more deadly, or was more contagious, or showed an increased ability to infect children... The plan was basically dump as much vaccine out there as they could and hope for the best, and to be fair, it was working pretty well until Delta came along, but the response since Delta became dominant hasn't been great.
I defended the CDC's updated mask guidance back in May, but their actions since then have become increasingly reactive and seemingly based on incomplete data or poor analysis. While there's something to be said for being overly cautious when it comes to this pandemic, all it's doing is resulting in increased confusion. First, when they reinstated the guidance that vaccinated people should wear masks, it was based on findings that vaccinated people with breakthrough cases were exhibiting similar viral loads as infected, unvaccinated people. Even at the time a lot of experts were saying that didn't necessarily mean vaccinated people with breakthrough cases were as contagious as unvaccinated people, but they plowed ahead anyway and now surprise, surprise, today a new study comes out that shows that while they may carry similar viral loads, vaccinated people are actually less infectious than unvaccinated people with the less infectious original strain.
Similarly, the guidance for boosters for the general population is starting to seem more and more like a last ditch attempt to right the ship than anything else. The data from Israel is not as clear as they'd like to pretend and experts have been arguing about what it really shows for months, now, but the CDC is once again forging ahead with this strategy. Which is fine, I'll take a booster, whatever, except their 8 month guidance is based on essentially zero actual data and seems more of a political maneuver than anything else. The data would seem to indicate protection starts to wane at the 5 or 6 month mark, but we can't say that, because we have a lot of people who should have gotten boosters a month or two ago and we can't cause a panic, so we'll say 8 months instead because why not? The implication to this is that vaccination wasn't really picking up for most age groups until April/May in a lot of the country, which means based on CDC guidance they won't be eligible for a booster until after the holidays, but their protection against infection may already be waning. So we'll have a lot of people desperate to see family this year over the holidays because they weren't able to last year and they'll think they're more protected than they really are and we'll probably see another wave that peaks higher than it really should have due to faulty guidance.
Meanwhile, it's taken them entirely too long to take any kind of fight to red state governors who, it's been obvious for more than a year now, are completely uninterested in protecting their populations. Finally, the admin is putting up some kind of fight for the mask mandate bans in schools, but these are the same people who like a month ago were saying children didn't need to wear masks in schools just to completely change course like a week later and say hey you know what, actually, they should be wearing masks.
So now you have vaccinated people completely confused about how protected they are and how contagious they are, pissed at unvaccinated people for not getting a damn shot. Unvaccinated people are pissed that they're facing new restrictions because the uncontrolled spread primarily brought on by their refusal to get the shot. We're only now starting to see some movement on vaccination mandates and I understand the whole "it's only authorized for emergency use" reasoning, but the fact that we've seen mandates issued before it has been fully authorized means it was probably actually possible all along, they just didn't want to have the fight.
Biden asks businesses to do the right thing and require vaccination for employees and even customers, but there's zero funding or guidance available to actually help them do that. We're still using flimsy, easily lost, easily forged paper cards to hold vaccination records and the federal government is completely uninterested in creating a more durable system for verifying vaccination and doesn't seem to be offering any support to states that do want to implement such a system. If I lived 15 minutes away, I'd be in New Jersey, where I can use an app to access my vaccination record and use it as proof for entry to various places, but no such mechanism exists in PA, so any place that does want to mandate vaccines is stuck trying to verify the authenticity of a picture of a card on someone's phone. So sure, beg places to do the right thing, but give them some means to do so, maybe? More places may be willing to require vaccination for entry if there was a more surefire way to verify someone's vaccination. But instead we'll just continue to fire off a tweet every day saying "vaccinations are available all over the country, get yours today!"
Everyone is done with this, for better or worse, but we all still have to navigate it in our daily lives. Why wouldn't we express discontent with the administration who was supposed to take this seriously and get us out of this mess? Is it better than how Trump handled it? Sure. But that's not a high bar to clear. They did a good job getting enough vaccinations out there, and they passed the relief package early on. They deserve credit for those things. But the situation has changed since then, and the current situation is going to require a lot more than what they've shown a willingness to do thus far although they have picked up the pace every so slightly the past couple of weeks.