[ad_1]
Fully vaccinated people – people who are two weeks past their second dose of Moderna or Pfizer Covid-19 vaccines, or after a single dose of Johnson & Johnson’s – have many questions for the Vanderbilt University professor of infectious diseases .
They ask if it’s OK to kiss their grandchildren now. Can they play cards with their vaccinated friends? Can they organize a small dinner party, but should they forget to invite Uncle Frank who has often been spotted at the bar?
“I try to answer as many questions as possible because they are very thoughtful people,” Schaffner said. “These are the people who are trying to do the best in these circumstances.”
For others who don’t have a preferred infectious disease expert on the speed dial, the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention will soon be issuing guidelines for fully vaccinated people.
Official: Nothing ‘bad’ about the delayed directives
The Biden administration said it had been working on the guidelines for weeks. They were widely expected to be released on Thursday, but are still in the works, according to an official involved in the drafting process.
Under the Trump administration, White House officials sometimes had a heavy hand with CDC guidelines, dictating what the agency could and couldn’t say, according to CDC officials.
But that’s not currently happening with these new guidelines, according to administration official Biden.
“I don’t think anything bad is going on,” the official said.
The official said a draft of the new guidelines had likely been sent to the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services so staff could be aware in advance of what they had said.
“I don’t envy the authors of these guidelines,” Schaffner said. “You can paint some pictures with a fairly large brush, but people want to apply general guidelines to a specific life, and it gets very, very precise. There’s no way to capture everything.”
The CDC must strike a delicate balance with these guidelines, the experts said.
The guidelines should encourage people to get vaccinated, help the vaccinated understand that they still need to be careful, and manage the expectations of the unvaccinated.
“We don’t want people who are not fully vaccinated to think that everything has been lifted and that we can already put things behind us, and the pandemic is over, because it is not,” said the responsible.
It’s not like going back to 2019
While the guidelines do not give vaccinees permission to resume living as in 2019, according to a Biden administration official, the guidelines offer hope that the end of total social isolation is near.
For example, you can finally show your vaccinated friends all of your DIY home projects from the past year.
However, do not throw away this cloth mask just yet. The guidelines will advise vaccinees to continue to wear masks in public and to keep a good physical distance from others.
“While we continue to immunize everyone, our primary societal goal remains to protect the unvaccinated,” said Richterman.
Masks help do just that. And there is no guarantee that those vaccinated will not yet have a virus in their nose or throat – a virus that may not make the carrier sick, but which could be spread and infect someone who has not yet been vaccinated. .
“The masks continue to work and we need them against the variants,” Schaffner said. Public health experts fear that the spread of the more contagious variants could prolong the pandemic.
The guidelines should also help vaccinees navigate their interactions with loved ones in their nursing homes that have been kept behind locked doors for more than a year. They should also include travel tips.
Unfortunately, the vaccination is not a “free pass to travel,” Dr Anthony Fauci told a CNN Global town hall in early February. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said “essential” travel is a yes, “but we don’t want people to think about it because they’ve been vaccinated, so the other health recommendations public simply do not apply ”.
The guidelines will not be fully prescriptive and will tell you exactly what you can and cannot do after you are fully immunized.
The guidelines won’t tell you if you can or can’t play with Aunt Mary, for example, or if you can or can’t meet Grandpa at the cafe for a game of Settlers of Catan with the new “sheep strategy” that you learned from being stuck at home.
“It’s impossible to get to that level of detail. We can’t predict all the situations human beings will find themselves in,” said the Biden official. “What we can do is give people principles to think about. It will give people the means to think about it and then they can choose the level of risk they want to take.”
Elizabeth Cohen, John Bonifield, Maggie Fox and Virginia Langmaid of CNN contributed to this report.
[ad_2]
Source link