Yes, They Do Want You To Wear A Mask Even After Vaccination

What’s the point of the vaccination if you can’t ditch the mask and start living your life?

Why get COVID-19 vaccination if you still have to wear a mask? It beats getting sick, health experts say.

Get a COVID-19 vaccine and you’ll be counseled to keep wearing a mask and keep staying away from other people. So, what’s the point?

There’s an immediate benefit to the individual who gets a vaccine, said Andy Slavitt, White House senior advisor on the COVID-19 response. “People are interested in taking the vaccine,” he said at a Monday news conference, because “they don’t want to be sick and they don’t want to die.”

Getting two shots of either the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine reduces an individual’s risk of developing symptomatic COVID-19 by about 95%, according to large research trials.

But life won’t get back to something like normal for the broader society until national infection rates come down further, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Yeah, but, if I get the shot, why am I worried about getting a sickness that has a low rate of death if I don’t wear a mask? Especially since masks have pretty much not worked, based on infections skyrocketing after masks became required in 31 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

It’s also possible, though research increasingly suggests it’s unlikely, that vaccinated people could still transmit the virus, even if they don’t fall ill themselves. “For that reason, we want to make sure that people continue to wear masks despite the fact that they’re vaccinated,” Fauci said.

Wait, weren’t we told that masks stop us from catching it? Or, are we going back to the original standard the CDC put out prior to May 31, that people who think they are sick should be the ones who wear them? Either way, it’s hard to think that this is anymore than Government wanting to make us comfortable with them telling us how to live our lives with COVID so we’re comfortable with more control.

The CDC is still working out exactly what is safe and what isn’t for those who are vaccinated.

They’ll let us know at some point. Maybe next year. So, keep locking down and stuff, Comrades!

Meanwhile, Excitable Rev William Barber, who likes to grab women flight attendants and fight with people on airplanes, is looking to take advantage of 500k American deaths

500,000 Americans have died of Covid. Will we wake up to our own callousness?

As the United States marks the terrible milestone of half a million souls lost to Covid-19, these deaths demand a grown-up conversation about the policies that shape our public life. When we look at the impact of this pandemic on other wealthy nations around the world, the disproportionate death toll we have sustained in the US exposes a basic failure of national security. Though we spend more than the next several nations combined on our military budget, our government was unable to protect its citizens against a deadly pathogen.

So, Government is bad, Bill?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported this week that, during the first six months of the pandemic, life expectancy for the average American dropped by a full year. For African Americans, the impact was nearly three times as severe, exposing persistent systemic racism that was not corrected when corporations agreed to say “Black Lives Matter”. We have not simply suffered a disaster. This disaster has unveiled dysfunction in our society.

Strange that most of that occurs in areas run by Democrats.

It is insulting to a people who have lost half a million parents, grandparents, siblings and partners to continue talking about the root causes of a national crisis in simplistic terms that do not fit the reality we can all see. In the US Congress, where the issue of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour is being debated as part of Biden’s American Rescue Plan, we are told that “moderate” Democrats are hesitant to support the measure. But what is moderate about denying just wages to the frontline service workers whom we’ve called “essential” throughout this pandemic? These poor workers are disproportionately Black and Latino, though the largest racial group in raw numbers is white. Senators like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin think they are guarding against the power of Trump’s fake populism among their white base by hedging on bold action to raise wages. But this simplistic framing plays into the divide-and-conquer tactics that pit poor white people against their Black and brown neighbors by telling them that the “far left” wants to take away their jobs and their freedoms. When we repeat the lie that raising the minimum wage is a “far-left” idea, we implicitly suggest that it is something the sensible people of West Virginia would never support.

It’s an interesting argument to link Fight for $15 as a need for COVID response, I’ll give him that. But, it’s a bunch of mule fritters. Just using the deaths for political gain.