Fully vaccinated? Time to party!
I defended Fauci through most of 2020, but his overcautious approach is now wearing very thin.
I was actually for masks before Anthony Fauci was. In early spring 2020, he was advancing the line that people shouldn’t buy masks, that they were ineffective and perhaps even counterproductive. Save them for the doctors and nurses, he said. Of course, this didn’t make a lot of sense—masks don’t work, but we don’t want medical personnel to run out of them?—but I forgave him for this apparent disingenuousness after he changed his tune. Fauci was engaged in a constant and very tricky battle with a criminally irresponsible president who scoffed at masks, held giant un-distanced rallies, and advanced lunatic ideas like injecting disinfectant inside the body. I felt great sympathy for him and the tightrope he had to walk.
But now he’s got a sane administration to work with, a country that is increasingly vaccinated, and his overzealous stringency is trying my patience. I was thrilled to get my second shot of Pfizer and be able to get back into activities I had foresworn for more than a year. Not so fast, says Anthony Fauci, doing his best impression of a wet blanket:
[Fauci] does not see being vaccinated as a green light to resume the myriad activities he and the rest of us have been deprived of.
Movie theaters where viewers remove their masks to snack on popcorn? Nope.
"That would still be of concern to me," Fauci said.
Bars and restaurants where maskless people are eating and drinking inside? Those are still off the table, too.
Nope, nope, nope, you lost me, dude. Look, I’ve been waiting very patiently. I used to love going out to bars, restaurants, and movie theatres, back in those bygone days of 2019 and very early 2020, but I gritted my teeth and stayed home for fourteen months. I stopped going to the gym and settled for doing jumping jacks and lifting improvised weights at home. In the hallways of my apartment building, I wore an N95 mask plus face shield, even as most of my neighbors ignored the signs telling them to mask up. I was even one of those people who would scold strangers in public for blowing off public health precautions.
But now I’m done. I’m hitting the bars, going to dine inside at restaurants, seeing movies in theatres. And I’m not wearing masks for any of it. I’m fully vaccinated, for god’s sake! The science is clear: this means a very low chance of transmitting the virus to others. A recent National Geographic piece made this plain in the title: Yes, vaccines block most transmission of COVID-19. The article’s lede:
COVID-19 vaccines have provided an opportunity to slow the spread of the virus and end the pandemic. Now scientists are trying to learn just how much the vaccines can prevent transmission from occurring at all. New data from the CDC shows that COVID-19 infections do occur in vaccinated people, but they appear exceptionally rare.
Is the risk actually 0.000%? No, but if we operated based on that principle, we could never go anywhere in a car, never ski or ride a bike, never even enjoy an ice cream cone. There has to be a limit. And I’ve reached mine.
It’s worth noting that vaccines are now unconditionally available for all Americans 12 and older. Which means if unvaccinated people are going out to bars, restaurants, or movie theatres and spreading Covid to each other, they have no one but themselves to blame. (I do have an eleven year old daughter and eight year old son, and I wish they could get the shots as well; until they can, I will not be taking them to crowded indoor spaces like movie theatres or restaurants.)
So why not just ignore Fauci’s tut-tutting and keep my own counsel? I mean, that’s what I’m doing; but it does bother me that after all these months of having to fight with right wing idiots who called it a “plandemic” and refused to mask or social distance even before the vaccine was released, we now have these public health officials undermining the case for “following the science”, since they seem unable to do so themselves. Mind you, I’m not equating their overcautious approach with #MAGA buffoonery, but it’s galling all the same.
I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised, given all the public health experts who bizarrely claimed last summer that on the one hand, mass protests against lockdowns were unsafe and risked spreading the virus (which seems likely true, even if they were outside, since the protesters were packed so close together for hours on end, generally without wearing masks) but magically, protests against racism were safe.