by Stacey Lennox, PJ Media:

The coverage on COVID-19 has taken a strange turn in the legacy media. For a while now, cable news anchors have been pressing Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, and other administration officials about continued mask-wearing and other restrictions for vaccinated individuals. Quite frankly, their answers don’t make any sense after the CDC put out guidance that vaccinated individuals who were exposed to a COVID-positive individual did not need to quarantine if they did not have symptoms.

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That guidance meant that the vaccines effectively prevent illness from COVID-19, and data on breakthrough infections supported that idea weeks ago. The risk is approximately one in a million that a vaccinated individual will become ill and die from COVID-19. The CDC also noted that the risk for this is in the expected demographic—the elderly with pre-existing conditions for the most part. So if you are under 65 and healthy and this news scares you, don’t ever get in your car, cross a city street, use stairs, or climb a ladder. Your lifetime odds of dying doing one of those is well under one in a thousand.

First, the New York Post broke the story on the teachers’ unions’ undue influence on the CDC’s school reopening guidelines. The New York Times tattled on the CDC and shredded Dr. Walensky for saying outdoor transmission is less than 10% of all infections. It is under 1%, possibly less than 0.1%, according to the data. This gross overstatement has no possible purpose other than continued restrictions. Now, ABC News tells us that all the places the CDC told us to avoid were not major transmission vectors:

Bars, gyms and restaurants. Those were just a few settings health experts warned could become hotbeds for COVID-19 spread as states began reopening in the spring and summer of 2020 following the first and second waves of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.

Yet, public data analyzed by ABC News appears to tell a different story. The data from states across the country suggests specific outbreak settings (including bars, gyms, restaurants, nail salons, barbershops and stores — for the full list, see graphic below in story) only accounted for a small percentage, if any, of new outbreaks after the pandemic’s inital wave in 2020.

How small, you may ask? Well, ABC included a handy graphic to help clarify:

These statistics are not a surprise if you have been following the data. A meta-analysis published in Dec. 2020 articulated two critical findings. First, the asymptomatic spread within the home was 0.7%. This finding should have told the experts that casual outdoor contact and even activities like shopping, getting your hair done, and dining indoors would not result in significant transmission if participants were asymptomatic. Further, household transmission between spouses, the people who have the closest contact for the most prolonged period, occurred in approximately two out of five cases. Transmission rates to other members of the household were under one in five. How likely is it that anyone will catch COVID-19 passing another shopper in Walmart if these are the rates when you live with an infected patient? Not very.

Despite this study—and many others done globally before and after—lockdowns, mask mandates, school closures, and other restrictions stayed in place for the healthy and the vaccinated. As one who has followed the data closely, I really started to wonder if there was something about COVID-19 that they weren’t telling us. But it appears the legacy media has finally woken up, and the health bureaucracy isn’t screaming.

The CDC has finally issued mask guidance that makes sense after months of data from states like South Dakota, Florida, and Georgia, along with more recent “Neanderthal” states like Tennessee and Texas, was hard to deny. Thank goodness federalism pierced the narrative because it had nothing to do with The Science™. While ABC says the data they are sharing could guide public health measures in future pandemics, there’s a better idea. Let’s never do again what we had never done before: quarantine the healthy, mandate masks, pick winners and losers in the economy, and politicize public health information. That would be a great start.

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