CDC Director Defends Revised Mask Guidance on Fox News: ‘This Weighed Heavily on Me’

Fox News’ Bret Baier spoke with CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky on Friday and questioned her about the new guidance on masks.

On Tuesday Walensky announced the new CDC recommendation that fully vaccinated people should mask up in public, indoor spaces in areas with “high transmission.”

Baier brought up the stats on how out of millions and millions of people who have been vaccinated, a considerably low percentage of breakthrough infections and deaths have been reported.

He asked Walensky, “Are the vaccinated people wearing the masks to protect the unvaccinated people or are they protecting the vaccinated people?”

“If you are vaccinated, when you are vaccinated, you are protected from severe disease and death,” she said. “When we removed the masks in May for the vaccinated people, the alpha variant was the predominant variant. And we had data to suggest at the time if you were infected as a breakthrough case that you couldn’t give disease — you couldn’t give alpha disease to someone else.”

For the Delta variant, she continued, the data was different.

“The masks are really being put on for vaccinated people in areas of high density disease such that if they were to get infected, that they knew that they might bring it to somebody who is immunocompromised, somebody who is not yet vaccinated. So it was really to prevent transmission.”

Baier noted how there are “people confused by the messaging” and showed a question from one man asking: “If it’s considered rare to get covid-19 if you are fully vaccinated with the delta variant, when will we ever get back to normal when masks are not required? And my second question is if other variants come along at what percentage of cases, of hospitalizations do you not recommend wearing masks?”

Walensky responded by saying, “I think it’s really important to recognize that as we think about the absolute number of people who are getting infected, that is related to the number of people who have disease, the number of people who are vaccinated, and how well those vaccines work. So it is actually quantitatively possible to have 95 percent protection from hospitalizations and still have a lot of breakthrough infections if most of your population is vaccinated.”

“This was not news that I expected the American people to welcome. This weighed heavily on me to have to do this,” she told Baier. “I have no interest in continuing mask guidance, and the best way to stop a new variant from spreading is to have less virus out there and the best way to do that is to get people vaccinated and to mask up until they are.”

You can watch above, via Fox News.