Fauci Says CDC Will Put Out ‘Significant Clarification’ Soon Addressing People’s Questions About Mask Guidance

Dr. Anthony Fauci addressed some of the big lingering questions about the new CDC mask guidelines on CBS’ Face the Nation Sunday morning.

CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky announced last week that mask guidelines have been relaxed and now vaccinated people can go without masks most places. But she faced a number of questions on the Sunday shows on some big questions people have about these new guidelines, particularly how businesses are supposed to navigate this.

John Dickerson started with Fauci by noting how the guidance is “confusing people a little,” given how recently the CDC was defending the previous policy about vaccinated people masking up.

Fauci pointed to the “accumulation of data showing in the real-world effectiveness of the vaccines” and research finding the vaccines protect people from the variants going around.

The director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases repeatedly emphasized during the interview that “the more people you get vaccinated, the safer the entire community is.”

He expressed hope that relaxing mask guidelines will lead to more people wanting to get vaccinated.

Dickerson asked him about the messaging surrounding the new guidance and whether the CDC could have handled it better:

This kind of caught some people by surprise. And because people have been so confused over the course of the last 14 months, would it have been better to prepare the way a little bit more for this? Good news, of course, for everyone. But because there’s been so much confusion over time, would it have been better to kind of walk people up to this very kind of head-snapping new news?

“People will say that, there may be some merit to that, but as a matter of fact, the CDC did this and took this action based on the data,” Fauci responded.

“What they’ll be doing now is coming out very quickly with individual types of guidances,” he elaborated. “So people will say, ‘Well, what about the workplace? What about this? What about that?’ And I think that’s going to be clarified, John, pretty quickly. I would imagine within a period of just a couple of weeks, you’re going to start to see significant clarification of some of the actually understandable and reasonable questions that people are asking.”

You can watch above, via CBS.

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