CNN Medical Analyst Criticizes CDC’s ‘Awful’ Messaging on Mask Guidance: ‘They Need to Articulate the Problem Clearly’

CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner said on Tuesday he agrees with the CDC’s revised mask guidance, but thinks “their messaging is awful.”

The Centers for Disease Control announced on Tuesday that because of the spread of the Delta variant, the new recommendation is that fully vaccinated people should wear masks in public indoor settings where there is high covid-19 transmission.

Reiner told Erin Burnett, “I have enormous respect for CDC and their mission and for Dr. [Rochelle] Walensky in particular. But boy, they’re really, really getting messaging wrong here.”

“Do you really think that CDC has changed mask guidance for vaccinated adults, to use Dr. Walensky’s words, because of rarely a vaccinated person may transmit virus to an unvaccinated person? No,” he said. “They changed guidance to do the right thing, which was to force basically unvaccinated people to be vaccinated… and to mask up.”

Reiner argued that “they need to articulate the problem clearly” that tens of millions of Americans have not gotten the vaccine and are not masking up and “that is the force that is propagating this virus around the country.”

CDC messaging is astonishingly bad here. Instead of clearly articulating the problem which is 80 million adults have chosen not to get vaccinated and they are largely also unmasked, CDC suggests that the problem is rare transmission from vaxed to unvaxed people. This is so wrong.

— Jonathan Reiner (@JReinerMD) July 27, 2021

You can watch above, via CNN.