A few days ago, the White House announced that “social distancing and masking will be essential even after vaccination”. This has predictably caused a significant amount of public consternation, and given new life to conspiracy theories around social control etc…
To an extent, it is probably not a bad policy to continue to demand social distancing and masks. It is very likely that there will still be some avenues for transmission after vaccination, and that, since you can’t tell who is vaccinated by looking at them, some percentage of the unvaccinated would blithely ignore mask mandates were there to be exceptions made for the vaccinated. But here’s the thing? Why not just say that?!?!?
This is government treating people like cretins again, and I’m quite sure it will produce similar results and get people killed.
When this all started, the CDC/NIH decided that they had to manipulate the public into not buying the N95 masks needed by medical personnel, instead of just saying what they meant, so they told the public “masks don’t work”. Since even a cretin is able to twig to the ridiculousness of saying that masks are only effective if you have a certain kind of job, this sowed a *lot* of mistrust and conspiracy bullshit we’re still fighting, especially after their complete 180 a couple of months later insisting that masks were vital: “Were they lying then, or are they lying now?”.
Then we had Dr Fauci himself insisting for months that we’d reach herd immunity at around 60% vaccination/other immunity, but then as soon as vaccines were in sight inching the estimate up over months to around 85%. Then, in a recent interview, he publicly admitted that he “knew the public wasn’t ready to hear” the real numbers, so he consciously lied about them to manipulate their expectations. So again, doctor: “Were you lying then, or are you lying now?”
In the public’s mind the follow-up to this is: “What else are they lying about?”
So in my opinion, this is another example where a proclamation is being made likely for a good reason, but the reason is being withheld from, or at least glossed-over to, the public. It will lead to resistance and suspicion, and feed the conspiracy theorists further. As previously, this resistance will cause more death.
tl;dr – The government is once again subverting their own goals by treating the public like idiots, and it’s going to get people killed…
