By Denise Chow - NBC News
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Thursday that mask use and social distancing are no longer necessary for people who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. .
This is a measure that, according to the agency, is due to
scientific evidence that vaccines
play an important role in reducing infections and transmission of the virus.
In announcing her updated recommendations, Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, said there are "numerous reports in the scientific literature" that demonstrate the real-world safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.
Walensky highlighted
three recent studies
that demonstrated the impact of vaccines on symptomatic and asymptomatic infections, and another published last week on the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines against two variants known to circulate in the United States.
All the findings add to a growing body of evidence that
vaccines are effective
in preventing severe symptoms and death from COVID-19, and that they help prevent people from transmitting the virus to others.
[CDC allows vaccinated people to stop wearing mask indoors and outdoors]
"All the trends are going down because
vaccines are making a big difference,
" said Isaac Weisfuse, a medical epidemiologist at Cornell University and a former New York City health commissioner.
"The fewer people who are susceptible, the more likely it is that trends will continue to decline," he added.
The number of new COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the United States are declining.
The most recent seven-day average of
new cases was down 23%
from the previous week, Walensky said.
The seven-day average of daily deaths also dropped to 587 per day, according to the CDC.
Los Angeles residents react to announcement that vaccinated no longer need to wear a mask
May 13, 202101: 48
"Today, COVID-19 deaths are at the lowest point since April 2020," Andy Slavitt, White House coronavirus adviser, told a news conference Thursday.
These statistics help reinforce that vaccines work, and they
work well
, said Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
[Expert doubts that vaccinated people can stop wearing a mask in restaurants, cinemas or theaters]
"It's like we've reached a tipping point in terms of the weight of evidence that
these are deeply effective vaccines
, beyond our wildest dreams, and that they are really good at blocking transmission," Gandhi said.
According to David Dowdy, a professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, the change in the recommendations was necessary.
"I think part of the problem before this was that
there was kind of a mixed message
: vaccines are very effective, but you have to keep wearing a mask," said Dowdy, "now this is a strong statement that we know these vaccines They work, and for those who are fully vaccinated it is appropriate to take some steps to live life a little more normally. "
In one of the studies cited by the CDC, the Pfizer vaccine was
shown to be 97% effective
in protecting against symptomatic infection and 86% effective in protecting against asymptomatic infection.
These results, published May 6 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, are based on a study of more than 6,700 vaccinated healthcare workers in Israel.
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Walensky also referred to two recent US studies that were published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
One study showed that COVID-19 vaccines were
90% effective in preventing symptomatic
and asymptomatic
infection
among nearly 4,000 first-line and healthcare workers.
In a second study, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were found to be 94% effective in preventing coronavirus-related hospitalizations among adults 65 and older who had been fully vaccinated.
The CDC study of adults 65 and older was especially important, Gandhi said, as there were initially questions about the performance of vaccines in older populations.
CDC announces that people vaccinated against COVID-19 will no longer have to wear the mask in these places
May 13, 202100: 51
"The cumulative weight of all these studies shows that removing the mask from a vaccinated person is completely fine," he said.
Although it is possible for a fully vaccinated person to become infected, these spot infections are considered very rare.
Of the more than
117 million people who have been fully vaccinated in the United States, only 9,245
have tested positive for COVID-19.
The CDC has also said that illnesses from breakthrough infections are usually mild.
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Walensky also highlighted the results of a study published May 5 in The New England Journal of Medicine that analyzed the effectiveness of Pfizer's vaccine against two variants of the coronavirus. The research, based on the results of a mass vaccination campaign in Qatar, showed that the vaccine was
89% effective in preventing infection
of the so-called B.1.1.7 variant, the most contagious strain of the virus that was first reported. time in the UK. Pfizer's vaccine was also 75% effective in protecting against the B.1.351 variant, which was first identified in South Africa.
These results are significant because it has been feared that the vaccines would not be as effective against variant B.1.351, and variant B.1.1.7 that have taken hold in the United States, becoming, at the beginning of April, the dominant strain in the country.
Other variants of the virus may emerge
that will force the CDC to change its guidance, but Dowdy said the time is right to ease restrictions for people who are fully vaccinated.
"If those variants emerge, we will react accordingly," he said, "but the important message right now in the United States is that things are trending in the right direction, to a point where we are able to recommend more than a third of people who can already remove their masks. "
[It is false that thousands died from the COVID-19 vaccine as suggested by Tucker Carlson without any evidence]
Weisfuse said the updated guide represents an important milestone for the country and a breakthrough in the course of the pandemic: "It has been such a long and terrible road," he said, "but this is a historic day."