- Texas and Mississippi are lifting COVID restrictions very early.
- To make people wait, you need to be honest with them about how long they will be waiting.
- That message should be “weeks, not months”, due to the rapid launch of the vaccine.
- This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
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Why is Scott Gottlieb the only person who seems to be good at this?
On CNBC Wednesday, anchor Becky Quick asked Dr. Gottlieb, the former FDA director and board member of Pfizer, if Texas’s immediate lifting of statewide COVID restrictions, including mask mandates, is an issue. The answer to that question is obviously “yes”. But it also needs to be more than just “yes”.
Gottlieb struck that balance between caution and hope. As he noted, March will be a strange month. In February, the epidemic was “violent” and it is very likely that April will be “profoundly better”. This month, “we still face a lot of resurgence risk”. So it is not yet time to completely back off on COVID restrictions, as Texas and Mississippi did, but soon it should be time to slow down many measures – in weeks, not months, given the fast pace of the vaccine’s release.
Unfortunately, the public has heard the message “wait a little longer” much earlier. We are approaching the one-year anniversary of “15 days to slow the spread”.
It is normal for public health guidelines to change when circumstances change, but the 15-day promise was never credible and should not have been issued. The public is understandably tired of a year of rules and wary of a public health establishment that – after the first messages of overconfidence – often seems reluctant to admit that things are about to get better.
To be credible, people hoping to influence public behavior need to find it where it is – giving realistic guidance and concrete timelines about when and how they can change their behavior soon, if they’re not right now.
Over-cautious public health guidance is bad for public health
While Texas and Mississippi are coming out of restrictions very quickly, the federal government’s public health officials have not given us enough guidance on when we can start to slow down, if not now.
Although about 30 million Americans have already received two doses of the vaccine (an impressive feat!), We are still awaiting broad guidance from the Centers for Disease Control on what you should do when you are fully vaccinated and what guidelines the CDC has issued until now he is almost comically too cautious. For example, the CDC says it is okay to not quarantine if you are exposed to COVID, as long as you are asymptomatic and received all doses of the vaccine at least 14 days ago – and no more than 90 days ago.
As the CDC admits, there is no reason to believe that vaccines will stop working after 90 days, and a 90-day window does not inform other aspects of our federal public health policy – we are not telling people to be revaccinated after 90 days.
However, there goes the CDC, postulating a extremely narrow range of behavior recently allowed after vaccination. The 90-day guideline is also bleeding from state recommendations. New York is creating another exemption from the travel quarantine rules, this time for people who have been vaccinated, but also limiting the exception to people whose vaccinations are less than 90 days old.
What message does this send to the public?
On the one hand, it is yet another message from the government suggesting that vaccines are not so good. If we have policies based on the implication that vaccines only work for three months, how does that encourage people to get vaccinated? On the other hand, people who we are going there and getting the vaccines anxiously are doing so on the reasonable assumption that vaccines work, perhaps not for life, but for much longer than 3 months.
In the absence of new findings from surprising research, they – and I – will ignore any public health guidelines that tell us to act as if our vaccines are no longer effective after 90 days.
You need to be honest and realistic with people
Gottlieb urged public officials to set specific targets for when, in the future, they would expect to lift restrictions. This gives the public hope and a good argument for continuing to comply with the restrictions for the time being.
“I think March is a little premature to lift everything, but it certainly makes sense to slide into lifting many of these provisions now,” he said.
But he is concerned that the CDC’s new vaccine guidance is “overly prescriptive and conservative” – so costly that people will simply ignore it. Rather than making it seem like a choice between free Texas style for all or months over strict restrictions – which would result in many people choosing the first one – a compromise can keep people safe and encouraged to get the vaccine.
Tell people that they can hug their grandchildren again
Gottlieb and Quick observed that the orientation that relaxes restrictions only for interactions between groups where Worldwide fully vaccinated is not plausible at a time when vaccines are not approved for use in children.
One of the main reasons why older Americans are lining up to receive vaccines is so that they can interact with their children and grandchildren in a way that they were not able to do recently. Vaccines offer ample protection to the recipient, especially against serious illness and death, and these recipients will – and should, if they want to – use that protection to resume close contact with their relatives, including unvaccinated children. As Gottlieb notes, they need plausible advice on how to mitigate the remaining risk in doing so, not guidance that tells them to wait several months before doing so.
Our lives are about to improve. It’s not just good to say that – it’s necessary, if you want people to hear from you about what to do along the way.