Fully vaccinated people – people who have already spent two weeks of the second dose of Moderna or Pfizer Covid-19 vaccines, or after a single dose from Johnson & Johnson – have many questions for the professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University.
They ask if it is okay to hug the grandchildren now. Can they play cards with their vaccinated friends? They may offer a small indoor dinner, but should you forget to invite Uncle Frank, who has been unmasked a lot at the bar?
“I try to answer as many of these questions as possible, because these people are very thoughtful,” said Schaffner. “These are the people who are trying to do their best in these circumstances.”
For others who do not have a favorite infectious disease specialist on speed dial, the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention will soon publish guidelines for those who are fully vaccinated.
Official: Nothing ‘nefarious’ about backward guidelines
The Biden government has said it has been working on these guidelines for weeks. They were expected to be released on Thursday, but are still in progress, according to an official involved in the drafting process.
During the Trump administration, White House officials sometimes had a heavy hand with CDC guidelines, dictating what the agency could and could not say, according to CDC officials.
But that is not what is currently happening with these new guidelines, according to the Biden government official.
“I don’t think anything nefarious is going on,” said the official.
The official said a draft of the new guidelines was probably sent to the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services so that the team could find out in advance what they said.
“I don’t envy the drafters of those guidelines,” said Schaffner. “You can paint some photos with a very broad brush, but people want to apply general guidelines to specific lives, and it gets very, very thorough. There is no way to capture everything.”
The CDC needs to strike a tricky balance with these guidelines, experts said.
The guidelines need to encourage people to get vaccinated, help vaccinees understand that they still need to be careful and manage the expectations of the unvaccinated.
“We do not want people who are not fully vaccinated to think that everything has been lifted and we can already leave things behind and that the pandemic is over, because it is not over,” said the official.
It’s not like going back to 2019
While the guidelines do not give the vaccinee permission to start living as if it were 2019 again, according to a Biden government official, the guidelines offer some hope that the end of total social isolation is near.
For example, you’ll finally be able to show your vaccinated friends all of your homemade DIY projects from last year.
However, don’t throw that cloth mask away yet. The guidelines will advise vaccinees to continue to wear masks in public and to keep a good physical distance from others.
“Although we are still vaccinating everyone, our main social objective remains to protect the unvaccinated,” said Richterman.
Masks help to do just that. And there is no guarantee that vaccinated people will not yet carry the virus in their nose or throat – a virus that may not make the carrier sick, but that can be expelled and infect someone not yet vaccinated.
“The masks continue to work and we need them against variants,” said Schaffner. Public health experts fear that the spread of the most contagious variants could prolong the pandemic.
The guidelines should also help vaccinees navigate interactions with loved ones in their nursing homes, which have been kept behind locked doors for more than a year. They must also include travel advice.
Unfortunately, vaccination is not a “free pass to travel,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci at CNN Global Town Hall in early February. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that “essential” travel is a yes, “but we don’t want people to think that because they’ve been vaccinated, then other public health recommendations just don’t apply.”
The guidelines will not be completely prescriptive and will tell you exactly what you can and cannot do after you are fully vaccinated.
The guidelines will not tell you whether or not you can go bowling with Aunt Mary, for example, or whether or not you can meet Grandpa at the cafeteria for a Settlers of Catan game with the new “sheep strategy” you learned while you were stuck at home.
“It is impossible to reach that level of detail. We cannot predict every situation that human beings will be in,” explained the Biden official. “What we can do is provide principles for people to think about. It will give people the means to think about it and then they can choose the level of risk they want to take.”
CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen, John Bonifield, Maggie Fox and Virginia Langmaid contributed to this report.