CDC Taking Flack for the Mask Rollback that Everybody Has Been Waiting For
Just a couple of days before the announcement, Walensky was defending CDCs mask policies at a Senate hearing. She got an earful from Sen. Susan Collins, who said "I always considered the CDC to be the gold standard. I don't anymore." She continued:
So, here we have unnecessary barriers to reopening schools, exaggerating the risks of outdoor transmission, and unworkable restrictions on summer camps. Why does this matter? It matters because it undermines public confidence in your recommendation, in the recommendations that do make sense, in the recommendations that Americans should be following.
Ouch.
So you would think Collins and people like her would be overjoyed when the mask guidance changed. Perhaps she was, but others, not so much.
National Nurses United, the largest union for nurses lashed out. “This newest CDC guidance is not based on science, does not protect public health, and threatens the lives of patients, nurses, and other frontline workers across the country,” said their Executive Director. “Now is not the time to relax protective measures, and we are outraged that the CDC has done just that while we are still in the midst of the deadliest pandemic in a century.”
So some people just don't agree with CDC's conclusions about the science, and that is to be expected. But others disagree with the way the guidance was changed. CNN medical commentator Dr. Sanjay Gupta, are complained about the "surprise" of it. This echoes Collins's worries about inconsistency in the messaging.
And there seems to be something to this criticism. In March, Walensky worried about "impending doom" due to surges of variants. But the same day she told Rachel Maddow that vaccinated people don't carry the virus. On April 27, she said:
With regard to why people who are vaccinated are wearing masks indoors, I think what we really need to convey here is we still have 50,000 cases a day. We do believe that vaccinated people are much safer when they’re wearing those masks indoors, as indicated by the green on the right side of that graphic. And, right now, it’s very hard to tease apart who is vaccinated, where they are in the vaccination.
But two weeks later, CDC removed the restrictions. Then there was the infamous flip-flop by Dr. Anthony Fauci near the beginning of the pandemic on whether ordinary people need to wear masks.
The CDC's own communication guidelines speak to this issue. "Trust and credibility can greatly influence your ability to persuade affected persons to follow public health authorities’ recommendations during an outbreak or public health response."
One definitions of trust is confidence in the reliability of a person or system. When you have the CDC abruptly changing course on recommendations, especially over the course of a few days, it makes them seem unreliable, as if they are flailing.
If I were communication director for CDC, I would have delayed the mask-free announcement by a week or two. I would have filled the gap with discussions about research showing vaccine effectiveness and how new findings warranted a re-evaluation of the mask policy.
Look, these people have a tough job and they have to operate under a lot of uncertainty. But they would be well served by paying much more attention to how their messages are likely to be received. And that doesn't just apply to a given announcement, but what kind of story their messages are telling about their organization over time.
