Just two months after declaring that fully vaccinated folks can now refrain from wearing face masks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) backpedaled and reinstated its mask mandates citing the spread of the highly contagious delta variant of COVID.
The CDC's new mask guidelines earned criticism from citizens and government leaders alike. Now, it has been revealed that their updated mask mandates, despite "following the science," is actually based on at least one study that was not peer reviewed and was based on a non-U.S. approved vaccine for COVID.
The Daily Caller reported that the CDC has justified their flip-flopping on mask mandates based on several studies. However, at least one of those studies was rejected by peer review and was a study conducted on non-U.S. approved vaccines for COVID.
The study was titled "SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617.2 Delta variant emergence and vaccine breakthrough" and was conducted by researchers in India, where according to the BBC, the government has given 260 million doses of three approved vaccines: Covishield, Covaxin and Sputnik V. None of these have Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. The only COVID vaccines with EUA in the U.S. are the PFizer-BioNTech vaccine, Moderna vaccine, and Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
On Thursday, the CDC released an updated brief in which they cited the Indian study in the argument that the delta variant of COID is transmissione from a vaccinated person with a breakthrough infection, meaning someone who is fully vaccinated but still got infected with COVID. This citation was placed in the updated brief despite the study having no mention of viral loads from the delta variant against unvaccinated individuals.
"Studies from India with vaccines not authorized for use in the United States have noted relatively high viral loads and larger cluster sizes associated with infections with Delta, regardless of vaccination status," the new CDC guidance read, as reported by the Gateway Pundit. "These early data suggest that breakthrough Delta infections are transmissible."
That "suggestion" is important because the study was conducted in India, where "vaccinated" individuals were given entirely different vaccines than the ones available to Americans in the U.S. The CDC added that there are pending "unpublished and "additional data collection" studies to help "understand the level and duration of transmissibility from Delta vaccine breakthrough infections in the United States and other settings."
Furthermore, internet sleuths found that in the very website where the study was published, the peer review timeline says that the editorial decision was "Reject after peer review." Its current status is now "under review."
In the U.S. only 60% of Americans who are eligible to get inoculated with the COVID vaccine have had at least one shot. 50% of the population who are eligible to get the vaccine have been fully vaccinated against COVID.
