Breaking Benjamin has announced a fall tour with Papa Roach joining on select dates.
The headlining outing is set to begin September 11 in Gilford, New Hampshire, and will wrap up September 22 in Huntington, West Virginia. Tickets go on sale this Friday, August 6, at 10 a.m. local time. Members of the Breaking Benjamin fan club will have access to a pre-sale beginning Wednesday, August 4.
Breaking Benjamin’s most recent album is 2018’s Ember. In 2020, they released a compilation titled Aurora, featuring reworked, acoustic-driven versions of past songs, as well as the brand-new single, “Far Away.”
Lady Gaga and legendary crooner Tony Bennett, who turns 95 today, will release their new duets album, Love for Sale, on October 1.
The record, which will be Bennett’s final studio recording, features him and Gaga singing songs penned by the iconic composer Cole Porter. The first single, “I Get a Kick Out of You,” is out today.
Tonight, Gaga and Bennett will take the stage at New York’s Radio City Music Hall for the first of two performances; the second takes place Thursday night. The video for “I Get a Kick Out of You” will debut on MTV, MTV Live, MTVU and its network of channels on August 6 at midnight. It’ll also be screened on an electronic billboard in New York’s Times Square.
Doing an entire album of Cole Porter songs was an idea that came up after the success of Gaga and Bennett’s first album, 2014’s Grammy-winning Cheek to Cheek, but it wasn’t recorded until after Bennett had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He received the initial diagnosis in 2016, but his family only revealed his condition in February of this year.
Here’s the track listing for Love for Sale:
“It’s De-Lovely”
“Night and Day”
“Love for Sale”
“Do I Love You”
“I Concentrate On You”
“I Get a Kick Out of You”
“So In Love”
“Let’s Do It”
“Just One of Those Things”
“Dream Dancing”
“I’ve Got You Under My Skin” (DELUXE VERSION)
“You’re the Top” (DELUXE VERSION)
(WASHINGTON) — Even as the delta variant is causing higher COVID-19 case rates and hospitalizations across the United States, President Joe Biden will discuss his push to help get people around the world vaccinated in remarks Tuesday, highlighting that the U.S. has already shipped 110 million doses abroad.
The push to share vaccines globally is an effort to halt the rise of any future variants of the virus, which global health experts warn could potentially compromise vaccine immunity.
Biden will announce that the first of 500 million Pfizer vaccine doses the administration ordered for global distribution will begin shipping at the end of August. Of those doses, 200 million are expected to ship in 2021, with the remaining 300 million to follow in 2022.
Biden announced the 500 million-dose commitment at the G-7 summit in the United Kingdom in June, as part of an effort to drum up additional contributions from allies.
“We’re gonna help lead the world out of this pandemic, working alongside our global partners,” Biden said in remarks ahead of the summit. He added that the U.S. had a “responsibility” and a “humanitarian obligation to save as many lives as we can.”
Biden will also tout a vaccine-sharing milestone Tuesday: that the U.S. has already shipped more than 110 million doses to more than 60 countries around the world, mostly through COVAX, the World Health Organization’s vaccine-sharing initiative. The U.S. has shared more doses than every other country combined, according to U.N. data.
In April, Biden first committed to sharing 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which were purchased by the U.S. but never received FDA emergency use authorization. Biden also pledged in May to share another 20 million doses of the three available vaccines in the U.S., totaling a pledge of 80 million doses. Tuesday’s remarks will highlight the fact that U.S. contributions worldwide have already outpaced that 80 million-dose pledge.
Still, global public health experts warn that wealthier nations need to step up their efforts, noting that the longer it takes for poorer countries to become vaccinated, the longer the pandemic will persist worldwide.
Various non-governmental agencies, including the Center for Strategic International Studies, the Duke University Global Health Institute and the Center for Global Development penned an open letter to the Biden administration Tuesday, calling on the U.S. to ramp up its efforts.
“The US and G7 allies have taken important but modest steps to close the global vaccine gap, including by accelerating large-scale production and delivery of high-quality vaccines, increasing financial support to COVAX, and committing to share roughly 900 million doses over the next year (including 580 million from the US). But these actions fall far short of the true scale and urgency required,” the letter says.
“Getting 110 million doses out is really helpful, but in the scale that we need to find a way to get 10 billion plus doses out, it’s not even in the order of magnitude to make a difference,” said Dr. Krishna Udayakumar, director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center. “The U.S. has done more than any other country so far, but that’s more an indictment of the whole response, as opposed to the U.S. standing out in any positive way.”
Udayakumar warned that while the focus continues to be on worldwide vaccine supply, distribution challenges will soon come to the fore.
“We have under-invested on the ground in ensuring vaccines can turn into vaccinations. My biggest concern is we’re going to see vaccines sitting in freezers around the world.” he said.
The upcoming official Led Zeppelin documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin has been added to the lineup of the 2021 edition of Italy’s Venice International Film Festival, which runs from September 1 through September 11.
The movie will be screened as part of the out-of-competition section of the festival.
As previously reported, Becoming Led Zeppelin features new interviews with band members Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones, as well as archival interviews with late drummer John Bonham.
The film, which was directed by Bernard McMahon, follows the individual paths of Led Zeppelin’s four members through their various groups and musical endeavors en route to becoming part of one of the biggest and most influential rock bands in the world. The documentary ends in 1970, at the height of Led Zeppelin’s meteoric rise.
“With Becoming Led Zeppelin my goal was to make a documentary that looks and feels like a musical,” McMahon says in a statement. “I wanted to weave together the four diverse stories of the band members before and after they formed their group with large sections of their story advanced using only music and imagery and to contextualize the music with the locations where it was created and the world events that inspired it.”
McMahon adds, “I used only original prints and negatives, with over 70,000 frames of footage manually restored, and devised fantasia sequences, inspired by Singin’ in the Rain, layering unseen performance footage with montages of posters, tickets and travel to create a visual sense of the freneticism of their early career.”
McMahon also directed American Epic, an award-winning documentary series focusing on American roots music and its impact on the world.
Becoming Led Zeppelin was co-written and produced by Allison McGourty, who also co-wrote American Epic.
(WASHINGTON) — Two Washington, D.C.. Metropolitan Police Department officers who responded to the Jan. 6 riot died by suicide in July, the department announced on Monday, nearly seven months after the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of pro-Trump supporters.
Officer Kyle DeFreytag, who was on the force since November 2016, and Officer Gunther Hashida, an 18-year-veteran of the force, are among the three MPD officers who have so far died by suicide in 2021, the department said.
President Joe Biden expressed his gratitude toward the officers in a tweet on Tuesday morning, hailing them as “American heroes.”
“When the United States Capitol and our very democracy were under attack on January 6th, Officers Hashida and DeFreytag courageously risked their lives to defend them. They were American heroes. Jill and I are keeping their loved ones in our prayers during this difficult time,” he said.
It is not clear if the events of Jan. 6 contributed to the officers’ suicides, and research shows that law enforcement officers experience stressors as a regular part of the job and can struggle with mental health issues.
“On a daily basis, officers experience job-related stressors that can range from interpersonal conflicts to extremely traumatic events, such as vehicle crashes, homicide, and suicide. This cumulative exposure can affect officers’ mental and physical health, contributing to problems such as post-traumatic stress symptoms, substance misuse, depression, and suicidal ideation,” a research paper released by the Justice Department and Police groups said.
Capitol Police Officer Howard Liebengood also died by suicide in the months after responding to the Jan. 6 attack.
“After assisting riot control at the Capitol on January 6th, USCP scheduled Howie to work lengthy shifts in the immediate days following. He was home for very few hours over the course of four days,” Serena Liebengood, his wife, wrote to Rep. Jennifer Wexton, D-Va., in March.
In the nearly seven months since the attack, law enforcement suicide experts say the families of those who responded to the incident say they’ve behaved differently.
A Jan. 6 rally in support of then-President Donald Trump turned deadly after Trump encouraged his supporters to march to Capitol Hill, where Congress was meeting to certify Biden’s election win.
Rioters breached barricades and security checkpoints, forcing Vice President Mike Pence and lawmakers to evacuate or shelter in place and temporarily disrupting the certification. At least 140 police officers were injured and the Capitol building suffered approximately $1.5 million in damage.
According to B.L.U.E. Help, a nonprofit that works to reduce stigmas tied to mental health issues for those in law enforcement., 87 police officers from across the country have died by suicide so far in 2021.
Karen Solomon, who runs Blue H.E.L.P, said officers are afraid to speak to the media about the Jan. 6 events because for fear of losing their jobs.
“It’s compounded by the public scrutiny and lack of support for the officers, not only by the public but from other officers who are still standing by the ‘it was one day’ suck it up mentality. We are now seven months out, what has been done? How are these officers being assisted?” she said. “This is one of the most talked about events in the country, yet we are still ignoring the needs of some of the victims of this event — the police officers.”
“There is still too much talk around first responder mental health, too much money being wasted discussing what needs to be done, and not enough action,” she added. “How many more families are going to watch their loved ones suffer, watch it sensationalized and then see it disappear again into yesterday’s headlines?”
Last week, the House select committee tasked with investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol held its first hearing in which lawmakers heard dramatic, emotional accounts from officers who defended the building.
Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn told lawmakers he is receiving private therapy for the “persistent emotional trauma” he faces from that day.
“I know so many other officers continue to hurt, both physically and emotionally. I want to take this moment to speak to my fellow officers about the emotions they are continuing to experience from the events of Jan. 6. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with seeking professional counseling,” Dunn said. “What we went through that day was traumatic, and if you are hurting, please take advantage of the counseling services that are available to us.”
He also pleaded with the panel, which hasn’t announced its next public hearing, to look into mental health resources available for officers to decide if they are “sufficient enough to meet our needs.”
(New York) — Boeing’s chance at redemption for its Starliner spacecraft will have to wait for now. The launch attempt scheduled for Tuesday was scrubbed at the last minute due to an unexpected incident with the spacecraft, NASA said.
The attempt was scrubbed “due to unexpected valve position indications in the Starliner propulsion system,” NASA noted. Further details were not immediately available, but the space agency said the next launch opportunity is 12:57 p.m. ET on Wednesday.
The second test flight for Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft was scheduled to launch from the Florida coast on Tuesday afternoon before it was called off. This comes on the heels of last week’s launch attempt also being scrubbed due to an unplanned thruster-firing incident on the International Space Station.
The first Starliner launch in December 2019 famously did not go as planned and the spacecraft never reached the ISS.
NASA was set to carry live coverage of the uncrewed mission starting at 12:30 p.m. ET Tuesday. It’s part of NASA’s Commercial Crew program, in which the space agency tapped the private sector to help with missions in low-Earth orbit. It’s not immediately clear when the next launch opportunity will be.
On Monday, the Starliner spacecraft and a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket were rolled out on to the launch pad at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station ahead of Tuesday’s liftoff. Meteorologists with the U.S. Space Force 45th Weather Squadron predicted a 60% chance of favorable weather for launch day.
After launching, the Starliner was supposed to commence a daylong trip to the space station.
The spaceship was set to bring some 400 pounds of cargo and supplies to the space station crew.
While the test flight is uncrewed, an anthropometric dummy dubbed “Rosie the Rocketeer” will be aboard the Starliner when it launches.The 180-pound test device will sit in the commander’s seat of the capsule for the test flight, and its sensors will be used to collect data on how the launch will impact eventual human passengers. The model human was named after the World War II icon Rosie the Riveter, and is meant to honor women pioneers in aerospace. The test device is clad in the iconic red polka-dot bandana.
Boeing also said it will be paying tribute to more than a dozen historically Black colleges and universities during the upcoming flight test. Among the cargo inside the spacecraft are flags, small pennants and other items “representing HBCUs from throughout the U.S.,” according to a statement from the company.
NASA and Boeing blamed errors in automation and software issues for the botched launch in December 2019, saying mission clocks were not in sync and thus timing errors prevented the Starliner from reaching the orbit it needed in order to get to the space station. Rather than reach the space station, the Starliner landed in White Sands, New Mexico.
The second test flight mission is seen as critical for Boeing, as it has yet to launch astronauts for NASA while its Commercial Crew program competitor SpaceX has flown multiple crewed missions to the space station in addition to numerous cargo flights. Boeing is also still reeling from the fallout related to issues with its 737 Max jets. If the Starliner launch fails again, it is difficult to see how it will be able to remain competitive against SpaceX for NASA contracts — especially as the private sector’s involvement in the budding commercial space industry has grown significantly over the past year.
COVID-19 live updates: Arkansas sees highest hospitalization increase since start of pandemic
(NEW YORK) — The United States is facing a COVID-19 surge this summer as the more contagious delta variant spreads.
More than 613,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 and over 4.2 million people have died worldwide, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
Just 58.1% of Americans ages 12 and up are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC last week, citing new science on the transmissibility of the delta variant, changed its mask guidance to now recommend everyone in areas with substantial or high levels of transmission — vaccinated or not — wear a face covering in public, indoor settings.
Here’s how the news is developing Tuesday. All times Eastern:
Aug 03, 11:25 am
Data ‘tipping’ to show delta more serious for kids than past variants
National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins told CNN Tuesday the data is “tipping” toward showing how the delta variant is more serious for children than past variants.
Collins listed studies from Singapore, Scotland and Canada that “certainly tilts the balance in that direction” but made clear that more data is needed.
Collins also added that part of the reason the U.S. is seeing more children in hospitals is because they’re part of the unvaccinated population and he doesn’t want to “overstate the confidence.”
-ABC News’ Cheyenne Haslett
Aug 03, 10:23 am
NYC to require proof of vaccination to eat inside
New York City will soon require vaccinations for workers and customers for indoor dining, indoor fitness facilities and indoor entertainment facilities, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday.
This mandate will be enforced as of Sept. 13.
Aug 03, 8:55 am
US ships more than 100 million vaccine doses abroad
The Biden administration has hit a vaccine-sharing milestone, shipping more than 110 doses to over 60 countries around the world, mostly through COVAX, the World Health Organization’s vaccine-sharing initiative. The U.S. has shared more doses than every other country combined, according to United Nations data.
Starting at the end of August, the U.S. will begin shipping another batch of 500 million doses of Pfizer to 100 low-income countries across the globe. Two-hundred million of those 500 million doses are expected to be shipped in 2021.
Aug 03, 8:24 am
Arkansas sees highest increase in hospitalizations since start of pandemic
Another 81 COVID-19 patients were admitted to Arkansas hospitals on Monday, the highest increase in hospitalizations since the beginning of the pandemic, Gov. Asa Hutchinson tweeted.
The state now has 1,220 COVID-19 patients in hospitals, including 250 on ventilators.
“We continue to see nearly all hospitalizations among the unvaccinated,” the governor wrote. “Hospitals are full & the only remedy is for more Arkansans to be vaccinated.”
(NEW YORK) — Starting this week, fully vaccinated Hawaii residents can skip COVID-19 testing and quarantine requirements when flying between the islands.
According to the new rules, which Gov. David Ige announced last month, Hawaii residents who were vaccinated in the state are exempt from testing and quarantine on the 15th day after their final vaccine shot.
To participate in the inter-county travel program, island residents will need to provide their Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccination record card, as well as register with Hawaii’s “Safe Travels” program and affirm they are fully vaccinated, to get a digital record card.
Travelers under the age of 5 can bypass the requirements, as long as they are on the same travel itinerary as a fully vaccinated parent or guardian.
The new rules went into effect Monday.
For now, only state residents are eligible for the program, and visitors will still have to either test negative for COVID-19 before flying or quarantine for 10 days when traveling between islands. Ige said the state is hoping to troubleshoot the process before rolling it out to out-of-state Americans as early as this summer and international visitors later this year.
“It will allow us to validate the screening process necessary, and I think most importantly, learn about what kinds of bottlenecks and delays it may inject into our screening process for inter-island travel,” Ige told reporters last month.
As of Tuesday, 41% of the population in Hawaii was fully vaccinated and 59% had received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Hawaii is the second state after New York to issue a vaccination verification certification for state residents.
(NEW YORK) — With over a third of the United States population now fully vaccinated against COVID-19, scientists hope to preserve this newly acquired immunity as the pandemic continues. Now, researchers are exploring whether we might all need booster shots in the coming months and years in order to maintain immunity or to protect against newly emerging variants.
“The goal is to prevent future outbreaks — not react to them,” said Dr. Thaddeus Stappenbeck, chair of the department of inflammation & immunity at Cleveland Clinic.
The Biden administration said during a Senate hearing Tuesday that the government has enough funding to buy booster shots if needed.
“There could be two reasons why booster shots may be needed,” said Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The first is the “natural waning” of vaccine immunity, and the second is that new variants could emerge that might not be fully covered by the current vaccines, he said.
Some experts predict vaccine immunity will last roughly a year and that COVID-19 vaccines might one day be folded into annual flu shots. Meanwhile, with new mutations of COVID-19 emerging worldwide, scientists and vaccine manufacturers are thinking one step ahead by testing booster shots specifically designed to enhance protection against these new variants.
“If we start to see breakthrough infections of clinical significance, then booster doses would likely be recommended. It may be that boosters are recommended for travel to countries where significant transmission continues — we just don’t know,” said Dr. Anna Durbin, professor of international health and infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins University.
Last week, Moderna announced positive preliminary results showing a third booster shot could both preserve immunity and add protection against two variants — one that was first identified in South Africa and another first identified in Brazil.
“It’s a very good piece of news,” Dr. Stephen Hoge, president of Moderna, told ABC News. “It suggests not only can we boost people’s immunity back up and keep it high during the pandemic but also that we can specifically boost it up against some of the new variants of concern.”
Hoge acknowledged that recently vaccinated Americans may be frustrated that additional shots could be needed in the future.
“Well, I’m sympathetic to the disappointment,” Hoge said. “Our current expectation is that we’re going to need a booster probably annually for the near term, and then maybe in the future we’ll be able to do it much less frequently.”
Pfizer is also testing booster vaccinations and monitoring the need to develop a specific booster shot against a newly emerged variant first identified in India.
“We want to make sure to have a vaccine available before the variant will raise levels of infections that are dangerous for the society,” Dr. Albert Bourla, chairman and CEO of Pfizer, said.
Booster shots being studied by manufacturers include existing vaccine formulations, new strain-matched compounds or a combination of both. Multivalent vaccines contain multiple strain-matched compounds and could potentially expand protection against several new variants with a single booster shot.
Scientists say the mRNA technology behind the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines lends itself to rapid modifications of the vaccine. The vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson could also be updated quickly.
“We should be able to produce it in less than 100 days,” Bourla told ABC News. “And this is our goal right now, so that we can always stay ahead of the [virus].”
With a major portion of the country and world still unvaccinated, some specialists caution that the most effective approach to ending the pandemic may not necessarily be through booster shots. The World Health Organization says existing vaccines remain effective at preventing severe illness and death even for newer variants.
And recent data has shown that the more people are vaccinated with existing vaccines, the sooner the pandemic will end.
“We have a global need for vaccine doses now, and the best way to reduce transmission and reduce the number of variants is to vaccinate as many people as possible,” Durbin said.
(NEW YORK) — A growing consensus among public health experts that the U.S. could soon safely end mask mandates has put pressure on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to update its guidance in the weeks ahead or risk losing credibility with the public.
All adult Americans who want to get a vaccine will have had the chance to do so in the next two months, the thinking goes, and they should then be able to make their own risk assessment based on the strong efficacy of the vaccines, which experts believe largely protects fully vaccinated Americans from getting severely ill with the virus and from transmitting it.
“What’s happening in the past week or so is that we’re seeing the effect of the vaccine winning this race against the variants, winning the race against the virus, and that’s freeing us up — and forcing us, rightly so — to reevaluate our control strategies that are in place,” said Joe Allen, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The CDC has begun to loosen its recommendations for fully vaccinated people, defined as someone who has received the full regimen of the vaccine and waited two weeks for full immunity to kick in, but it hasn’t gone so far as to say people can ditch their masks indoors if they’re vaccinated.
Experts believe that is the logical next step.
“We should not undersell the vaccines. They offer excellent protection,” said Linsey Marr, an expert in virus transmission at Virginia Tech. “I think we can really start thinking about ending mask mandates once everyone who wants to be vaccinated has had a chance to be fully vaccinated. And that should be in another month or two.”
And President Joe Biden said as much on Tuesday, telling governors that there could be guidance on indoor mask mandates “at some point soon.”
“We’ve gone a little slower to make sure we’re exactly right in terms of the percent of the population that has been vaccinated,” Biden said, but added that the White House would be “moving on that in the next little bit.”
Beginning last month, the CDC released guidance that fully vaccinated people can gather in small groups without masks indoors and do the same with unvaccinated friends and family so long as they’re low risk. Then, two weeks ago, the CDC said that fully vaccinated Americans could safely ditch their masks in spacious outdoor settings.
But this week, the CDC has come under increasing pressure from lawmakers to offer more incentives for Americans to get vaccinated, demonstrating through national guidelines that getting a vaccine is the path back to normalcy.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, testifying before Congress on Tuesday, defended the CDC’s conservative decision-making so far. The CDC has to consider every situation before it can issue guidance, she said.
“I think it’s important to realize that we, at CDC, are responsible for putting out guidance for individuals as well as for populations, for public health. We are responsible for putting out guidance for counties that have less than five cases per 100,000 and for counties that have greater than 100 cases per 100,000, as well as for counties that have less than 10% of people vaccinated and counties that have more than 50% of people vaccinated. Our guidance has to be science-based for all of these situations,” Walensky said.
The timeline on just how soon the CDC could loosen guidelines is unclear, since experts say masks indoors should stick around until every adult who wants the vaccine has had a chance to reach full vaccination. At the same time, over 116 million Americans have already hit that mark.
Allen, the professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, thinks “top-down” mask mandates can be walked back around July 4, a symbolic date of independence and freedom, but also when he estimated there will have been enough time to guarantee Americans have fairly and adequately had access to the vaccine.
“Once everyone has had the chance to get it, then we start to move into this personal risk decision making,” Allen said. “And my feeling is that it’s reasonable by July 4 or so that we’ll be in a place to pull back on some of these mandates, assuming cases keep dropping as we expect them to.”
At the same time, risks for fully vaccinated Americans are already very different.
Marr, who is fully vaccinated, said she’d now be comfortable indoor dining, going to a grocery store without a mask on, or attending an outdoor barbeque mask-less, with people who are both vaccinated and unvaccinated — though she would follow the rules in her community. She said she would be comfortable with her children, who aren’t vaccinated, doing the same because she’s generally been more concerned about them spreading it to someone who’s vulnerable to COVID than she is about their risks of severe illness.
The place she would still consider wearing a mask, Marr said, would be in a really crowded indoor environment, like a standing-room only indoor concert or a packed worship service with lots of singing. Marr would also consider if case numbers are high or vaccination rates are low, which would increase the risk of exposure.
Allen said he looks forward to traveling with his family this summer, mostly without masks. Like Marr, he said he would pay attention to how much virus is circulating in the community, as well as the social norms of the area he’s in.
“It’s going to vary based on what part of the country you’re in and it’s going to vary based on your own risk tolerance,” he said.
William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said vaccinated people should feel confident indoors even in congregate settings, so long as they’re not immunocompromised, and be comfortable ditching their masks around children.
His suggestion?
“Vaccinated people don’t have to wear masks indoors. Period. Except if you’re immunocompromised. Whereas unvaccinated people, they still need to be cautious for their own good, and for the good of others,” he said.
It’s difficult to enforce masks for unvaccinated people while no longer requiring them for fully vaccinated people, largely because it’s awkward to single people out. But, Shaffner said, an important part of ushering in the “new normal” is to “formally, in recommendations, permit the vaccinated people to behave much more as they did pre-COVID, because we have so much confidence in the vaccines.”
“The CDC has been hearing from many people, informally, that it’s time to allow a little more risk out there. If we’re going to get more people vaccinated, you have to reward them,” Schaffner said.
And if the CDC doesn’t act soon to acknowledge those new freedoms, it could erode people’s confidence in the recommendations.
“I’m worried that if we don’t relax restrictions, then people say, ‘What’s the point of getting the vaccine?'” said Allen.
“I also think public health will have a credibility problem. When we urge people to put in controls, people put in controls, largely. If we then don’t pull back controls when it’s time to pull back, we lose credibility,” he said.
