CDC Lifting COVID Safety Guidelines—What’s Wrong with This Picture!

Aug 15, 2022

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is “loosening” their COVID rules, moving away from quarantines, social distancing and other measures that had been security staples of the pandemic. So now, for example, it is no longer recommending that schools perform routine testing or require students or employees exposed to COVID to test to stay in school. It has also dropped the “six foot” distancing standard. This also applies to most businesses and other institutions.

Their reasoning is that the current variants of the virus are not as lethal and have proven less likely to cause serious illness and death. According to the Washington Post, the CDC report released on August 11 indicated that their guidance revisions were because the more favorable circumstances allow public health officials to focus on “sustainable measures to further reduce medically significant illness as well as to minimize strain on the health care system, while reducing barriers to social, education and economic activity.” They state openly that now they are looking at “individual responsibility” as the means to limit viral spread, rather than federal mandates.

What ARE they talking about?!!! That is what has been happening all along these past two and a half years, where the population has had to live with this virus that has killed over a million people in this country. Individual parents have had to decide how to school their children. Individual teachers have had to navigate remote learning and all its drawbacks. Individuals who are “essential workers” have had to go to work and risk their lives. All because corporations want profits, and their government of both parties, including their “medical experts” of the CDC, are at their beck and call.

Yes, there was a strain on the health care system. But it was a health care system that was already diseased by the profit motive, with the decimation of public health over the years.

Yes, there were problems with educational activity—but there were never sufficient, widespread, centralized changes to provide all the resources needed to improve the ventilation systems of all schools, to provide more nurses, to have smaller class sizes and be able to provide more outdoor activities.

Yes, there was a strain on economic activity, because businesses wanted workers back to work, and didn’t want to take any social responsibility for testing, quarantining, paying workers who contract COVID or workers exposed to COVID.

And now, these latest measures continue to take away yet more federal and corporate responsibility, and continue to put the burden on individuals.

The latest loosening of restrictions, according to some public health experts, reveals the Biden administration’s strategic shift toward a “live with the virus” approach.

In fact, they want us to live with the virus of capitalism—which is at the heart of the problems that the vast majority of the population, the working class, faces.

And the only remedy, the only “vaccine” so to speak, to rid us of this virus, is the working class’ own ability to overthrow this system and organize a healthy, humane system.