The White House insisted Friday its about-face on masks didn’t come due to pressure or polls but was driven purely by the science — and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Asked whether a Biden administration official had updated the guidance for political reasons, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said this wasn’t the case.
“No,” Psaki told reporters during a Friday press briefing.
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She said the CDC reviews data regularly and based its decision on a review of scientific studies that have shown the available COVID-19 vaccines to be effective at protecting people and limiting the spread of the disease, including against variants.
“Vaccines work in the real world, we’ve seen a lot of studies done on that, including internally in the federal government,” Psaki said. “That’s how they came to the decision.”
Republicans in Congress probed federal health experts on delays over updating the rules, particularly on outdoor mask-wearing.
The CDC’s update on Thursday seemed to go further than many expected, however, stating that vaccinated people could ditch masks altogether.
According to CDC data, 59% of adults have received one vaccination shot and 46% are fully vaccinated.
In March, President Joe Biden criticized Texas and Mississippi for lifting restrictions on mask-wearing before every adult gets a shot, calling the decision “Neanderthal thinking.”
A reporter asked Psaki what had changed, given how many people in the country have yet to get the shot.
Responding, she said that Biden, “our North Star, has been listening to the guidance of our health and medical experts and teams, and that’s exactly what we’re doing in this case.”
“And just to reiterate, the CDC, the doctors, and medical experts there are the ones who determined what this guidance would be, based on their own data, and what the timeline would be,” she said. “That was not a decision directed by, made by the White House. The White House was informed of that decision, just to give people assurance of that.”
The CDC is not advising states or other places how they should implement the guidance, she continued. “Different localities, businesses will implement it in the way that they feel will help ensure their community is safe, but I know I am reassured by listening to the guidance of health and medical experts, not political decision-making.”
Andy Slavitt, an adviser to the White House coronavirus response team, said Friday that the CDC informed the White House at 9 p.m. the night before of the announcement. The move came one day after CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky faced a grilling from Senate lawmakers and as gas shortages spread across the Southeast.
“If they wanted to do this politically conveniently, wouldn’t she have done this before the hearing so she didn’t have to take the tough questions, rather than after?” Slavitt told Fox News. “She’s not running a popularity contest. And the CDC always is going to be criticized as either being too fast or too slow — usually at the same time, by the way. They’re getting it from both sides today, they got it from both sides before they made this change.”
Psaki said few people at the White House were informed ahead of time of the decision.
“If you were here yesterday, you saw a kind of shock of people taking off their masks around the building,” she said.
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Earlier in the week, Psaki told reporters that she empathized with people who had grown impatient with the health guidance.
“I’m tired of wearing a mask, too,” she said at the time.
