I bring good news. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released new ‘rules’ for those who have received one of the coronavirus vaccines. You’ll be excited to know that you can enjoy “limited” freedom, according to CNN.

The CDC releases guidelines giving limited freedoms to people fully vaccinated against Covid-19. Here are the rules to keep following. https://t.co/OIBqTGyyTq

— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) March 8, 2021

The framing here is just incredible. A mainline news outlet is presenting the CDC as the arbiter of freedom without even a second thought about questioning whether these guidelines even make any sense. This is, of course, a stark turnaround from the conspiracy-mongering from CNN about the CDC that went on under President Trump. With Biden in charge, though, we are expected to treat the CDC as sacrosanct.

Here are some of the new “rules to keep following.”

NEW CDC GUIDELINES:

-fully vaccinated people should continue wearing masks, practicing distancing and washing their hands often
-in gatherings with fully vaccinated people and unvaccinated people from multiple households, everyone should wear a mask and practice distancing

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) March 8, 2021

Forgetting the scientific arguments here about the efficacy of masks, something I’ve covered many times, this is just a horrible way to promote people getting the vaccine. Telling people to get the vaccine but that they’ll have to keep doing all the same things will simply discourage people from taking the time and energy to get the shot. The best argument for the vaccine is that it lowers risk enough for you to return to normal life, knowing that you can never eliminate all risk.

It’s also not lost on me that the CDC appears to be shaping these new “rules” around commentary Jen Psaki gave a month ago (see Jen Psaki Spits in the Face of Science, People Say Enough is Enough). The politicization of this process was made clear when previous guidelines were changed and put out to fit the wants of the teachers’ unions (see The CDC Burns Its Credibility to the Ground). The Biden administration isn’t letting any of this happen in a vacuum. They are intimately involved in every decree despite the fact that we were assured that was improper when Trump was accused of doing such (he wasn’t actually doing so).

But getting back to the media presentation of this, it’s scary how subservient outlets like CNN and others are. What kind of person writes the above headline and doesn’t feel gross when they write “limited freedom,” as if a government bureaucracy has the power to limit freedom in the first place? You’d hope the news industry would be standing by with a skeptical eye, but they’ve become stenographers for every edict.

I’m of the opinion that a lot of people in the beltway, from Biden to Fauci to CNN, really don’t want this pandemic to end from a political standpoint. I believe they want the deaths to stop, but I think they’ve grown very accustomed to their newfound power and prominence. It’s long past time that began to fade.