A little earlier today, my colleague Scott Hounsell posted about the CDC permitting us to travel so long as we’d had the vaccine and continued to wear face diapers, anti-social distance, and engage in basic hygiene (see The CDC Says Vaccinated People Can Travel, As Long As They Do Exactly What Unvaccinated People Do). This was how Scott summed things up:

In other words, nothing has changed.  The recommendation still only applies to essential travel, and those who have been vaccinated still have to comply with mask mandates and social distancing guidelines.  Next to nothing has changed.  How many were quarantining after their return unless it was required?  My own family’s spring break trip to Hawaii was postponed as a result of travel restrictions due to COVID-19 which have not been altered, even in the light of all adult passengers being vaccinated.

This is precisely why Americans are increasingly finding the Government Mandates laughable.  I have talked previously about the data showing that many of the government-imposed measures to “slow the spread,” were completely unnecessary and in many cases, made the problems worse.  Now, even when you comply with government directives to vaccinate, they still, won’t let you get back to your life.

Hot on the heels of that announcement, the CDC has made another announcement about travel and the vaccine:

CDC Director Walensky: "While we believe that fully vaccinated people can travel at low risk to themselves, CDC is not recommending travel at this time due to the rising number of cases."

— Kevin Liptak (@Kevinliptakcnn) April 2, 2021

The state of play now is that the CDC doesn’t want you to travel even if you have the vaccine and do the same silly virtue-signaling as everyone else.

But it gets better.

Last weekend, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky was on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC. This was Maddow’s setup for the interview:

Well, today, the CDC reported new data that shows that under real world conditions, not just in a lab, not just extrapolating from tiny numbers of test subjects but looking at thousands of front line health workers and essential workers who have gotten vaccinated and who have since been doing their jobs and living in a real world, not only are the vaccines for those folks, thousands of them, keeping those people from getting sick from COVID themselves, those vaccines are also highly effective at preventing those people from getting infected, even with non-symptomatic infection. And if you are not infected, you can`t give it to anybody else.

And I know this sounds like an incremental piece of news, but sit on this for a second enough to absorb what this means, right? What this means is that we can get there with vaccines. We can end this thing.

It means that instead of a vaccine being able — excuse me, it means instead of the virus being able to hop from person to person to person to person, spreading and spreading, sickening some of them but not all of them, and the ones it doesn`t sicken don`t know they have it and they give it to mere poem because they didn`t recognize, right? Instead of the virus being able to hop from person to person to person, potentially mutating and becoming more virulent and drug resistant along the way, now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person.

A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus. The virus does not infect them. The virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else. It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to get more people.

That means the vaccines will get us to the end of this. If we just go fast enough to get the whole population vaccinated. It`s huge news.

What Maddow described there in breathless terms was basically how all vaccines are understood to work. If you are vaccinated, you are nearly definitely immune to the pathogen, and you can’t spread it to others. That’s why we have childhood vaccines. Walesnky did not contradict this commentary in the interview. In the manner that has become the trademark of CDC messaging on any health issue, that was then; this is now.

CDC walks back claim that vaccinated people can't carry the coronavirus https://t.co/Tgf1VYbzde pic.twitter.com/Si5OfGNG9e

— New York Post (@nypost) April 2, 2021

After Walensky made the statement, her own agency contradicted her.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has walked back the claim made by its director that vaccinated people don’t carry the coronavirus.

CDC chief Rochelle Walensky said earlier this week that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.”

But the health agency clarified the statement Thursday,  saying “the evidence isn’t clear” and that Walensky was “speaking broadly.”

“It’s possible that some people who are fully vaccinated could get COVID-19,” a CDC spokesperson told the New York Times. “The evidence isn’t clear whether they can spread the virus to others. We are continuing to evaluate the evidence.”

Dr. Peter Bach, director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said confusion about bulletproof immunity could lead to Americans refusing to wear a mask after getting the jabs.

Two separate things are happening.

(See my colleague Bochie’s take on this here The Biden Administration’s Incoherence Reaches Parody Levels After They Flip-Flop Again on Vaccinations.)

First and foremost, our public health policy is being determined by idiots. A few weeks ago, my colleague Susie Moore and I explored this topic on an episode of Moore to the Point (see PODCAST: Moore to the Point With Susie Moore – Ep. 5 – Conversation With Streiff on Elite Incompetence). No matter what other motive is afoot, and there is one, it is difficult to reconcile the relentless self-beclowning the public health establishment has inflicted upon itself with anything but absolute incompetence. It is funny, and I must admit, watching the Grand Poobahs tell us no mask, one mask, two masks, six-feet, three-feet (Six-Foot Social Distancing Is on the Way out, but How We Got There in the First Place Is the Real Story), demonstrate-but-don’t-go-to-church has been entertaining. It is also dangerous. We are confronting a virus that is somewhat more lethal than the seasonal flu but definitely much less dangerous than the 1918 flu, and no sane person can have any confidence that anyone advising policymakers and legislators can tell his or her ass from a hot rock. For instance, states without a mask mandate and lockdowns are doing better than the states with the most extreme policies (see Joe Biden Calls Texas and Mississippi Removing Mask Mandates ‘Neanderthal,’ but His Fear of What Is Next Is the Real Story). Events that were maligned as “superspreader events” in the media (such as the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the Super Bowl, Trump campaign rallies, and Spring Break in Florida) have not been proven to be any more dangerous than the events, like BLM riots, that were championed by the media (see Super Bowl Was Not a ‘Superspreader’ Event, Creating a Sad in the Pandemic Porn Industry). And this just in on the new round of lockdowns in Germany:

German Covid maps from March 1 (left) and April 1 (right), respectively. Darker colors indicate more infections. Germany 🇩🇪 has been under fairly strict nationwide lockdown throughout the period in question. https://t.co/MMhSAZhb6C

— HumphreyBohun (@HumphreyBohun) April 2, 2021

They are literally incapable of putting out a coherent message. pic.twitter.com/CP7twljhY7

— Noam Blum (@neontaster) April 2, 2021

The old saying, “never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity,” is probably correct here. That does not mean there isn’t a large dose of malice tossed in for good measure. Note the last graf in the NY Post story:

Dr. Peter Bach, director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said confusion about bulletproof immunity could lead to Americans refusing to wear a mask after getting the jabs.

We’ve discussed for months how this virus has been used as a stalking horse to set aside our rights under the Constitution. Never before have our governors been empowered to forbid church services, prohibit gatherings in private homes, or force any citizen to wear a particular item of apparel and had those decisions upheld by our courts.  They have become brazen about what they are doing; as Bonchie points out this agenda here, CNN Says the Quiet Part out Loud About Lockdowns and Vaccinations, and It’s Pure Tyranny.

We are at a point where the people making these policies have revealed themselves to be knaves and poltroons. They don’t know what they are doing and appear to be using us as lab rats in their Skinner box to make us respond to stimuli for, as they say, sh**s-and-grins. They are using the authority they have arrogated to themselves to erode civil liberties, civil rights, and civil society. And they are going to be surprised when we all stop playing along with the fiction that these clowns have any right to do what they are doing.