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TOKYO (AP) The IOC says the Olympics are only about the sports; no politics allowed. This will be the mantra, as it always is, when the Beijing Winter Games open in six months.

Covering ski races or figure-skating finals should be painless; just stay in the sports bubble and out of trouble. But reporters from other countries who puncture the PR skin to explore other aspects of life in China as they have in Japan during the Tokyo Olympics could draw more than criticism.

They could face harassment and threats if portrayals are deemed by the government and the increasingly nationalist public to be giving a negative view of China.

China demands complete adherence to its position on a number of issues, Oriana Skylar Mastro, who researches China security issues at Stanford University, told The Associated Press.

It demands this from governments, but also corporations, media, and individuals," she said in an email. "So, do I think China is going to go after anyone, including sports reporters during the Olympics, that deviate from the acceptable script? Yes, I absolutely do.

Chinas foreign ministry has repeatedly criticized the politicization of sports and has said any Olympic boycott is doomed to failure. It has not addressed journalism during the Games specifically.

The peril for journalists was evident last week when foreign reporters covering floods in central China were targeted. The Communist Youth League, an arm of the Chinese Communist Party, asked social media followers to locate and report a BBC reporter on assignment. That expanded into broader accusations against foreign reporters for slandering China with coverage that could be seen as critical rather than focusing on government rescue efforts.

In a statement, The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China said the rhetoric from organizations affiliated with China's ruling Communist Party directly endangers the physical safety of foreign journalists in China and hinders free reporting.

The organization added that staff from the BBC and the Los Angeles Times received death threats and intimidating messages and calls. This came after China last year expelled more than a dozen American reporters working for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.

Beijing was the IOC's unlikely choice for the 2022 Winter Olympics, a decision made in 2015 chiefly because European favorites like Oslo and Stockholm pulled out for financial or political reasons. The IOC was left with only only two candidates: Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Beijing won by four votes, 44-40. The choice elicited sharp criticism from human rights groups, which continues.

The IOC has declined several recent demands to move the Olympics out of Beijing. China is accused by some foreign governments and researchers of imposing forced labor, systematic forced birth control and torture upon Uyghurs, a largely Muslim ethnic group Xinjiang, a region in the country's west.

China has denied committing genocide against the Uyghur people, calling such accusations the lie of the century.

Last week a vice president of Intel, one of the IOC's top 15 sponsors, said he agreed with a U.S. State Department assessment that said China was committing genocide against Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang. Other sponsors including Coca-Cola, Visa, Procter & Gamble, and Airbnb appeared in a congressional hearing but wouldn't answer most questions directly.

Its what I refer to as the Olympics Catch-22 for illiberal regimes like China, Victor Cha, an Asian specialist at Georgetown University, wrote in an email to AP. Cha surveyed the politics of sports in Asia and the 2008 Beijing Olympics in his book Beyond the Final Score. He also served from 2004-2007 in the Bush White House as director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council.

They want all the glory and attention of hosting the world for the Winter Games, but they want none of the inevitable criticism that comes with the media magnifying glass," Cha said. All hosts have to deal with this; witness all of the scrutiny over COVID pre-Tokyo. The difference is how the hosts handle it.

The IOC says its focus is only sports, though it's a highly political body with an observer seat at the United Nations. IOC President Thomas Bach touted his efforts to bring the two Koreas together during 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. He also addressed world leaders in 2019 in a G20 summit in Osaka, Japan.

Our responsibility is to deliver the Games," said Mark Adams, the IOC's spokesman. That is our responsibility. It is the responsibility of others the United Nations, who have been very supportive of the Olympic Games, and governments to deal with this and not for us."

He added: Given the diverse participation in the Olympic Games, the IOC has to remain neutral. Thats clear."

Adams was asked in an email if the IOC was willing to condemn China's policy of interning Uyghurs and other largely Muslim minorities." He did not answer the question and referred to previous statements. At all times, the IOC recognizes and upholds human rights within its remit," Adams wrote. This includes the rights of journalists to report on the Olympic Games.

The IOC included human rights requirements several years ago in the host city contract for the 2024 Paris Olympics, but it did not include those guidelines the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights for Beijing. Paris is the first Olympics to contain the standards, long pushed for by human rights groups.

In countless interviews about China and its preparations for the Winter Olympics, Bach has not mentioned the situation of the Uyghurs. Nor has he said it was a topic covered in meetings of his executive board.

The IOC, however, has promoted press statements about conversations Bach has had with Chinese President Xi Jinping, though it has not revealed the content.

The Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs, reacting to the BBC incident, essentially said the British news organization had it coming.

The BBC has a long history of ideological bias against China, ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said. It has been producing and broadcasting fake news, spreading false information on issues related to Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and the COVID-19 epidemic to attack and discredit China.

The BBC has been reporting on China with tinted glasses for a long time, which brought down its reputation in China," Zhao added.

Yaqiu Wang, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch who grew up near Shanghai, said the foreign media had brand credibility five or six years ago. But she said increasing information control by the Chinese state does not allow average Chinese to get a fair assessment of what the Western press is saying about China.

Wang said the mood is vastly different from 2008, when Beijing held the Summer Olympics. Many outside China hoped the Olympics would improve human rights, and some Chinese saw it as period of optimism. Controls over the foreign media were relaxed in the runup to the Olympics, which some interpreted as a relaxation on the political front after decades of reform and opening-up, as China refers to its 40 years of economic reconfiguration.

The hostility among the people is real, much more real than before,," Wang said. That kind of hostility did not exist in 2008, but it exists now. Among average people, they know that saying bad things about the West or being hostile, they know its in your interest to do that.

If you go to a stadium, it will be all good if they feel you are covering something good," Wang added. "But say you speak to some dissidents or somebody who is a victim of some kind of abuse, you could be in a dangerous position.

___

AP Sports Writer Stephen Wade reported from Beijing for 2 1/2 years covering the runup to the 2008 Olympics, the Games, and its aftermath. More AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2020-tokyo-olympics and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

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Beijing Games: Sports coverage fine, other things maybe not - AZCentral.com

In fact, he barely rates. His CNN town hall last week was a fizzle, averaging only 1.5 million viewers. Fox News easily beat it with its regular programming, and MSNBC had more viewers as well, dumping the president of the United States into third place in the cable-ratings race.

Hes underperformed in other more formal settings, too. Biden drew 27 million for his first address to a joint session of Congress, whereas Donald Trump drew 48 million.

The contrast with Trumps hour-by-hour, impossible-to-ignore cocktail of provocation and political melodrama, naturally, makes Bidens approach even more stark.

Hes the Olympic badminton competition after a WWE match; hes elevator music after a heavy metal concert; hes the sparkler after a fireworks display.

Bidens presidency is, in this sense, practically pre-modern, almost hearkening back to the pre-mass media days when presidents were neither seen nor heard.

Of course, this is in part a deliberate strategic choice by the White House, playing on the contrast with Trump and limiting Bidens exposure to the media to avoid distractions (and gaffes). Being a notably low-voltage political figure worked for Biden in his comeback primary campaign and in the 2020 general election, so why not as president?

As a result, Biden strangely doesnt feel like the main event of the Biden years.

Assuming it arrives, the midterm backlash in 2022 wont be directly about Biden; instead, it will be driven by the Biden-adjacent issues of the border, crime, critical race theory andif they reemerge in forcemask mandates and school closures.

Biden is the prime driver of only one of these issues, the crisis at the border that easily could have been avoided by keeping in place the policies the Trump administration had implemented to get control of the flow of migrants.

Otherwise, they are hot buttons where others besides Biden are the key players, whether governors, mayors, school boards, or education bureaucrats.

In other words, the culture war itself is likely to be the overwhelming issue in 2022, rather than the president.

This would be a marked departure from the midterm shellackings that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama got in 1994 and 2010, which were deeply personal rejections of both men (Clinton was viewed as a draft dodger unworthy of the office and Obama as a crypto-socialist hostile to American exceptionalism).

If no one on the right is enamored of Biden or his agenda, very little energy is invested in opposing him as such.

Indeed, the idea that tends to generate the most interest and passion isnt that the president is assiduously working to destroy the American way of life so much as Bidenwhose verbal meanderings can be truly bizarreisnt in charge at all.

Given the alternatives, this probably works in Bidens favor. He is pushing a truly radical spending agenda that would, if championed by a more in-your-face progressive president rather than someone who feels like a caretaker, surely be met with much fiercer resistance.

But there are risks to Biden, too. If his spending agenda flounders, its not clear what comes next. Even if the White House decides to try to unleash Biden, he is not not obviously well-suited to rallying the country or driving an agenda. Hes always been a talker, but never an orator.

His low-intensity presidency may, as his advisers hope, help create a sense of a return to normality in Washington, but it easily could be consistent with a disturbing sense of drift. Usually, the dynamic of the presidency is if you dont seem to be in control of events, they are in control of you.

The test for Biden will be if, eventually, he has to be the dominant public figure in his own presidency.

Excerpt from:
Opinion | The Biden Era Has Surprisingly Little of Joe Biden in It - POLITICO

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended Tuesday that fully vaccinated people begin wearing masks indoors again in places with high Covid-19 transmission rates. The agency is also recommending kids wear masks in schools this fall.

Federal health officials still believe fully vaccinated individuals represent a very small amount of transmission. Still, some vaccinated people could be carrying higher levels of the virus than previously understood and potentially transmit it to others.

"This pandemic continues to pose a serious threat to the health of all Americans," CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told reporters on a call. "Today, we have new science related to the delta variant that requires us to update the guidance regarding what you can do when you are fully vaccinated."

The updated guidance comes ahead of the fall season, when the highly contagious delta variant is expected to cause another surge in newcoronaviruscases and many large employers plan to bring workers back to the office. In mid-May, the CDC said fully vaccinated people didn't need to wear masks in most settings, whether indoors or outdoors.

"In areas with substantial and high transmission, CDC recommends fully vaccinated people wear masks in public, indoor settings to help prevent the spread of the delta variant, and protect others. This includes schools," Walensky said. The CDC recommends that everyone in grade schools wear masks indoors, "including teachers, staff, students and visitors, regardless of vaccination status."

Walensky said new data shows the variant behaves "uniquely differently from past strains of the virus," indicating that some vaccinated people infected with the delta variant "may be contagious and spread the virus to others."

Read More: Americans will need masks indoors as U.S. heads for 'dangerous fall' with surge in delta Covid cases

Health experts fear delta, already the dominant form of the disease in the U.S., is hitting states with low vaccination rates. Those states are now being forced to reintroduce mask rules, capacity limits and other public health measures that they've largely rolled back in recent months.

White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that the CDC was considering whether to revise mask guidance for vaccinated Americans, saying it was "under active consideration."

"It's a dynamic situation. It's a work in progress, it evolves like in so many other areas of the pandemic," Fauci, also the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN. "You've got to look at the data."

The CDC's guidance is only a recommendation, leaving it up to states and local officials on whether to reintroduce their mask rules for certain people. But even before the CDC's anticipated guidance Tuesday, some regions were reintroducing mask mandates and advisories as Covid cases began to spike again.

Walensky said a majority of the hospitalizations and deaths in the U.S. are occurring among unvaccinated people, pointing to vaccines she said worked well in protecting against severe illness and death. "But the big concern is that the next variant that might emerge, we're just a few mutations potentially away where it could potentially evade our vaccines," she said.

President Joe Biden said the CDC's updated guidance was necessary to defeat the virus, and that he will lay out "next steps" to get more Americans vaccinated on Thursday.

"Although most U.S. adults are vaccinated, too many are not.While we have seen an increase in vaccinations in recent days, we still need to do better," he said in a statement. "More vaccinations and mask wearing in the areas most impacted by the Delta variant will enable us to avoid the kind of lockdowns, shutdowns, school closures, and disruptions we faced in 2020."

Several counties across California and Nevada were already advising all residents to wear masks in public indoor settings whether they are vaccinated or not. In Massachusetts, officials in Provincetown advised all individuals to resume wearing masks indoors after Fourth of July celebrations led to an outbreak of new cases.

Experts say Covid prevention strategies remain critical to protect people from the virus, especially in areas of moderate-to-high community transmission levels.

The CDC defines "substantial transmission" as counties that have 50 to 100 cases per 100,000 residents over a seven-day period and "high transmission" is more than 100 cases per 100,000 people over seven days, Walensky said.

"We have places and counties and states here that are now reporting over 300 cases per 100,000 over a seven day period. So really an extraordinary amount of viral transmission, which is what we're concerned about," she added.

Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine advocate who has served on advisory panels for both the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, told CNBC earlier this month that the U.S. was still "undervaccinated," with about half of the population not fully inoculated.

Even people who are fully protected have cause for concern when it comes to Covid variants, Offit said. While the vaccines protect well against severe disease and death, they may not protect as well against mild disease or spreading Covid to others, he said. No vaccine is 100% effective, he noted.

"It is not a bold prediction to believe that SARS-CoV-2 is going to be circulating two or three years from now. I mean there are 195 countries out there, most of which haven't been given a single dose of vaccine," Offit said. "Will it still be circulating in the United States? I think that would be very, very likely."

Israel released preliminary data last week that showed the Pfizer vaccine is just 39% effective against the virus there, which officials attributed to the rapidly spreading delta variant. Its effectiveness against severe disease and death remained high, the data showed.U.S. and world health officials said they are looking at the Israeli research, which was not peer-reviewed and was scant on details.

Executives from Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have said they expect Americans will need booster shots, and Pfizer has said it plans to ask the FDA to authorize boosters as it sees signs of waning immunity. Federal health officials say booster doses of the vaccines are not needed for otherwise healthy people at this time, although they may recommend it for the elderly or people with compromised immunity.

CNBC's Meg Tirrell and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Read this article:
CDC reverses indoor mask policy, saying fully vaccinated people and kids should wear them indoors - CNBC

Every Thursday at 5 p.m., my grandmother would go into her bedroom in Havana, lock the door, and tune her Soviet-made radio to Radio Mart, a Miami-based station run by Cuban exiles who had fled Fidel Castros revolution. She always set the volume barely above a whisper. Walls have ears, she would say. Despite being an ordinary and compliant citizen, she, like the rest of my family, avoided controversial political topics on the phone, afraid that the lines were tapped. We acted as if the state were always staring directly at us. Its presence was everywhere.

For my mothers generation, the following things, among others, were forbidden: listening to the Beatles, being openly gay, displaying religious beliefs, and reading certain books. As a kid in the late 1980s, I wore the same clothes as everybody else did, received an identical education, and even used the same and only toothpaste brand, Perla. Individual autonomy and freedom of choice did not exist.

Modeled after and subsidized by the Soviet Union, the Cuban government exercised unfettered control over every aspect of its citizens lives. The agents of state security, trained by the East German Stasi and the Russian KGB, made sure that not a leaf moved without their knowledge. Then, a couple of weeks ago, the unthinkable happened: People marched in the streets, demanding freedom. Where was Big Brother and his omniscient eye?

The recent nationwide protests in Cuba are symptomatic of a much deeper underlying condition than decades of scarcity and a systemic lack of civil liberties. The Cuban political system is cracking. The structures upholding its authority have been slowly but steadily weakening for the past three decades, and the people living beneath them have not only taken notice but are reacting in ever more public ways.

Jorge Felipe Gonzalez: Black Lives Matter misses the point about Cuba

As a child growing up in Castros long shadow, I saw the scaffolding of the state begin to crumble. I remember being 9 years old in 1992 and seeing empty store shelves where Soviet apples used to be, and the tragic day when my little red fire truck, made in East Germany, broke. It was the last toy I had. The Soviet Union had collapsed, and Cuba, a parasitic economy that had little to offer the global market and was further suffering under the U.S. embargo, lost 85 percent of its trade, triggering a severe humanitarian crisis. Soon we were without electricity. To cope with the intense Caribbean heat, we took our mattresses to the roof. The mosquitoes made sure that sleeping under the tropical stars was not the romantic experience many may imagine.

The good old times are coming back, my grandfather said one day in 1994, placing his newspaper on the table. Castro had just allowed Cubans to establish small businesses, reopened tourism to Westerners (the embargo kept Americans away, except for Cuban Americans, who were allowed to visit family), and legalized the domestic use of U.S. dollars. For ordinary Cubans, the liberalization and later subsidies from Hugo Chvezs Venezuela slightly alleviated the crisis. But for the state, the ideological and political consequences would be devastating.

As teenagers in the late 90s, my friends and I gawked at the sight of Western tourists and Cuban Americans walking around Havana with their shiny sneakers, glimpses of a more prosperous world beyond the sea. It became harder for Castro to keep us convinced that socialism was the next logical step in human progress. As time went on, any remaining loyalty to the state was eroded by the seemingly endless stream of new stores packed with colorful products we couldnt afford and hotels we couldnt stay in, or even enter.

Back in the mid-80s, my father worked as the accountant for a factory that made the Cuban version of Coca-Cola. Like every Cuban, he was a state employee, and as such, he had to demonstrate political obedience. For example, he was required to attend monthly meetings and do voluntary work for the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), a neighborhood-based organization that Castro had established in 1960 for collective revolutionary surveillance. He also had to join the state-controlled Workers Central Union of Cuba. In that Cuba, social existence was impossible outside the domain of the state.

Today, nearly one-third of the workforce is employed by the private sector. My best friend, Yunior, now rents a room in his house to tourists and pays a housekeeper to clean it. Like all workers in the private sector, neither of them is required to join the state-controlled union, participate in state-led demonstrations, or provide government paperwork to keep their jobs. They are independent of the state and earn 10 times as much as a doctor. Yes, the cleaning lady too.

The early-90s crisis triggered an exodus to Florida of nearly 35,000 people on small boats and makeshift rafts. I vividly remember my neighbors assembling rustic boats made of tables and tires tied with ropes and crowning the bow with a statuette of Our Lady of Charity, the patron of Cuba and protector of sailors. Many people did not make it. Those who reached American soil were able to stay because of the 1995 wet foot, dry foot policy and get permanent-resident status through the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. Years later, in 2019, that Cold War law would open my own path to American citizenship.

Read: How education shaped Communist Cuba

For many Cubans desperate to leave the island and for Cuban Americans wishing to reunite with their relatives, these U.S. policies were joyfully received. They were convenient for Castro as well. Since taking power in 1959, the Communist leader had used migration as a political pressure-relief valve to rid the island of dissatisfied citizens, most famously in 1980, when 125,000 people left the countrymany under government coercionduring the Mariel Boatlift.

Now that relief valve is closed. Days before leaving office, President Barack Obama ended the wet foot, dry foot policy. His successor reduced the U.S. embassys personnel and stopped issuing visas on the island. Cubans are now trapped, and instead of looking to the horizon, they are looking upward to those in power.

This months demonstrations were not the islands first. Three decades ago, on August 5, 1994, a smaller group of Cubans protested in Havana, chanting freedom and Down with Castro. They were beaten and arrestednot that you would have known it from watching the coverage on state media. What we were shown back then was an edited version without the repression, highlighted by images of Castros arrival at the protest site, riding in a jeep and welcomed with chants of Viva Fidel!

That disinformation strategy is impossible today. In 2018, the Cuban government reluctantly authorized internet usage via cellphones. Three years later, the internet turned a local protest into a nationwide rebellion. Cellphone videos documented the ongoing repression and contradicted state-media manipulations. The information monopoly the government once enjoyed is gone.

After a half century in power, Fidel Castro, the embodiment of the state, got sick, stepped down as president, and died in 2016. Neither his brother Ral nor his handpicked successor as president, Miguel Daz-Canel, has come close to capturing the charisma, or commanding the respect, of the elder Castro. (Daz-Canel singao, a slur better left untranslated, was chanted during the recent protests.)

Read: How did Fidel Castro hold onto Cuba for so long?

Today there is a new generation of Cubans who grew up without the omnipresent figure of Fidel and the prying eyes of the state. To these young people, the old-fashioned socialist rhetoric that still plays on state TV is unconvincing, alien, and frankly ridiculous. Unlike my generation, they did not watch Soviet cartoons but Disney and Pixar. They know the government has little to offer them. They want a political change and they want it now. Instead of fearing walls with ears or tapped phone lines as my late grandmother did, they want to be heard. To ensure that they are, they have taken to social media to amplify their voices.

To be sure, Cuba remains under Communist control, and the government can unleash its might at will, as ongoing violent repressions and summary trials show. But its totalitarian structures are irreversibly damaged. People sense the governments weakness and will continue testing its rusty chains. Those in power should acknowledge that their time is overdueand that they cant solve the countrys never-ending economic and political crises with old formulas. They must open venues for liberalization before it is too late and the worst happens: a total collapse of the state, and a civil war.

A photo caption in this article originally misidentified the origin of the tank shown in the picture.

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I Watched Cuba Crumble From the Inside - The Atlantic

The exchange on Friday between Fox News Channel anchor Bret Baier and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle WalenskyRochelle WalenskyCDC's Walensky is the wrong media messenger on COVID-19 New mask guidelines trigger backlash US vaccinations tick up as delta variant spreads MORE perfectly encapsulatedthe federal governments patently poor communications on the COVID-19 virus.

"Are you for mandating a vaccine on a federal level?" Baier asked.

You know, thats something that I think the administration is looking into. Its something that I think we are looking to see approval of from the vaccine,"Walensky replied.

"Overall, I think in general, I am all for more vaccination. But, you know I have nothing further to say on that except that were looking into those policies," she added.

The answer quickly caught fire on social media, prompting Walensky to directly respond to a CNBC reporter who noted in an ALL-CAPS tweet the revelationaround federally mandating vaccinations:

U.S. CDC DIRECTOR SAYS FEDERALLY MANDATING COVID-19 VACCINATION IS SOMETHING THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION IS LOOKING AT -FOX NEWS INTERVIEW

.@BerkeleyJr To clarify: There will be no nationwide mandate. I was referring to mandates by private institutions and portions of the federal government. There will be no federal mandate.

Portions of the federal government? That's quite a difference from Walensky's original answer, which was seen by infinitely more people than her clarification on Twitter.

It's no wonder trust in the CDC has plummetedsince riding highlast year during the early months of the pandemic. A recent NPR poll shows barely half of Americans have a great deal of trust in the CDC. A May WebMD-Medscape poll gets even worse, with 77 percent saying their trust in the CDC has decreased since the start of the pandemic. It's hard to see how that number isn't even higher as we enter August.

Poll Finds Public Health Has A Trust Problem https://t.co/yGoBN8ByJn

Trust in CDC, FDA Took a Beating During Pandemic. Many healthcare professionals no longer trust the CDC and FDA. Maybe that's one reason why many of them are refusing the Covid vaccine. #Covid_19https://t.co/30kn6OfwK5

To be fair, Walensky isnt the only one to blame for all of this; the problem started during the Trump administration. But Walenskys flip-flops have become all too common. It was just two months ago that she went on The Rachel MaddowRachel Anne MaddowCDC's Walensky is the wrong media messenger on COVID-19 Budowsky: How Biden can defeat COVID-19 for good Democratic group launches seven-figure ad campaign on voting rights bill MORE Showto declare that vaccinated people didn't have to wear masks anymore. And, yes, cases of the delta variant had been recorded for some time before that declaration was made.

How did CDC Director Rochelle Walensky go from asserting so definitively *just 2 months ago* that there is no health reason for vaccinated people to wear masks, to issuing today's alarmist message about vaccine-resistant strains? There were variants then:pic.twitter.com/apSDki3JV5

"Forgive me for speaking in impersonal terms and I dont mean to be too blunt about this, but how sure are you? Maddow asked Walensky about dropping maskmandates on May 13. Because this feels like a really big change.

We're sure, Walensky responded. Theres an extraordinary amount of evidence now that demonstrates the vaccines are working in the real world, in cohort studies, in care facilities, in across all states, that these vaccines are working the way they worked in the clinical trials. Importantly, theres also new data just even in the last two weeks that demonstrates these vaccines are working in against the variants that we have circulating here in the United States, and also data has emerged that has demonstrated that if you are vaccinated, you are less likely, not likely, to asymptomatically shed the virus and give to it others."

That narrative of which Walensky was so sure then has now, of course, been completely turned on its head. Masks are back. Breakthrough cases are primarily driven by the delta variant. Vaccinated people with COVID can shed the virus at the same rate as the unvaccinated,per Walensky's CDC.

Predictably, there have been conflicting reactions to the CDC's new mask mandate, with the American Medical Association agreeing and former U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb insistingits overly broad.

"I trust the experts at the CDC to follow the science but the C clearly doesnt stand for COMMUNICATIONS! tweeted David AxelrodDavid AxelrodCDC's Walensky is the wrong media messenger on COVID-19 Unscripted remarks start to haunt President Biden The Memo: 'Hillbilly Elegy' author binds himself to Trump after past criticism MORE, former senior adviser to President Obama.Too little has been done to foreshadow and explain the changing directives that variable conditions require,"

I trust the experts at the CDC to follow the science but the C clearly doesnt stand for COMMUNICATIONS! Too little has been done to foreshadow and explain the changing directives that variable conditions require.

Moving forward, the CDC needs to take a walk out to the figurative media mound, send Walensky back to the bench and replace her with a competent, professional, disciplined spokesperson. One who understands that words have consequences.One who understands word economy.One the public can trust.

Because not to do so will only lead to more public mistrust, more anger and more confusion over how best to defeat this virus, once and for all.

Joe Concha is a media and politics columnist for The Hill and a Fox News contributor.

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