I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Friday, May 14th.

Today, CDC is updating our guidance for fully vaccinated people. Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities,

large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing.

If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things that you had stopped doing

because of the pandemic.

Wait, what? Why is that different today than it was a week ago? But that is Centers for Disease

Control Director Dr. Rochelle Wilensky announcing their new guidelines for wearing masks yesterday.

And while they had faced some criticism for being too cautious about when fully vaccinated people

could safely go without masks, they used to say mainly outdoors and still while distanced,

now they're going beyond what some public health experts are comfortable with in saying

fully vaccinated people can go maskless, except in a few specific

circumstances like on public transportation or in health care settings. And they did say that people

still need to follow their state and local guidelines. And New York and New Jersey have said

their respective health departments are reviewing the new CDC recommendations, but the old ones still apply.

Some labor groups and businesses are also not ready to expose their workers to unvaccinated, unmasked folks too, and have said their guidelines won't change. They won't know everybody who's coming

into the store, for example, whether they're vaccinated or not, so they'll require for everybody.

So let's try to understand the new guidelines and what they mean for you and for everybody

with Dr. Stephanie Silvera, epidemiologist and public health professor at Montclair State University.

Dr. Silvera, hi, welcome back to WNYC.

Hi, thank you for having me back.

Dr. Silvera, is this science or is this politics?

Why did this suddenly flip on the basis of, I think, the same science that we've known for weeks or months.

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