As my elected representatives, I ask you to intervene with the CDC and all levels of the Administration regarding COVID-19. We MUST have N95 masks or equivalent worn by all staff with patient contact in hospitals, outpatient centers, and nursing homes.
The HICPAC advisory committee to the CDC proposes to weaken infection control measures. They incorrectly said that surgical masks are as protective as N95s, cherry-picked their data, and ignored abundant evidence.
Further, some hospitals (like MGH) are not honoring requests from patients that staff wear a mask—violating ADA standards for accommodation and is unconscionable, resulting in patients delaying necessary care because they risk a deadly hospital-acquired COVID-19 infection.
Like the rest of the Administration, Dr. Cohen is pretending that Covid is over and focusing on the “urgency of normal.” They are pushing people to return to unmasked offices with inadequate ventilation when teleworking has worked well.
On July 20, 900 experts sent a letter to Dr. Cohen asking her and HICPAC to make their processes transparent, seek various stakeholders’ input, and listen to ventilation and aerosols experts. (See https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10482911231195898)
This has fallen on deaf ears.
On 8/25, in “The Check-in with Dr. Cohen,” a Q&A session, Dr. Cohen tells people to wash their hands and stresses, “it’s important to use all the tools we have in our toolbox to protect ourselves.” Not once did she mention masks or ventilation, both critically important since we know that aerosols primarily transmit COVID-19.
The CDC’s mission is “Saving Lives, Protecting People.” They have abdicated in meeting their responsibility.
