"CDC finally admits COVID can be treated like the flu"

"The U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) quietly updated its federal COVID-19 guidelines to recommend treating the virus similarly to the flu, vindicating years of dissident opinion and undermining the original justification for drastically upending Americans’ lives in its name.

Declaring that COVID is 'no longer the emergency that it once was, and its health impacts increasingly resemble those of other respiratory viral illnesses,' the new guidance says COVID’s threat is now 'more similar to that of other common respiratory viruses,' justifying the agency’s decision to issue a general 'Respiratory Virus Guidance, rather than additional virus-specific guidance.' It admits that 'states and countries that have already shortened recommended isolation times have not seen increased hospitalizations or deaths related to COVID-19.'

Accordingly, COVID-positive Americans are no longer told to isolate themselves for five days but instead simply stay home until one has gone a day without fever or symptoms, while masking and limiting close contact for the next five days (advice for both COVID and more routine viruses).

The Wall Street Journal, whose headline summarizes the development as 'It’s Official: We Can Pretty Much Treat Covid Like the Flu Now,' noted that the climbdown does not 'apply to health care settings, including nursing homes,' and the CDC still recommends annual fall COVID vaccinations, with the elderly boosted more often.

Medical experts who spoke with WSJ framed the relaxed guidelines as a simple adaptation to changing circumstances, but a report released last month by a Florida grand jury found that the government’s more stringent measures earlier in the pandemic were never justified. It concluded that lockdowns did more harm than good, that masks were ineffective at stopping COVID transmission, that COVID was 'statistically almost harmless' to children and most adults, and that it is 'highly likely' that COVID hospitalization numbers were inflated.

Yet those who argued as much from 2020 through 2023 were maligned from the highest levels of government and media as purveyors of 'medical misinformation' so dangerous it necessitated censoring on social media."