CDC Weakens COVID Protections After Corporations Told Them To

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that they were shortening the recommended quarantine time for those exposed to COVID from 10 to 5 days, after the CEO of Delta asked them to do it last week. The agency has proven that they are now just another tool for the corporate elite, and that worker protections mean absolutely nothing when they get in the way of corporate profits. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Following pressure from corporations, the centers for disease control and prevention announced this week that they're cutting down the recommended quarantine time for those who've been exposed to COVID-19, even as we just hit our worst day of the pandemic so far with over 446,000 confirmed new cases in a single day. That is more than we have ever had in a single day, more than we've ever had in a single day by 150,000 cases, folks. And at the same time, the CDC bows to corporate pressure and says, we're reducing quarantine from 10 days to five. This was specifically requested of the CDC by the CEO of Delta airlines and as we know, as we discussed, over the past weekend we had close to 10,000 flights either delayed or canceled because of staffing shortages with the airlines. So last week, even before this happened, Delta CEO and a bunch of other airline CEOs went to Congress, you know, said, hey, we gotta do something.

We don't have the staff. We can't make this happen. So rather than the CDC saying, you know what, President Biden, you need to put a vaccine mandate in place for the airlines. That would certainly reduce traffic and reduce the spread of the virus. Instead, they said, all right, fine. If you get exposed, you only have to wait five days before you can come out of isolation, before you come out of quarantine and potentially infect others. Now, of course, these new guidelines are for fully vaccinated people. So it's possible that it's not going to have an effect on anyone. But it's also possible if these individuals do not get tested again after five days, if they wait their five and then just assume everything's fine, they could easily still be carrying the virus. We know you can still get infected even if you're fully vaccinated. We know you can still be symptomatic if you're fully vaccinated.

But this government, this agency is so unwilling to let corporations suffer even a few days of lower profits that they're willing to put our health at risk for this. For 17 years here at Ring of Fire, we have talked about industry regulatory capture, right? The FDA, the EPA, the SEC, OSHA, all of these agencies where you get this revolving door of people from industry going to the agency, people from the agency going to the industry. Not until now have we had to include the CDC on that particular list, but here they are. It may not be a revolving door, but the corporations said jump and the CDC asked, how high? There was no pushback. There was no scientific reasoning that drove their decision. This is exactly what corporations asked them for. And it does drive me a little crazy because I've seen some folks on the left on Twitter saying, well, you know, we've been saying follow the science and if the CDC says, it's what we do, then it's what we do.

But they weren't following the science, folks. You can't tell me they were following the science when the CEOs a week ago, asked them to literally do what they did. Are you telling me these CEOs had better science than they did? No. It's profits. This is a profit driven decision by the CDC and they're not even the ones who get the profits. The corrupt CEOs do. The people that consistently put those profits over the health, safety and welfare of the American public. There are big steps that need to be taken to control this pandemic.