No Masks Required, White House Tells Vaccinated Staffers

White House staffers are no longer required to wear a mask on the grounds if they have been vaccinated, CNN reported.

On Thursday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidance declaring that people fully vaccinated against COVID-19 do not need to wear masks or practice social distancing indoors or outdoors, except under special circumstances.

The CDC’s decision came after a number of events emerged, the CDC director said Thursday.

''Several things have happened in the last two weeks,'' Dr. Rochelle Walensky told a White House COVID-19 briefing. ''In the last two weeks, the cases in this country have dropped by a third. In the last two weeks, we've had increasingly available vaccine, and we now have available and eligible people between the ages of 12 and 15; and we have had a coalescence of more science that has emerged just in the last week,'' she added.

''The science has been three areas. One is the effectiveness of the vaccines in general and in a real-world population. One is the effectiveness against variants, which was just published last week, and then the effectiveness in preventing transmissibility,'' all of which contributed to the CDC’s mask removal decision.

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