Still, some vaccinated people can’t help but feel a bit like “suckers,” Chapman said. Many people covered up dutifully while awaiting their shots, then tossed their masks aside because the government said they could—only to reel from the whiplash of last week’s switcheroo. The guidelines for the unvaccinated (that is, keep masking) haven’t changed, while the immunized are once again being called upon to act. “Asking people to mask up again is triggering a lot of emotional stuff,” Lindsey Leininger, a public-health-policy expert at Dartmouth, told me. “You can’t tell people that those feelings are invalid.”

Masking, at least at pandemic levels, also doesn’t feel sustainable in the long term. Although vaccines confer protection against disease that’s expected to last for many months, if not years, with one or two brief jabs, masks require constant reinvestment and vigilance. They falter when we wear them incorrectly; they vary immensely in quality; they can tear or fall apart or fall off; they can be forgotten at home. “It’s on you to do it right every time,” Chapman told me. “People love the set-it-and-forget-it approach, where you only have to intervene once. Enduring behavior change is often a very thorny problem.”

“Keep on masking” also feels like a pretty sharp departure from the initial selling points for face coverings. These accessories were meant to be deployed until something better came along, and the most unpalatable aspect of the CDC’s new mask ask might be the uncertainty it comes with. This time, there’s no well-signed off-ramp. The vaccines are already here; they’ve already been made available to most Americans. We hit the milestones we laid out and still feel stuck.