This isn’t the “precautionary principle” or whatever the fuck, it’s just incorrectly assessing risks. Which should literally be the CDCs job.

Very much not--in fact, it's pretty strongly counter to the precautionary principle, at least under any reasonable formulation of the PP. There are lots of different ways of formulating it, but so-called "strong" PP formulations are pretty much universally accepted as being self-undermining and resulting in no effective action ever. Something like a prohibitory approach (e.g., a formulation like "activities that present an uncertain potential for significant harm should be prohibited unless the proponent of the activity shows that it presents no appreciable risk of harm") are insane and unworkable: following something like that, we'd basically never do anything at all, as it's pretty much impossible to show that any new technology or policy presents "no appreciable risk of harm." Weak PP formulations are much more tenable, and basically flip the logic of the principle around. They emphasize that a lack of perfect information about risks shouldn't preclude action, especially if that action is to prevent a known (or very strongly suspected) catastrophic outcome. That sort of logic applies equally well to COVID vaccines as to climate change.

A reasonable formulation of the PP looks like this. We should make the precautionary choice to avoid potentially hazardous activities when three conditions are met: (1) we have a reasonably clear understanding of the range of harmful outcomes that could occur but highly inadequate information about their probabilities; (2) we care fairly little about the potential gains to be made by choosing the hazardous activity; and (3) the potential harms associated with the hazardous activity are unacceptable.

Dragging our feet on the COVID vaccines arguably violates all three of these conditions, but it indisputably violates (2): we have very good reason to care about the harms associated with not vaccinating people for COVID, especially around the holiday travel season. The conservative culture of science (and to some extent public health) is great when it comes to abstract theory change, but right now it's getting people killed.