He is lifting restrictions, despite what red is trying to do to defend him.
From the beginning of this, Newsom has been a disaster. He has jerked people around, offered barely any assistance, and has broken his own rules before. When businesses were finally opening back up and everyone worked hard to meet all the standards, he literally said "Oh wait, you have to close back down in four days." He's just a goon and everyone has a right to be upset at him because he's just jerking people around and nothing he does makes sense.
He went on TV to brag about how much science there is and how great his state is doing now getting under control. Covid is still worse than it's ever been in California. The numbers are FINALLY starting to go down, but they're still horrifically bad and worse than they were before this latest lockdown. There are ICUs STILL at 100% capacity right now. And the tiered system is bad because people just go over to neighboring counties and it fucks everything else all over again. We still need this lockdown because things are still going up.
And you can say "Well at least we're getting the vaccine rolling!" But California is number 50 out of 50 states in terms of effectiveness in getting the vaccine out. He's just completely failed at getting people vaccines in this state, so we're even more behind than everyone else.
And on top of all of that, California has its own strain of Covid that is going around, meaning MORE people are likely to get this new strand of it! Things are so bad here we literally have a brand new strand of Covid to deal with.
And he's loosening the restriction for this trash tiered system that will not be successful. Gavin Newsom is an asshole. And I know red is saying "Well all these right wingers", no. Literally everyone on both sides are saying this is a terrible call. Right wingers will say whatever, but the science behind this makes no sense to lift a full state-wide lockdown right now. The right wing started to do a recall of this schmuck that got millions of signatures from people in California, which is why he's doing this. This is just going to lead to more deaths and anyone who is trying to defend this just buying into the nonsense of a guy who hasn't had a sense at all throughout this whole thing.
The vaccine rollout, from what I've read is actually...fine. We're not doing terrific at it, but the supply constraint is such that we are probably going to run out of vaccines soon regardless at current pace. There was also a conservative approach taken due to lack of clarity on whether there was enough for second doses. We're also no longer last (#44, woo).
Not gonna defend the French Laundry stuff (what a stupid thing to do), but I imagine the removal of lockdown is a response to the more conservative parts of state basically rebelling against it. Unfortunately there's a lot of parts of CA that are full of COVID deniers/antimaskers, and as it turns out the police in those parts don't really care to do much about it. It feels mostly like a "fuck it, leave it to the counties then" because realistically nothing will change much from this. The counties full of antimaskers will continue to be assholes regardless of whether it's sanctioned or not.