Delta variant: record in the United States of children hospitalized by covid | Alarm due to high percentage of anti-vaccines

United States counts 1,450 children hospitalized with covid-19, the highest number to date in the pandemic, warned this Sunday the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH, in English), Francis Collins.

In an interview with the channel ABC News, Collins felt that the country should never have come to where it is, with a repels cases of coronavirus caused by the Delta variant.

“We have vaccines that we know are very effective and safe, and yet half the country is still not fully immunized,” complained the official. And he stressed that “the United States pays” a terrible price “before the rapid increase in cases, especially in unvaccinated people.

“Almost all of the deaths are from unvaccinated people. And now it’s younger people, including children,” he added.

Although Collins said they did not have “hard data” to suggest the Delta is more serious for miners, he did admit he was listening to them. pediatricians worry because in this new peak of contagion of the disease “the children who are in the hospital are more numerous and are more seriously ill”.

Back to school

Asked about the next school year, the specialist asked parents to consider the masks as a “saving medical device” and not as a “political declaration or an attack on their freedoms”, and believed that its use will prevent epidemics that force a return to distance learning.

For her part, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Randi Weingarten, said that 90 percent of the teachers who make up this union were vaccinated and admitted that they plan to reconsider their policy of “voluntary vaccination” of their members.

“I believe that circumstances have changed and that vaccination is a community responsibility,” he said and confessed that it “weighs a lot” that children under 12 cannot yet be vaccinated.

“I believe that the combination of vaccines and masks will protect our youngest children“, he said, although he stressed that for this it is also important to work with parents.

Vaccine not mandatory, for now

In the same program, the principal epidemiologist of the government of the United States, Antoine Fauci, reiterated that there will be no federal mandate to require vaccination against covid-19.

However, he estimated that if the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fully approved the vaccines now authorized for emergency use – something he said could happen “in the next few weeks” – to many companies and private entities they could announce vaccination warrants.