Fauci: High school students will likely be vaccinated against COVID-19 by fall

Although no COVID-19 vaccine is yet authorized for children under the age of 16, Dr Anthony Fauci has said he expects high school students to be vaccinated by the start of the next school year. .

“By the time we get into the fall semester, we’ll be feeling very, very comfortable about it,” President Chief Medical Advisor Joe Biden said at a virtual event with Tufts University Monday afternoon. (Fauci has a personal connection to the local college: he regularly visited his close friend and mentor, Dr Sheldon Wolff, who chaired the Department of Medicine at Tufts Medical School until his death in 1994.)

Young children, however, are unlikely to be able to get the vaccine safely until the first quarter of 2022, Fauci said. Although children will have to wait to get vaccinated, they will be able to go to school safely much sooner, he noted.

“Hopefully the infection level will drop so that all the kids will be back to school in a reasonable time, hopefully by the time we get into the fall term and maybe even the fall term. spring term to come, ”he said.

The comments reinforce his revised perspective on the youth immunization schedule. Fauci told ProPublica in early February that elementary-aged children might be able to get vaccinated by September, but he tempered that more optimistic forecast during a White House press briefing weeks later. .

But children are at particularly low risk for their own health when they contract COVID-19. Although they can be infected, most have no or only mild symptoms and are orders of magnitude less likely to be hospitalized or die from the virus. Yet children can be very sick from the coronavirus: more than 2,000 children under the age of 18 have been hospitalized and more than 200 have died in the United States.

Some older high school students are already allowed to be vaccinated. Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are only approved for people 18 years of age and older, but Pfizer is approved for people 16 years of age and older. Vaccine trials for children and adolescents have gained momentum in recent weeks, including ongoing trials of Pfizer and Moderna for minors 12 and older.

Fauci also reflected on how the pandemic has evolved since the nationwide shutdowns in earnest began a year ago this week.

“At that point, I thought that at worst we would have a bad rest of the winter, and then, as we had to get into the hot summer weather, things would calm down a bit,” he said. he declared. “I never thought that the summer thrust would be higher than the previous winter. I never would have thought that the economy would have been shut down, not only in the United States, but around the world.

He said the United States had suffered a “double whammy” because it suffered the epidemic amid an incredibly contentious period in the twilight of Donald Trump’s tenure as president.

“Unfortunately for us I feel bad especially for the younger ones because they may think it’s always like that,” said Fauci. “This is not the case. There were times when [were] political differences, but not such a division that different groups hated each other.

“It makes it very difficult to do something together – The common enemy is the virus, and when you have the common enemy, the only way to attack that common enemy is when everyone comes together. You don’t want to be too melodramatic about it, but the metaphor is that it’s a war. It’s like we’re at war, and the military doesn’t particularly like the navy, and they do things differently because of the particular ideologies they have, instead of saying, ‘By the way, we have to defend the country together, let’s do it together. ‘”