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Amid growing fears that children are now both victims and vectors of the latest wave of Covid-19 variants, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins reported on Sunday that an increasing number of children are falling. sick in the United States.
His comments also came as one of America’s largest teachers’ unions appeared to change its stance on mandatory vaccinations for teachers.
With around 90 million U.S. adults unvaccinated and unauthorized vaccines for 12 years and under, Collins told ABC News This Week with George Stephanopoulos that “the greatest number of children to date in the entire pandemic is currently in the hospital, 1,450 children in the Covid-19 hospital.
Collins acknowledged that the data on pediatric infections was incomplete, but said he was “hearing from pediatricians worrying that this time the children who are in the hospital are both more and more. seriously ill ”.
Collins’ comments came as new cases of Covid-19 in the United States have rebounded to more than 100,000 a day on average, returning to winter surge levels six months ago. But health officials focus on children adds urgency to the situation as America’s education system nears the start of the school year.
Collins said his advice for parents of school-aged children is to “think of masks the way they should be thought.”
He added: “This is not a political declaration or an attack on your freedoms. It is a medical device that saves lives. And asking kids to wear a mask is uncomfortable, but, you know, kids are pretty resilient. We know that children under 12 are susceptible to infection and if we don’t have masks in schools, this virus will spread more widely. “
The alternative, he said, “will likely lead to epidemics in schools and children will have to go back to distance learning, which we really want to prevent.”
Warning that virtual learning that children have been through for over a year is “really bad for their development,” Collins insisted that “we should do everything we can to make sure they can get back to class. . And the best way to do that is to make sure the masks are worn by the students, by the staff, by everyone. “
The president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, went further, calling for vaccination mandates for teachers. “For the sake of personal conscience, I think we need to work with our employers, not oppose them, on immunization mandates,” she told NBC’s Meet The Press.
Weingarten’s comments are a step up from the union’s earlier position in which it maintained that teachers should be prioritized for vaccines, but without supporting a mandate. The change was previewed last week when Weingarten said she would consider supporting immunization mandates to keep students and staff safe and schools open.
Dr.Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, also echoed Weingarten’s comments on Sunday, saying the best way to protect children from the virus is to “surround them with those who can be vaccinated, whoever they are. they are. Teachers, school staff, anyone, get them vaccinated.
Former FDA Commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb also weighed in on the concerns, saying schools are not “inherently safe” from the Delta variant and that society “cannot expect the same result that we have. seen earlier in relation to schools where we have been largely able to control large epidemics in schools with a different set of behaviors. “
“The challenge right now is that the infection will start to collide with the opening of the school. And we’ve seen that schools can become sources of community transmission when you’re dealing with more transmissible strains, ”Gottleib told CBS’s Face the Nation.
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