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

Although there is still no COVID-19 vaccine for children under 16, dr. Anthony Fauci said he expects high school students to be vaccinated by the next school year.

“By the fall, we will feel very, very comfortable,” President Joe Biden, chief medical adviser, said Monday during a virtual event with Tufts University. (Fauci has a personal connection with the local college: he regularly visits his good friend and mentor Dr. Sheldon Wolff, who was chairman of the medicine department at Tufts Medical School until his death in 1994.)

However, younger children will probably only be able to be vaccinated safely in the first quarter of 2022, Fauci said. Although children will have to wait to get vaccinated, they can go to school much sooner, he noted.

“Hopefully the level of infection will drop to such an extent that all children will be back in school within a reasonable period of time, hopefully by the autumn period and maybe even in the spring term,” he said.

The commentary reinforces his revised perspective on the timeline for vaccination of juveniles. Fauci told ProPublica in early February that children of lower age could possibly get vaccinated by September, but he tested the more optimistic forecast at a press conference in the White House.

But children are at low risk when it comes to their own health when it comes to COVID-19. Although they can become infected, most experience no symptoms or only mild symptoms and are less likely to be hospitalized or die from the virus. Yet children can become very ill with the coronavirus: more than 2,000 children under the age of 18 have been hospitalized and more than 200 are dying from it in the United States.

Some older high school students are already authorized to get a vaccine. The Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are only allowed for people 18 and older, but Pfizer’s are allowed for people from 16 years of age. Vaccination trials for children and teens have accelerated in recent weeks, including ongoing trials of Pfizer and Moderna for minors aged 12 and older.

Fauci also reflected on how the pandemic has developed since the national shutdown began in earnest a week ago.

“At the time, I thought at worst we would have a bad winter rest, and when we get into the hot weather in the summer, things will get a little calmer,” he said. ‘I would never have thought that the summer boom would be higher than the previous winter. I would never have imagined that the economy would be closed not only in the United States but also worldwide.

He said the US was experiencing a ‘double blow’ because it had the outbreak amid an incredibly divisive period in the twilight of Donald Trump’s term as president.

“Unfortunately, we feel bad for the younger people in particular, because they may think it’s always the way it is,” Fauci said. “It’s not. There were times that there [were] political differences, but not so great a division that the different groups hated each other.

‘It makes it very difficult to do something together. The common enemy is the virus, and if you have the common enemy, the only way you can attack the common enemy is when everyone pulls together. You do not want to get too melodramatic about it, but the metaphor is that it is a war. It’s like we’re at war, and the army does not like the navy, and they do things differently because of specific ideologies they have, instead of saying, ‘By the way, we have to defend the country together, let’s do it together. ”