All the school children of the country must be back in the classroom by autumn, the head of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday.
“We should expect that in September 2021 there should be personally full-fledged schools and all our children in the classroom,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the federal agency, told ABC News.
Teachers, students and their parents must be prepared to say goodbye to distance education – regardless of whether children are vaccinated or not, she said in an interview on Instagram Live.
“We can vaccinate teachers, we can test, there is so much we can do,” Walensky said.
Children older than 12 should be eligible for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine by mid-May, pending approval from the Food and Drug Administration for that age group, she added.
Walensky said she expects Moderna’s coronavirus shot to follow soon, meaning there will be two vaccines for children 12 years and older by the summer.
However, she expected that there would probably not be a vaccination for children under 12 before the end of the year.
The comment comes after Walensky announced during an information session in the White House that the highly contagious variant of the British coronavirus had become the dominant strain in the country.
All three vaccines authorized in the US – Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson – apparently work against the B117 variant.
Walensky stresses ABC that the COVID-19 tribes that are spreading across the U.S. are reinforcing its goal of getting a large portion of the population vaccinated.
“My goal is for people to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated,” she said.