Millions of school-aged children will be able to return to in-person schooling earlier, easing the pressure on millions of parents who are still caring for their children at home.
According to Anthony Fauci, the White House's top pandemic advisor, the United States could begin vaccinating older children against Covid-19 in the fall and younger children by year's end or early 2022.
Millions of school-aged children will be able to return to in-person schooling earlier, easing the pressure on millions of parents who are still caring for their children at home.
The timing of school reopenings has been fiercely debated, with some private and religious schools opening ahead of public schools and teachers in some areas opposing any early return.
However, the US Food and Drug Administration's decision on Saturday to give emergency use authorization to a new single-dose vaccine from Johnson & Johnson has raised the probability of earlier reopenings.
On ABC's "This Week," Fauci said, "We now have three very efficacious vaccines."
For the time being, none of the three licensed vaccines in the United States (which also include Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna) has been approved for children under the age of 16, but studies on children are ongoing.
High school students in the United States (roughly ages 14-18) should be able to get the vaccine "sometime this fall," according to Fauci on NBC's "Meet the Press."
"I'm not sure it'll be on the first day of school, but it'll be pretty similar," he said.
Since data on the vaccines' safety and effectiveness for children in elementary or middle school — generally aged five to thirteen in the United States — is still being collected, "realistically" they will not be able to access the vaccine before late 2021 or early 2022, according to Fauci.
Former President Donald Trump, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida on Sunday evening, encouraged the new administration to reopen schools.
"On behalf of America's mothers, husbands, and children, I urge Joe Biden to open the schools as soon as possible," Trump said.
Although the federal government issues public health guidelines, it is largely up to locally elected school boards, not the president, to decide when to reopen classrooms.
Children and adolescents are less likely to be infected with the virus than adults, and community transmission has not been linked to in-person learning in schools.
According to the New York Times, with Covid-19 still ravaging the United States, the world's worst-affected country, roughly half of students are currently attending school in person.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new recommendations earlier this month urging schools to reopen as soon as possible and safely.
Universal masking, hand-washing, and disinfection, as well as touch tracing, are both stressed throughout the technique.
The CDC advises that teachers and workers get vaccinated as soon as supplies are available and that different approaches should be taken depending on the level of community transmission in a given region.
(This news was not edited by staff and is published from a syndicated feed, except for the headline.)
