All school children in the country should return to classrooms in the fall, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.
“We should anticipate, in September 2021, that schools should be in their own right in person and all our children return to the classroom,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the federal agency.
Teachers, students and their parents should be prepared to say goodbye to remote learning, regardless of whether children are vaccinated or not, he said in an interview on Instagram Live.
“We can vaccinate teachers, we can test, there’s a lot we can do,” Walensky told the network.
Children over the age of 12 should be eligible for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in mid-May, pending authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for this age group, he added. .
Walensky said he expects Moderna’s coronavirus shooting to occur soon, meaning there would be two approved vaccines for children 12 and older in the summer.
However, he anticipated that there would probably be no inoculation for children under 12 before the end of the year.
The comments came after Walensky announced during a White House briefing that the highly contagious variant of the UK coronavirus has become the country’s dominant strain.
The three vaccines authorized in the United States (Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson) are believed to work against variant B117.
Walensky stressed to ABC that COVID-19 strains spreading across the United States reinforce their goal of inoculating a large portion of the population.
“My goal is for people to want to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated,” he said.