Fauci: high school students probably vaccinated against COVID-19 in the fall

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

“When we get to the second semester, we will be very, very comfortable with that,” said President Joe Biden’s chief medical consultant at a virtual event with Tufts University on Monday afternoon. (Fauci has a personal connection to the local college: he regularly visited his close friend and mentor, Dr. Sheldon Wolff, who chaired the medical department at Tufts Medical School until his death in 1994.)

Younger children, however, are unlikely to be able to be safely immunized until the first quarter of 2022, said Fauci. Although children will have to wait to receive vaccines, they will be able to attend school safely much sooner, he noted.

“Hopefully, the level of infection will drop to such an extent that all children will be back to school within a reasonable period of time, hopefully when we get to the fall semester and perhaps even the spring semester ahead,” he said.

The comments reinforce their revised perspective on the youth immunization schedule. Fauci told ProPublica in early February that elementary school children could be vaccinated by September, but he moderated that more optimistic outlook at a White House press conference a few weeks later.

But children are at a particularly low risk with regard to their own health when contracting COVID-19. Although they may be infected, most have no symptoms or only mild symptoms and are much less likely to be hospitalized or die of the virus. Still, children can become very sick with the coronavirus: more than 2,000 children under the age of 18 have been hospitalized and more than 200 have died in the United States.

Some older high school students are already allowed to get the vaccine. The Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are authorized only for people over 18, but Pfizer is allowed for people over 16. Vaccine trials for children and adolescents have accelerated in recent weeks, including ongoing trials by Pfizer and Moderna for children under 12 and over.

Fauci also reflected on how the pandemic has evolved since national strikes began in earnest a year ago this week.

“At that time, I thought, in the worst case scenario, we would have a terrible rest in the winter, and then, when we got into the hot weather in the summer, things would calm down a little,” he said. “I never would have thought that the summer peak would be greater than the previous winter. I would never have thought that the economy would have ended, not just in the United States, but globally.

He said the United States experienced a “double hit” because it endured the outbreak in the midst of an incredibly divisive period in the twilight of Donald Trump’s term as president.

“Unfortunately for us, I feel bad especially for the youngest, because they may think it is always like that,” said Fauci. “It is not. There were times when [were] political differences, but not so big 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 when you have the common enemy, the only way to attack that common enemy is when everyone comes together. You don’t want to get too melodramatic about it, but the metaphor is that it’s a war. It’s like we’re at war, and the army doesn’t particularly like the navy, and they’re doing different things because of specific ideologies that they have, instead of saying, ‘By the way, we have to defend the country together, let’s do it together.'”