High school students could receive a coronavirus vaccination by this coming fall semester and elementary school students by the first quarter of next year, Dr. Anthony Fauci projected on Sunday, citing ongoing tests on the vaccines’ ability to safely protect children.
“Maybe not the very first day,” Fauci said of high school students’ vaccine eligibility on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” “but certainly in the early part of the fall for that fall educational term.”
Currently, the COVID-19 vaccines from Johnson & Johnson and Moderna are approved for those 18 and older, while Pfizer’s vaccine is cleared for those as young as 16.
Pfizer and Moderna have completed enrollment for vaccine studies on children ages 12 and older, with the results of those studies potentially released this summer. Both companies expect to start studies with children ages 11 and younger later this year, The Associated Press reported.
At the same time, Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious diseases expert, urged Americans to not let their guard down and to keep practicing social distancing and wearing a mask because daily cases are likely to rise again before we reach herd immunity.
New daily case counts have plateaued at 60,000 to 70,000 cases after several weeks of dropping, he said. History has shown that when case counts plateau at high levels, they don’t start falling next ― they rise. Europe’s current conditions are also an indicator that a potential case surge lies on America’s horizon, he said.
“They’re usually a couple weeks ahead of us in these patterns,” Fauci said of COVID-19 counts in European countries. “They were coming down too, then they plateaued, and over the last week or so they’ve had about a 9% increase in cases.”
Fauci urged, “We’re going in the right direction. We just need to hang in there a bit longer.”
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