Fauci Says It’s a ‘Good Idea’ to Mandate COVID-19 Vaccines for School Children

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 11, 2021. Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool via AP

Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president, says that mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations for children attending school are a “good idea.”

“I believe that mandating vaccines for children to appear in school is a good idea. We’ve done this for decades and decades, requiring polio, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis. So this would not be something new, requiring vaccinations for children to come to school,” Fauci said on Aug. 29 on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

A number of research papers over the course of the pandemic have revealed that children appear to be the least likely age group affected by the CCP virus, which causes COVID-19, and those papers have shown that serious illness or death is very rare among children under the age of 18.

Fauci, during an interview with ABC on Aug. 29, said he hopes the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will approve the vaccine for children under the age of 12.

“The data has been collected, and we should have enough data by, I would say, the end of September, middle to end of September, early October, so that those data can then be presented to the FDA to examine for the risk-benefit ratio of safety and effectiveness,” he said.

A study published in June MedRxiv found that in England, COVID-19 caused 25 deaths among children younger than 18 between March 2020 and February 2021. And “long-COVID” cases—in which symptoms last longer than four weeks—among children are also quite rare, according to a study published earlier in August in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health.

“We know from other studies that many children who catch coronavirus don’t show any symptoms at all; and it will be reassuring for families to know that those children who do fall ill with COVID-19 are unlikely to suffer prolonged effects,” senior author Emma Duncan said in a statement released by King’s College London. “However, our research confirms that a small number do have a long illness duration with COVID-19, though these children too usually recover with time.”

But a study published on Aug. 27 in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report found that a teacher who wasn’t vaccinated may have started a COVID-19 outbreak at a school in Marin County, California. Some federal officials, including those with the CDC, have recently cited this study before imposing mask mandates in schools.

“In Northern California, we saw that the absence of optimal, multi-layer protection can result in the spread of COVID in this classroom and beyond,” said CDC Director Rochelle Walensky several days ago.

If schools mandate vaccines for children, it will likely draw pushback from parents. Protests have occurred across the United States over masking mandates for kids, including a recent demonstration in Los Angeles County.