All school children in the country should return to the classrooms by autumn, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday.
“We should anticipate in September 2021 that schools should have full rights in person and that all of our children should return to class,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the federal agency, told ABC News.
Teachers, students and their parents should be prepared to say goodbye to distance learning – whether children are vaccinated or not, she said in an interview on Instagram Live.
“We can vaccinate teachers, we can test, we can do so many things,” Walensky told reporters.
Children older than 12 should be eligible for the COVID-19 Pfizer vaccine by mid-May, pending authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for that age group, she added.
Walensky said he expects a Moderna coronavirus stroke to follow soon, meaning there could be two vaccines approved for children 12 and older by the summer.
However, she anticipated that there would probably be no inoculation for those under 12 before the end of the year.
The comments came after Walensky announced during a White House briefing that the highly contagious version of the coronavirus in the UK had become the dominant strain in the country.
It is believed that all three vaccines authorized in the US – Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson – work against variant B117.
Walensky told ABC that COVID-19 strains spread in the US strengthen its goal of having a large part of the population inoculated.
“My goal is for people to want to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated,” she said.