Dr. Fauci on Mask Mandates and COVID-19 Case Count

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, CHIEF MEDICAL ADVISER TO THE U.S. PRESIDENT: Well, the best ways, Christiane, to protect children is to surround them to the extent possible with people who are eligible to be vaccinated who are vaccinated, that would be teachers, personnel in the school, and children from 12 and older, who are now eligible to be vaccinated to get them vaccinated. Now, obviously, younger children, not yet have been approved to get vaccinated, those we need to protect. And that’s the reason for our CDC coming up with the recommendation of having everybody wear a mask in school, even those who are vaccinated because we know so well, the detrimental effects of having children not be physically present in school. We know that from mental health issues, from social development issues, from a variety of other issues that is so important. So we’ve got to do both. We’ve got to get them back to school, but we’ve got to do it safely. You were mentioning issues about vaccination. It just as extraordinary when you have vaccines that have been proven through hundreds of millions of doses to be highly effective and safe, even against this very troublesome Delta variant. And yet we still have recalcitrance in some areas of the country of people who just don’t want to get vaccinated. It’s almost in explicable that that’s the case.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Indeed, and can I ask you because there’s also quite a lot of politics and health data being, you know, some of us, some people don’t quite know who’s saying what. So what do you see, what does the data show us about young children right now in those states in the south, which i seeing spikes? Are they getting sick? How sick for instance, the Florida Governor says he’s seeing no difference in proportions of admissions but otherwise there are other numbers that say that actually there’s spikes even amongst children, tell us and for parents as well.

FAUCI: Well, there are spikes among children for a couple of reasons. First of all, we’re dealing now Christiane with an entirely different virus in the sense of its ability to transmit highly efficiently. If you look at the alpha variant, the one that was originally in the U.K. and now was became dominant in the United States, that’s been completely pushed aside by the Delta variant, which has an extraordinarily high capability of transmitting from person to person. The level of virus in the nasal pharynx of people who have the Delta variant is much, much higher than that in the nasal pharynx of people who are originally infected with the alpha variant. So what you’re seeing is for everyone involved, there’s a greater chance if you’re unvaccinated to get infected.