All of the country’s schoolchildren should be back in class by fall, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.
“We need to anticipate, by September 2021, that schools will be fully fledged in person and that all our children will be back in class,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the federal agency’s director, to ABC News.
Teachers, students and their parents must be willing to say goodbye to distance learning – regardless of whether children have been vaccinated or not, she said in an interview on Instagram Live.
“We can vaccinate teachers, we can test, there is so much we can do,” Walensky told the outlet.
Children over 12 should be eligible for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine in mid-May, pending Food and Drug Administration approval for that age group, she added.
Walensky said she expects Moderna’s coronavirus shot to follow soon, meaning two vaccines could have been approved for children 12 and older by the summer.
However, she expected that there would likely be no vaccination for people under 12 before the end of the year.
The comments came after Walensky announced at a White House briefing that the highly contagious British coronavirus variant has become the dominant strain in the country.
All three vaccines approved in the US – Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson – are believed to work against the B117 variant.
Walensky stressed to ABC that the COVID-19 strains spreading across the US reinforce its goal of inoculating a large portion of the population.
“My goal is to get people to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated,” she said.