White House Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci said Sunday that he would support a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for school students due to the highly contagious delta variant that has resulted in a surge of coronavirus cases across the country.
"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 Sunday in on CNN’s "State of the Union."
“I believe that mandating vaccines for children to appear in school is a good idea,” Dr. Anthony Fauci says about Covid-19 vaccines.
— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) August 29, 2021
“We’ve done this for decades and decades, requiring polio, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis. So this would not be something new” #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/5zWmCpaPoh
Fauci’s comments come a week after the Food and Drug Administration granted approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine. This approval prompted more than 100 congressional lawmakers last week to call on the FDA to give initial authorization of vaccines for children under 12 as soon as possible.
Fauci, in a different interview on ABC’s "This Week," said that he hopes the FDA will act quickly to approve the jab for children under 12-years-old.
"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," Fauci said.
