Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is finally following the science on the low-risk of spreading COVID-19 in schools, now urging schools to reopen so children can learn in-person.
“The default position should be to try as best as possible within reason to keep the children in school or to get them back to school,” Fauci said on ABC’s “This Week.
“If you look at the data, the spread among children and from children is not really very big at all, not like one would have suspected,” he added. “So let’s try to get the kids back, but let’s try to mitigate the things that maintain and just push the kind of community spread that we’re trying to avoid.”
According to Fauci, bars and restaurants are some of the main propellers of community spread and should remain the focus of lockdowns.
“Close the bars and keep the schools open is what we really say,” Fauci continued.
Despite many experts and GOP lawmakers noting early on that data shows COVID-19 spread in schools is not a large problem, Fauci did not always support school reopenings.
In August, Fauci echoed the mainstream media’s concerns about coronavirus spread in schools and urged them to adopt new scheduling and virtual learning.
“There are some areas where the level may be low but not absent and maybe a little trouble so you might want to modify the schedule,” Fauci said. “A hybrid taught online, taught in-person, morning, afternoon, alternating days, whatever it is that the local authorities [say].”
“There may be some areas that the level of virus is so high that it would not be prudent to bring the children back to school,” he added. “So you can’t make one statement about bringing children back to school in this country. It depends on where you are. And we’ve got to be very flexible.”
This isn’t the first time Fauci has changed his position about COVID-19 health and safety guidelines.
During the first presidential debate, Joe Biden falsely claimed that Fauci had not changed his stance on the efficacy of mask-wearing.
“Masks make a big difference,” said Biden. “His [Trump’s] own CDC said if we just wore masks between now- if everybody wore masks and social distanced between now and January, we’d probably save up to a hundred thousand lives. It matters.”
In March, however, Fauci said in a “60 Minutes” interview that “people should not be walking around with masks.”
“There’s no reason people should be walking around with a mask,” Fauci said. “Wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not proven to be the perfect protection that people think that it is.”