Anthony Stephen Fauci, Carole Johnson, Marcella Nunez-Smith, Rochelle Paula Walensky, and Jeffrey Dunston Zients

“ What I can tell you is most of the data that we have from schools have demonstrated that — and teachers specifically have demonstrated — that when disease comes into the school, it is not because of spread that is happening in the school, it is because the members who are attending school — teachers, staff, bus workers, and what not, bus drivers — have gotten disease from the community, not from one another in schools. ”

“ What I will say is there are opportunities for in-person learning in middle school and in high school through all of our layered — levels of community spread. The most limited, which encourages virtual learning when you’re in the red zone — the most community spread — does have opportunities for high schools to open — high schools and middle schools to open, if you can follow all the mitigation strategies. ”

“ This includes wearing a well-fitting mask that completely covers your nose and mouth; social distancing when around others who don’t live with you; avoiding travel, crowds, and poorly ventilated spaces; washing your hands often; and getting vaccinated when the vaccine is available to you.
It is more important than ever for us to do everything we can to decrease the spread in our communities by increasing our proven measures that prevent the spread of COVID-19. Fewer cases means fewer opportunities for the variant to spread and fewer opportunities for new variants to emerge. ”

“ Even though we don’t feel that every teacher needs to be vaccinated before you can open a school, that doesn’t take away from the fact that we strongly support the vaccination of teachers.
The second part of your question I think relates to what Dr. Walensky just said. When you talk about the danger of teachers getting infected, we know that when you talk about infection within the school setting, it’s what really is going on in the community that is the risk of infection to anyone, including teachers. ”

“ So the less community spread out there — the more we do to decrease the amount of disease in the community — there are well more opportunities for our children to get back to school, even in the middle and high school ranges.
MR. ZIENTS: I’ll just add that, you know, doing this — smaller class sizes, ensuring there are more school buses, having the equipment and the testing available — this costs money. And that’s why the passage of the American Rescue Plan — the $130 billion for schools — is so important to do. ”

“ One is, the science tells us that — we know as children age, as they get closer to teenage years, that they act, in this disease, similar to adults. That is they are increased transmiss- — — they are increased vectors, in terms of transmission, and that they are increasingly sicker compared to younger kids — get increasingly sicker.So we have to be a little bit more cautious with our high school kids because they act differently from kids who are really young. ”

“ These are places that typically don’t have the resources or the bandwidth to build partnerships with academic or commercial testing labs, and that’s where the government can be a facilitator. We’ll identify existing testing capacity, match it to an area of need, and support and fund that testing.
Second, we’ll invest almost $200 million to rapidly expand genomic sequencing to identify, track, and stop the COVID-19 variants that we’ve all heard and talked much about. Essentially, genomic sequencing is the process that tells us which COVID variants are in the country. ”

“ Walensky on the data question and the genomic sequencing. DR. WALENSKY: Yeah, thank you for the question. You know, right now we have about 54 million Americans who have had — received — or 54 million shots that have been given. About 5 percent of Americans have been vaccinated twice.And so what I would say is we’re not at the place where we believe that the current level of vaccination is what is driving down the current level of disease. We believe that much of the surge of disease happened related to the holidays, related to travel. ”

“ Consistently and correctly wearing a mask is one of the most effective tools we have to stop the spread of COVID-19. For reasons supported by science, comfort, cost, and practicality, the CDC does not recommend routine use of N95 respirators for protection against COVID-19 by the general public. Abundant scientific laboratory data, epidemiologic investigations, and large population-level analyses demonstrate that masks now available to the general public are effective and are working. ”

“ You know, many vaccination sites do operate 24/7, you know, through the weekends, through the evenings. And we want to make sure that as we’ve lost some time in some states for people to get needles in arms, that our partners do all they can to make up that lost ground, consistent with distributing the vaccine to people as efficiently and equitably as possible. ”

“ You know, from Houston, to Detroit, L.A., to Atlanta — in coordination with community leaders in these areas, we have the ability to reach 38 percent of the black community, 42 percent of the Hispanic/Latino community, and 41 percent of the Asian community in the country. And we also have reached into rural populations. So with regard to these therapies in particular, we will continue to keep you updated.
And then third, we have been hard at work developing robust efforts in COVID-19 testing as well. ”

“ High school kids are harder to cohort. One of our key mitigation strategies is to try and have small cohorts of kids, and it’s very hard to cohort high school kids and to convey and rely on that real high school experience of getting, you know, different classes and different levels of classes. ”

“ We need to test broadly and rapidly to turn the tide of this pandemic. But we still don’t have enough testing and we don’t have enough testing in all the places it needs to be.
Today, we’re taking a critical step along that path. Thanks to Pre- — President Biden’s leadership and his commitment to testing, we’re announcing that the federal government will invest $1.6 billion in three key areas: supporting testing in schools and underserved populations, increasing genomic sequencing, and manufacturing critical testing supplies. ”

“ If, in fact, you assume that decreased viral load is due — will result in a decreased transmission, when you follow breakthrough infections in the individuals in Israel who had been vaccinated, compared to infections in individuals who were not, there was a markedly diminished viral load in those individuals who were vaccinated but had a breakthrough infection, compared to individuals who were not. ”

“ As you can see in our weekly vaccination progress report, our seven-day average daily dose administered is now 1.7 million average daily shots per day, up from 1.1 million only four weeks ago. Our seven-day daily average of 1.7 million compares to an average of 892,000 the week before President Biden took office. ”

“ We know that millions of Americans have lost their health insurance as a result of this pandemic. This week, the administration opened a Special Enrollment Period to get more people covered. Between now and May 15th, Americans can go to Healthcare.gov and enroll in quality, affordable healthcare. ”

“ In addition, we’re doubling the weekly vaccine supply to local pharmacies from 1 million to 2 million doses. And thanks to the President’s leadership, we’re on track to have enough vaccine supply for 300 million Americans by the end of July. ”

“ So our administration will invest $815 million in building and surging domestic manufacturing capacity of these critical testing supplies. We need to build — to build the capacity to produce these materials or we’ll continue to face shortages that will sidetrack our work in expanding access to testing. ”

“ That really is rather impractical to make that a sine qua non of opening the schools.At the same time that we say that, we do say and we feel strongly that we should try as best as we possibly can to vaccinate teachers. ”