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FAUCI: You know, Hugh, that is a difficult situation, because you really do have to balance the risk of transmission versus the real risk, and I’m not putting down what you’re saying. It’s not comfortable, obviously, for children to wear masks, particularly the younger children. But you know, what we’re starting to see, Hugh, and I think it’s going to unfold even more as the weeks go by, that this virus not only is so extraordinarily transmissible, but we’re starting to see pediatric hospitals get more and more younger people and kids not only numerically, but what seems to be more severe disease. Now we’re tracking that, the CDC is tracking that really very carefully, so it’s going to be a balance that we would feel very badly if we all of a sudden said okay, kids, don’t wear masks, then you find out retrospectively that this virus in a very, very strange and unusually way is really hitting kids really hard. That’s the thing. Nobody feels comfortable at all about having children be put in a situation where it might ultimately, the way some people study, have some impact on them. But hopefully, this will be a temporary thing, temporary enough that it doesn’t have any lasting negative impact on them. And getting back to what you and I both agree very much on, Hugh, is that the way to get out of all of this is to just get as many people vaccinated as quickly as we possibly can. If we could do that, the level of virus in the community would be so low that we wouldn’t be talking about things like masking indoors even for vaccinated people and masking in school.
