Gottlieb: ‘Probable’ that high schoolers will get coronavirus vaccines this year

Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner Scott Gottlieb on Sunday said that it is “probable” that high school students will receive the coronavirus vaccine sometime this year.

While appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” host Margaret Brennan asked Gottlieb what he made of fellow health experts who have said that children will likely not receive the coronavirus vaccine until 2022. The nation’s leading infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci. has said that the earliest that grade school children could get the vaccine will likely be sometime in early 2022, while high schoolers may be eligible later this year.

Gottlieb agreed that it was “very unlikely” that grade school children will be eligible to receive the coronavirus vaccine this year, saying there were studies that needed to be conducted before that step was taken. However, he added that high schoolers may be eligible toward the end of 2021.

“I think it’s probable that we will be vaccinating high school kids at some point this year,” Gottlieb said. “One of the vaccines, the Pfizer vaccine — I’m on board of that company — is already approved down at 16. There’s studies underway with all the vaccines looking at younger age populations with their vaccines and so I think we’ll be in a position to be ready to vaccinate a high school age population sometime this fall.”

When will elementary school students be vaccinated? Likely not until 2022, @ScottGottliebMD tells @margbrennan

Gottlieb agrees with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s assessment that high school students will likely get vaccinated beginning this fall. pic.twitter.com/CtTW8aOCEw

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) March 7, 2021

Brennan also asked Gottlieb for his thoughts on what vaccinated people would be able to do, noting that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has yet to release guidance for them.

“People are going to want to start to do things, they’re going to want to start to go out more and we need to take that into consideration in terms of how we’re putting out guidance,” Gottlieb said.