We mandate all sorts of vaccinations as a condition of schooling, he notes. Why wouldn’t we mandate the COVID vaccine too?

Simple: Because it’s new and the country is drowning in anti-vax propaganda at the moment, much of which has a partisan/populist logic to it that hardens people’s resolve. As dug in as some adults have been against getting their shots, they’ll be that much more dug in once you trigger their parental instincts by raising the possibility of jabbing their kids

A few weeks ago the AP polled this question and found a revealing divergence. Among all American adults, 55 percent supported school vaccine mandates for kids 12 and older, the group that’s eligible for vaccination. But when they polled parents specifically, they found just 42 percent in favor. A KFF poll of parents also found vaccine mandates in the minority position:

Parents were much more willing to have their kids required to wear masks, a weak mitigation measure, than have them required to get their shots, a much stronger one. Why? KFF asked and found that fully 88 percent said “not enough is known about the long-term effects of the COVID-19 vaccine in children.” (Never mind that the long-term effects from being infected with COVID are likely to be worse.) Asked whether they’ll rush out and get their kids immunized once they’re eligible, just a quarter or so of parents said yes:

As of today, a mere 36 percent of kids aged 12-15 are fully vaccinated. All of that being so, if a school takes Fauci’s advice and mandates vaccinations for students, how many nervous parents will pull their children out and go shopping for an education that doesn’t require immunization?

On the other hand, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of a little institutional pressure. KFF found that twice as many parents (62 percent) whose children attend a school that encourages vaccination say their kids are vaccinated than parents (30 percent) whose children’s school doesn’t encourage it. The scary data about how transmissible the Delta variant is may also start shifting opinion towards vaccinating kids, just as it’s led more adults to get their shots recently. According to Time mag, there are already more kids hospitalized for COVID after six weeks of Delta, before fall classes have really gotten going, than there were at the height of the winter wave this past January:

This report of cases out of Tampa is mind-boggling:

Public school systems in Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco and Hernando counties reported 5,334 cases of the virus this past week among students and staff — far outpacing the 2,153 cases they reported the previous week.

By Friday, the number of cases among the four districts totaled 10,387 since classes began on Aug. 10 and 11. Last school year, it took until Feb. 20 to reach that number.

The load is testing school districts’ ability to keep their data current.

The frightening stories about pediatric hospitals filling up may goose some reluctant parents into getting their teenagers jabbed ASAP. But for the under-12s who are still months away from having the FDA authorize the shot for them, we’re left with an ominous question: Realistically, what percentage of American pre-teens will get infected with Delta before the vaccine becomes available in November or thereabouts? Fifty percent? Seventy percent? More?

Per the Tampa data, of what use will this vaccine be when it arrives considering that classrooms across the country seem destined to turn into informal “pox parties” this fall?

Ironically the FDA seems to have made the same mistake that Biden and the Pentagon made with Afghanistan, believing that it had more time to mount a response than it really did. Before Delta, the agency probably expected there’d be some negligible number of infections during September and October, likely not even as many as there were last year since so many adults around children had been vaccinated now. As long as the shots for kids were authorized by November, that would give parents time to get them jabbed before the worst of the winter wave. Instead Delta emerged this summer and began racing across the country the way the Taliban raced towards Kabul. In both cases we got caught by surprise and now there’s no Plan B. Allied Afghan allies will be left behind because we didn’t have time to get them out and American schoolchildren will be left to fight off COVID on their own because we didn’t have the vaccine ready for the start of the school year.

Maybe someday our government will learn to plan for worst-case scenarios instead of best-case ones.

Here’s Fauci making the case for school vaccine mandates. Watch the whole clip and you’ll see him asked about DeSantis’s “Don’t Fauci My Florida” campaign.

“I believe that mandating vaccines for children to appear in school is a good idea,” Dr. Anthony Fauci says about Covid-19 vaccines.

“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

— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) August 29, 2021