One of the country’s top health experts is encouraging parents to wear masks around their homes to protect their kids from getting sick.
NEW PODCAST ALERT! CHRISTIAN NEWS AND VIEWS:
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said on CNN’s “New Day” Tuesday morning that parents need to cover their faces around their children because the latest variant of COVID-19 “is capable of causing serious injury” in kids.
“It’s clear that this variant is capable of causing serious injury in children,” he said. “You have heard those stories coming out of Louisiana pediatric ICUs, where there are kids as young as a few months old who are sick from this. That is rare — certainly younger people are less likely to fall ill — but anyone that tried to tell you, ‘You don’t have to worry about it if you’re a young, healthy person,’ there’s many counter examples all around us now.”
Collins told the CNN co-hosts it’s recommended that kids under the age of 12 years old avoid places where they could catch COVID-19.
“Which means recommendations of mask-wearing in schools and at home,” he said. “Parents of unvaccinated kids should be thoughtful about this and the recommendation is to wear masks there as well. I know that’s uncomfortable. I know it seems weird, but it is the best way to protect your kids.”
According to the latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 340 children under the age of 17 years old have died of COVID-19.
***As the number of voices facing big-tech censorship continues to grow, please sign up for Faithwire’s daily newsletter and download the CBN News app, developed by our parent company, to stay up-to-date with the latest news from a distinctly Christian perspective.***
Collins’ comments come two days after Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, suggested Americans have a right to not get sick.
He told ABC’s Jon Karl that vaccinated Americans who refuse to wear masks are “encroaching” on others’ right to not contract a virus.
“Although you want to respect a person’s individual right, when you’re dealing with a public health situation — and we are, in fact, in a very serious public health challenge here with a pandemic, with a virus that has an extraordinary capability of spreading rapidly and efficiently from person to person — so a person’s individual decision to not wear a mask not only impacts them because, if they get infected, even though they say, ‘It’s my decision if I get infected, I’ll worry about that,’ but the fact is, if you get infected, even if you are without symptoms, you very well may infect another person, who may be vulnerable, who may get seriously ill,” Fauci told Karl. “So, in essence, you are encroaching on their individual rights, because you’re making them vulnerable.”
***As the number of voices facing big-tech censorship continues to grow, please sign up for Faithwire’s daily newsletter and download the CBN News app, developed by our parent company, to stay up-to-date with the latest news from a distinctly Christian perspective.***