A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee on Saturday endorsed Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines for young children, the last step before Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky can issue her final signoff.

The unanimous recommendations from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices followed the Food and Drug Administration’s authorization of the shots on Friday.

The director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Rochelle Walensky, is urging officials against dropping their school mask mandates even as officials from a handful of states have already announced such intentions for schools and elsewhere.

Walensky acknowledged in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday that “people are interested in taking masks off,” but added that “Right now our CDC guidance has not changed ... We continue to endorse universal masking in schools.”

One year into her tenure as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky acknowledges that she should have communicated certain things better to the American public.

She says the pandemic threw curveballs that she should have anticipated. She thinks she should have made it clearer to the public that new rules and guidelines were subject to change if the nature of the fight against Covid-19 shifted again.

Asked on ABC‘s Good Morning America (1/7/22) about “encouraging headlines that we’re talking about this morning, this new study showing just how well vaccines are working to prevent severe illness,” CDC director Rochelle Wallensky responded:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Wednesday that the agency's guidance on face masks would not change.

"[The] CDC continues to recommend that any mask is better than no mask and we do encourage all Americans to wear a well-fitting mask to protect themselves and prevent the spread of COVID-19. And, the recommendation is not going to change," she told reporters during the White House COVID-19 response team briefing. 

A record number of children in the US are hospitalized with COVID-19, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The US averaged 672 new hospital admissions per day for the 0-17 age group in the week of December 27 and January 2, shattering the previous record of around 340 admissions per day during a period in early September 2021.

Children, however, are the least likely age bracket to get hospitalized by the virus, according to the data.  

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put forward data on Friday that showed the amount of young kids who are brought to the hospital and tested positive for COVID-19 went up in the past week, but there is more to the information than is first evident.

The data included kids who were taken to the hospital for issues other than COVID-19 and then received a positive test result.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky warned on Friday that pediatric hospitals are seeing record numbers of children with COVID-19, as the Omicron variant surges nationwide.

US coronavirus cases are currently higher than they’ve ever been, averaging around 600,000 new cases reported daily (itself an undercount), with hospitalization rates that have increased for people of all ages, according to Walensky, who briefed reporters on Friday. More than 1,200 people a day are dying of COVID-19 nationwide.

The influential American Medical Association (AMA) on Wednesday criticized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) revision of guidelines for quarantine and claimed it is confusing.

Last week, the CDC reduced its recommended quarantine time from 10 days to 5 days for people who have asymptomatic COVID-19. On Tuesday, the agency reaffirmed its decision and said most transmission of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, occurs early on during the infection.