Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted Wednesday that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines for children’s summer camps are not “sensible.”
Fauci agreed with Good Morning America co-host Savannah Guthrie, who said, “The science doesn’t suggest those CDC guidelines are too sensible. For little kids outside in 90-degree heat, running around with masks?”
“Yeah, Savannah. You’ve asked me that question a couple of times before,” Fauci responded.
The CDC announced new guidance for summer camps on April 24. Public health officials recommend that campers be split into cohorts and maintain three feet distance between other children in their own cohort. Campers are to remain six feet apart from those not in their own cohort. The guidelines also require masks to be worn at all times, with exceptions for eating and swimming. The CDC expects campers to wear masks while playing sports outside, and strongly discourages inside or contact sports. (RELATED: CDC Releases New Mask Guidance)
Some doctors have criticized the CDC’s guidance.
Mark Gorelik, a Columbia University doctor, told New York Magazine, “I am supportive of effective measures to restrain the spread of illness. However, the CDC’s recommendations cross the line into excess and are, frankly, senseless. Children cannot be running around outside in 90-degree weather wearing a mask. Period.”
“Masking kids at camp outdoors is simply virtue signaling. Requiring kids to continuously wear masks at camps, even while outside playing in the heat, when it provides little additional protection is unfair and cruel to our children,” a doctor at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told New York Magazine.
Fauci, the head of NIAID, defended the CDC.
“The CDC makes decisions based on science. They will continually re-evaluate that. You’re right. It looks a bit strict, a bit stringent, but that’s the reason why they keep looking at that and trying to, you know, re-evaluate, literally in real-time, whether or not that’s the practical way to go.”