Health

(NEW YORK) — Dr. Deborah Levine has been a pediatric emergency medicine physician in the New York City area for over two decades. In recent years, she has observed an increase in the number of mental health emergencies in adolescents — which only got worse during the pandemic.

“The problem has always been there. The pandemic, we felt it even more so,” said Levine, who practices at NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital and is an associate professor of clinical pediatrics and emergency medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine.

Last week’s surgeon general’s advisory on the youth mental health crisis during the pandemic didn’t come as a surprise to hospitalists like Levine, who continues to see the impact as demand still outpaces access 21 months later.

“We’re seeing it on the ground,” Levine said. “We’re looking for ways to help ameliorate the crisis and in the meantime, we’re actively treating these children who need help.”

Hospitals are often a “safety net” for people experiencing mental health emergencies, she said, and that’s only become more pronounced as outpatient clinics and offices continue to be overwhelmed.

“I think this crisis is so significant that we just can’t meet the demand,” she said.

Some hospitals are trying to meet the immediate demand by increasing bed capacity. Though greater access to psychiatric care is needed to help prevent mental health issues from escalating to emergencies in the first place, experts said. At the same time, an existing shortage of behavioral health professionals is compounding the problem, they said. Telemedicine, which proliferated during the pandemic, can also continue to increase access, particularly vulnerable youth in more rural areas, where specialists are in shorter supply.

The surgeon general’s advisory came on the heels of a coalition of pediatric groups declaring children’s mental health challenges amid the COVID-19 pandemic a “national emergency” earlier this fall. The medical associations pointed to research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that found an uptick in mental health-related emergency department visits for children early in the pandemic when compared to 2019, as well as a 50.6% increase in suspected suicide attempt emergency department visits among girls ages 12 to 17.

Depression and suicide attempts in adolescents were already on the rise before the pandemic, the surgeon general’s advisory noted.

“I am worried about our children,” Dr. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, said during a recent White House briefing. “[Our] kids have been struggling for a long time, even for this pandemic.”

Continued increase in demand

When the pandemic disrupted access to schools, health care and social services, Texas Children’s Hospital saw adolescents who had received prior treatment for issues such as anxiety and depression come back, along with “tremendous increases of new-onset problems,” Chief of Psychology Karin Price told ABC News.

Even as schools and services have gone back online, the volume “hasn’t let up at all,” she said.

“Our numbers of referrals on the outpatient side continue to increase — general referrals for common mental health conditions in children and adolescents,” she said. “Unfortunately, we’ve also seen increases in the demand for crisis services — children and adolescents having to come to the emergency center for crisis evaluations and crisis intervention.”

During the previous fiscal year, behavioral health had the third-highest number of referrals throughout the Texas Children’s Hospital system — behind ENT surgery and orthopedic surgery — much higher than it typically is, Price said.

“That has been very striking within our system and really demonstrating the need,” she said.

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has seen more than a 30% increase in emergency department volume for mental health emergencies compared to the year before, according to Psychiatrist-in-Chief Dr. Tami Benton.

“We’re starting to see more kids who were previously well, so they were youngsters who were not having any specific mental health conditions prior to the pandemic, who are now presenting with more depression, anxiety,” she said. “So things have definitely not been heading in the right direction.”

The hospital has also been seeing adolescents with autism who lost services during the pandemic seeking treatment for behavioral problems, as well as an increase in girls with suicidal ideation, she said.

As the need has gone up, the number of services hasn’t necessarily followed, she said.

“It’s the same services that were challenged before, there are just more young people in need of services,” she said.

Adapting to the need

Amid the demand for psychiatric beds, CHOP converted its extended care unit to treat children in the emergency department while they wait for hospitalization, Benton said. The hospital also shifted clinicians to provide emergency outpatient services.

“We’ve had to make a lot of changes in our care practices to try to accommodate the volume to try to see more young people,” Benton said.

CHOP was already planning pre-pandemic to expand its ambulatory practices, though the increased demand has only accelerated the project, Benton said. The hospital is also building a 46-bed in-patient child and adolescent psychiatry unit. Both are slated to open later next year, “but as you can imagine, that’s really not soon enough,” Benton said.

Some hospitals have been looking at ways to prevent children from needing crisis services in the first place. Texas Children’s Hospital has developed a behavioral health task force that, for one, is focused on supporting screening for mental health concerns at pediatric practices, Price said. Levine is part of a team researching the pandemic’s effect on pediatric mental health emergencies with one goal being to prevent repeat visits to the emergency department.

“We’re trying to see if we can target certain areas that are at high-risk,” Levine said.

As far as increasing access, telehealth services have been invaluable during the pandemic, especially for reaching more rural populations. Though access may still be limited due to a family’s means, Levine said. Demand also continues to be high amid a workforce shortage, Price said.

“Behavioral health professionals have a lot of different opportunities now,” she said. “Any kind of behavioral health clinicians that didn’t already have full caseloads before certainly have them now.”

According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, every state has a high to severe shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists.

With those challenges in mind, engaging community partners will be key to addressing the mental health crisis, Benton said.

“The most important thing for us to do right now really is focused on expanding access, and I think the quickest way for us to do that is for us to partner with other communities where kids are every day,” she said. “Greater partnerships with schools and the primary care practices is a way to do that … and get the biggest bang for our buck.”

ABC News’ Cheyenne Haslett contributed to this report.

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(ATLANTA) — The CDC’s advisory committee recommended Thursday that people who have a choice should get an mRNA vaccine, either Pfizer or Moderna, over the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine after a review of new CDC data on rare blood clots linked to J&J.

The rare blood clots are not a new safety concern, and the J&J vaccine has already become far less common in the U.S. after it was given an FDA warning label about the clotting condition. But more data that confirmed a slightly higher rate of clotting cases and deaths than was previously reported caused the CDC and FDA to take another look at the data this week.

The CDC has now confirmed a total of at least 54 cases and nine deaths from the severe clotting event, which is called thrombosis with thrombocytopenia or TSS, out of the 17 million people who have gotten the J&J vaccine in the US.

Though it’s very rare, the data led CDC experts to favor mRNA vaccines by comparison, particularly because there are so many mRNA vaccines available in the US and people are less likely to be limited.

There could also be more cases and deaths, because TSS is under-diagnosed and could be underreported, the CDC said.

The clotting is more common among women in their 30s and 40s but has also been seen in adult men and women of all ages.

The experts were very clear, however, that the J&J vaccine should not be taken off the shelves and is still far more beneficial than not getting any vaccine at all.

In certain parts of the U.S., particularly among prison populations, people dealing with homelessness, or rural parts of the country, the J&J vaccine is most common. And outside of the U.S., J&J has played a huge role in vaccinating populations in low-income countries — a growing priority as it becomes clear that variants will continue to emerge until vaccination is widespread around the globe.

“In the setting where there are no alternative COVID-19 vaccines, the benefits of the J&J vaccine outweigh the risk. This is important in global situations where there may not be other COVID vaccines available,” CDC’s Dr. Sara Oliver said in a presentation to the committee on the cost-benefit analysis of J&J vaccines.

With the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, though, the protection against COVID was considered better and the side effects less severe, the CDC analysis found.

“Due to both higher vaccine effectiveness of the mRNA vaccines and the severity of safety issues seen with J&J vaccines, in the setting of widely available mRNA vaccines in the U.S., the benefit-risk balance of the mRNA vaccines is more favorable than for the Janssen vaccine,” she said.

There was also discussion about the recovery from TSS, which often leads to brain bleeding and can be a harder recovery than myocarditis, the heart inflammation condition linked to the mRNA vaccines that is also a rare safety concern.

“It’s important to note that there are differences in the severity of these vaccine associated events. In myocarditis after mRNA COVID-19 vaccines … at a three-month follow up, over half reported no symptoms and over 90% were fully recovered by cardiologist or health care provider, and there have been no confirmed deaths,” Oliver said.

“For TTS after the Janssen COVID vaccines, there’s around a 15% mortality rate and 17% required discharge to a post-acute care rehabilitation facility,” she said.

The experts on the committee were largely in agreement with the recommendation, supporting a push toward Pfizer or Moderna over J&J when available but continuing to offer J&J as opposed to no vaccination.

“I recognize the drawbacks of the Janssen vaccine. However, I look at this as an issue of the trolley problem in ethics, where you’re driving the trolley and you have to decide whether you’re going to go down one track and have one person die or go down a different track and have 10 people die,” said Dr. Jamie Loehr, a doctor in Ithaca, New York.

“If we take away the Jansen vaccine, and people … cannot get the mRNA vaccine, we have all these complications from getting COVID disease. And so even though there are significant risks to the vaccine, if it’s the only one that is an option, I want it to be available,” he said.

Dr. Beth Bell, a professor of public health at the University of Washington, said she thought the “preferential recommendation” would make it very clear that experts were concerned about the side effects but wanted to maintain individual choice.

“I would not recommend the Janssen to my family members. On the other hand, I think we do have to recognize that different people make different choices and if they are appropriately informed, I don’t think we should remove that option,” she said.

Some were more determined to avoid it, however.

“I just have a real problem with a recommendation for anyone to give a vaccine that 1 per 100,000 women ages 30-49 years old will have a condition with a case fatality rate of 15%,” said Dr. Pablo Sanchez, a pediatrician at The Ohio State University Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

“And so I really have a problem. I’m not recommending it to any of my patients’ parents and I tell them to stay away from it,” Sanchez told the committee.

For its part, J&J said it remained very confident in the positive impact of its vaccine, particularly in low-income countries.

“Let me just state at the outset that based on the data we are confident in the positive benefit-risk profile of our vaccine. It is saving lives here in the U.S. today and on every continent around the globe,” Dr. Penny Heaton, global head of vaccines for J&J, said at the meeting.

“Our vaccine is different, it’s long lasting, it offers high levels of protection and it provides breadth of protection. Our vaccine has flexible dosing, it’s easy to store and transport. In many low- and middle-income countries, our vaccine is the most important and sometimes the only option, even in the U.S.,” Heaton said.

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(NEW YORK) — The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted Americans’ perceptions of health care, and not for the better, according to a new survey.

Nearly half of Americans say the pandemic has worsened their perceptions of the U.S. health care system, with many describing it as “broken” or “expensive,” according to the West Health-Gallup survey released this week, the largest survey conducted on U.S. health care since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The high price of health care was a major factor, with a staggering one-third of Americans intentionally delaying or declining medical care over cost concerns.

In the midst of a pandemic, 14% of people with COVID-19 symptoms reported that they didn’t seek medical care because they worried they wouldn’t be able to afford it, a Gallup poll from April 2020 found.

In the new survey, nearly all sectors of society reported deep concerns about the health care system, including the insured and uninsured, wealthy and poor. The pandemic has also raised awareness of the unequal impact on Black, Hispanic and other non-white groups.

The survey found nearly three out of four Americans believe that their household pays too much for the quality of health care they receive, and an estimated 58 million U.S. adults find health care costs to be a major financial burden for their families.

One survey respondent, a white, Republican woman in her 60s, told researchers, “It’s hard when you have three or four kids and you’re trying to juggle the cost, and you’re deciding should I go to the emergency clinic or can we wait another day.”

Avoiding treatment due to rising costs is a problem facing both poorer and richer Americans. Around 34% of people with household incomes of less than $24,000 reported not seeking care in the prior three months due to cost. Twenty percent of people in high-income households (earning more than $120,000 annually) reported the same.

One in five U.S. adults reported they or a member of their household had a health problem worsen after postponing their medical care due to concerns about cost.

“Postponing care is only going to create higher costs in the long run,” said Dr. Blythe Adamson, founder of Infectious Economics LLC and affiliate professor at the University of Washington. “If we’re detecting cancer later on, that patient will have worse outcomes and more expensive care.”

The West Health-Gallup survey found that 60% of Americans reported the pandemic has made them more concerned about unequal access to quality health care services. Among Black Americans and Hispanic Americans, this concern was higher at three-fourths and two-thirds, respectively.

“We get brushed aside, African Americans, a lot of times,” said one survey respondent, a Black, Democrat woman in her 40s. “Things that we say, we feel it gets brushed off, they’re not really taking it seriously, like, oh, she’s just complaining again or it’s not serious, that kind of thing.”

Essential workers, who have lower income on average, continue to face greater COVID-19 risks than those with higher-income, more Zoom-friendly jobs.

“We continue to see low-income workers having high COVID-19 exposure at their job and not having insurance,” Adamson said. “These people are more likely to be hospitalized and thrown into bankruptcy.”

While some Americans have benefited from expanded access to telemedicine, inequities remain.

While other countries have government-backed health care, the US still relies on a mix of public and private health care insurers, which can create confusion and unequal pricing, according to Adamson.

Plus, as Adamson pointed out, “There are still many low income people that don’t have reliable internet, smartphones or computers that they can use in a telemedicine visit.”

Collectively, the survey shows that the pandemic appears to have worsened people’s views on the U.S. health care system.

“What’s changed in people’s minds is value in health care. Are we really getting a good value for every dollar we’re spending on prevention, on treatments, on hospitalization in this system?” Adamson asked.

Many of the challenges of the existing health care system were exposed under the strain of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Our current system is unsustainable, especially for the poor,” Adamson said.

Nicholas Nissen, M.D., is an author, host of the “Brain Health with Dr. Nissen” podcast and a contributor to the ABC News Medical Unit.

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(WASHINGTON) — Two senators are taking aim at the widespread issue of fake and ineffective masks flooding the U.S. market.

A new bill announced Thursday and obtained exclusively by ABC News will grant more authority to the Food and Drug Administration to enforce and punish counterfeiters in the mask industry. It’s a bipartisan effort by Sens. Chris Murthy of Connecticut, a Democrat, and Mike Braun of Indiana, a Republican.

It is the first piece of legislation in a large pandemic response package that will be rolled out by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in the next few weeks.

The wide-ranging bipartisan package, which the committee has been working on for months, will target various holes in the nation’s pandemic response infrastructure by improving the supply chain for medical equipment and addressing health inequities that have put minority populations at higher risk, among other measures.

The legislation announced Thursday, called the Protecting Patients from Counterfeit Medical Devices Act, comes as public health experts are urging Americans to renew their vigilance on masking in the face of omicron, a quickly-spreading COVID-19 variant of which infections have increased sevenfold in the U.S. over the last week.

New York, California, Illinois, Nevada and several other states have recently reimposed indoor mask mandates.

“In looking at early data on transmissibility of omicron from other countries, we expect to see the proportion of omicron cases here in the United States continue to grow in the coming weeks,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said at a White House briefing on Wednesday.

“What does this mean for individuals and families as we head into the winter months? A time when families may be gathering with one another over the holidays?”

“It means that it is vital for everyone to get vaccinated and boosted if they are eligible. Given the increase in transmissibility, this also means continuing to be vigilant about masking in public indoor settings, in areas of substantial or high community transmission. And as of now, this represents about 90% of all counties in the United States,” she said.

The new bill is also aimed at protecting health care workers who could face a surge of patients this winter.

Last February, the Department of Homeland Security announced it seized 10 million counterfeit 3M N95 masks, including some possibly headed for hospitals.

Since the start of the pandemic, Customs and Border Patrol has seized more than 34 million counterfeit masks, and nearly 60% of the counterfeits were seized in 2021, according to the FDA.

Earlier this year, the FDA asked for broader powers to seize and punish counterfeiters, telling Congress that the agency is currently limited to destroying certain fakes.

The current ability to enforce the rules around fraudulent PPE “is incomplete and there will be limited deterrence for the selling of counterfeit devices, especially domestically,” the FDA said in its 2022 budget request.

“The revisions proposed will help keep counterfeit devices like these out of the United States and facilitate enforcement actions against those that find their way into interstate commerce,” the FDA said.

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(NEW YORK) — One year ago, on Dec. 14, 2020, Sandra Lindsay, an intensive care nurse from Northwell Health, became the first American to roll up her sleeve and receive a COVID-19 vaccine, following the green light from federal authorities.

“That day, when that needle pierced my arm, all I felt was this huge boulder, this weight just roll off my shoulders. I’m always optimistic, but my light got even brighter that day,” Lindsay told ABC News.

Lindsay’s image rapidly circulated across the country, a symbolic representation of the light at the end of the tunnel after the pandemic had forced families apart, shuttered businesses and schools and confined millions of Americans to their homes.

“I just felt hopeful for myself, for the entire country, for the world — that yes, the day that we’ve waited so long for healing is coming,” Lindsay said.

The country’s unprecedented creation and rollout of the vaccine was once considered a nearly impossible feat, given that vaccine development is often a long and arduous process, requiring years of regulatory and manufacturing hurdles to be overcome before it can be made available to the general public.

However, leaning on years of prior research on vaccine technology and with support from the federal government, the process was expedited, allowing for emergency authorization of the shots less than a year after work began.

“When the vaccine first became available a year ago, it seemed miraculous that a vaccine could be developed, rigorously tested in large clinical trials and ready to go in less than a year after the virus was identified,” Dr. Stephen Morse, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, told ABC News. “That’s an amazing accomplishment considering that we really didn’t have the infrastructure for a rapid national mass vaccination campaign when we started.”

Nevertheless, hundreds of millions of Americans are now inoculated — but tens of millions of others remain completely unvaccinated, an ongoing hurdle that experts say will likely result in the loss of tens of thousands of more lives.

Millions vaccinated but hundreds of thousands still lost to COVID-19

Nearly two years after the vaccine companies first raced to study the virus genome, around 600 million vaccine doses have been distributed and more than 200 million Americans — about 61% of the population — have been fully vaccinated.

“Overall, I think that the vaccine rollout has been a major success over the past year,” Dr. Cindy Prins, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Florida, said. “This took a lot of effort and flexibility, with public health professionals in different states tailoring the rollout to the needs of their own populations. … Looking back, I’m really in awe of what the U.S. has achieved in the past year.”

Pfizer, along with its partner BioNTech, was the first company to receive U.S. regulatory emergency use authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine. Reflecting on the one-year anniversary of the rollout, Pfizer CEO and Chairman Albert Bourla told ABC News he feels proud of what the company has accomplished over the last two years.

“I’m proud and proud for the people at Pfizer. I’m proud for everything that we’re able to do. They [made] the impossible possible, in the way that they manufactured, they brought the treatment, they brought the vaccine,” Bourla said, later adding, “We have the tools to control the situation and go back to our normal way of life.”

However, the road to vaccinate the country has not been easy.

Even with the Trump administration’s multi-billion dollar initiative, Operation Warp Speed, created to speed up the development, manufacturing and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, as well as a subsequent push from the Biden White House to acquire vaccines and get Americans vaccinated, there have been inconsistent ebbs and flows of interest in the shots.

Over the last year, an average 1.3 million shots — including first, second and third doses — have been administered every day. Comparatively, an average of more than 1,300 lives have been reported lost to the virus each day.

When the first COVID-19 vaccines were administered last December, many hoped the shots would herald a return to normalcy. However, even with vaccines, the U.S. continues to lose thousands of lives every week.

The one-year vaccine anniversary coincides with yet another pandemic sobering milestone: 800,000 Americans reported lost to the virus. Since the first shots went into arms a year ago, approximately half a million Americans have died of the virus.

Of those lost in the last year, just shy of half — 230,000 — have died since mid-April of 2021, when President Joe Biden announced that the vaccine was widely available to every American over the age of 18.

“Since the unvaccinated are most likely to get serious disease and end up in the hospital, vaccination is lifesaving,” Morse said. “This week, we will reach 800,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. At least a quarter of these deaths, and probably more, were preventable and didn’t have to happen if these people had been vaccinated.”

According to federal data compiled in September 2021, unvaccinated individuals had a 5.8 times greater risk of testing positive for COVID-19 and a 14 times greater risk of dying from it, as compared to vaccinated individuals.

Vaccine hesitancy an ongoing obstacle

Across the country, the issue of vaccine hesitancy remains an ongoing obstacle in the country’s fight against COVID-19.

About 93 million Americans remain completely unvaccinated, including 73 million Americans who are currently over the age of 5, and thus, eligible for a shot.

“I think we were unprepared for the ferocity of the negative response and how many were adamantly opposed,” Morse said.

According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll released earlier this month, one in four adults remain unvaccinated, with about 14% saying they will “definitely not” get vaccinated. An additional 3% said they will only get the shot if they are required to do so for work, school or other activities.

In addition, despite the fact that all children above the age of 5 are now eligible to receive a shot, millions of youth remain unvaccinated.

About two-thirds of parents of elementary school-aged children are either holding off on getting their younger children vaccinated or refuse to do so, according to another recent KFF poll, conducted before the discovery of omicron.

Coronavirus infections among children continue to surge, currently accounting for about a quarter of all new cases.

“The challenge with having so many people remain unvaccinated is that the virus will circulate most efficiently among those people,” Prins said.

Issues of access still a roadblock for many Americans

Minority communities in the U.S. have faced disproportionate hardships in the pandemic. According to federal data, adjusted for age and population, the likelihood of death because of COVID-19 for Black, Latino and Native American people is approximately two to three times that of white people.

Vaccination rates among Black and brown Americans have notably improved since the first months of the pandemic, though some groups are still lagging behind in the rollout.

Despite representing 12.4% of the U.S. population, Black Americans currently account for 10.1% of those fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

“It’s OK to have questions, but go to trusted sites,” Lindsay, who has become a vaccine advocate, said. “Everyone knows that we are scarred from historical events. But you’ve got to put that aside. So much has happened since all those terrible things. Safeguards have been put into place to ensure that these terrible experiments don’t happen again.”

Issues of access, particularly in minority communities, remain a significant hurdle for many to get vaccinated.

“The access issues still exist, and I think that they can be even more challenging now, because a lot of the mass vaccine clinic and mobile clinic efforts have given way to vaccines being distributed by pharmacies or doctors’ offices,” Prins said. “There are many neighborhoods in the U.S. where people don’t have access to a pharmacy or physician’s office and may not have good transportation to be able to get to one easily.”

According to an ABC News’ analysis of pharmacy locations across the country conducted earlier this year, there are 150 counties where there is no pharmacy, and nearly 4.8 million people live in a county where there’s only one pharmacy for every 10,000 residents or more.

“While it is important to celebrate the incredible science, engineering and public health expertise that went into designing and delivering so many vaccines this past year, we must also remember the lack of equity both nationally and internationally in who has been vaccinated,” said Samuel Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation. “As we move forward, it is critical that we address the systemic barriers preventing more equitable delivery vaccines.”

‘Now is the time to take action’

Ultimately, experts concurred that the country’s vaccination efforts are far from over.

“If we had controlled the virus early on, we could have avoided this. More recently, if everyone had been vaccinated, we could have prevented many deaths and much suffering. Too late now, but still not too late to use the vaccine to soften the landing,” Morse said.

With the waning of immunity over time and the potential that the omicron variant could chip away at efficacy, experts are urging Americans to slow the rise of infections by getting vaccinated and boosted.

“The virus isn’t going anywhere,” Lindsay added. “Now is the time to take action, get informed and make the right decision for yourself and for your loved ones.”

ABC News’ Sony Salzman and Chris Donato contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — Omicron can evade the protection initial vaccines give, but boosters increase efficacy and better protect against the newest variant of concern, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday.

The variant can also evade protections provided by monoclonal antibodies and convalescent plasma, the White House chief medical adviser told ABC This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos. “If you want to be optimally protected, absolutely get a booster,” he said.

Omicron has a high degree of transmissibility, which Fauci said is easy to see as the delta and omicron variants compete for dominance. With less than 140 omicron cases confirmed in the United States so far, delta is still driving the pandemic. The U.S. is currently averaging more than 118,000 new cases a day — an increase of more than 42% in the last two weeks — and hospitalizations are also on the rise; in the last month, COVID-related admissions are up nearly 50%.

Fauci said there are 60 million eligible Americans who are not yet vaccinated and about 100 million who are eligible for boosters. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Protection, 60.7% of the entire U.S. population is fully vaccinated, and around 26% of fully vaccinated individuals — more than 50 million — have received a booster shot.

The omicron variant was discovered in southern Africa last month and has been deemed a “variant of concern” by experts. Early anecdotal data has shown that most who contract the new variant experience mild illness, but the main consensus among experts is that it’s too early to tell what the long term impacts will be.

“The level of severity appears to be maybe a bit less than delta. But there are a lot of confounding issues there,” Fauci told Stephanopoulos. “It may be due to the underlying protection in the community due to prior infections, but these are just preliminary data that we’re going to have to just follow carefully to get them confirmed.”

With omicron’s transmission advantage and protection evasion, Stephanopoulos pressed Fauci on whether a three-shot vaccine regimen will become the standard of care. But while the official requirements remain two doses of an mRNA vaccine and one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, Fauci said if individuals “want to be optimally protected, (they should) absolutely get a booster.”

Stephanopoulos noted the World Health Organization has said boosters will exacerbate global vaccine distribution inequities and has asked richer countries to hold off on boosters. The organization’s concern is that some people are getting multiple doses, when those in other countries have yet to receive their first shot.

“That’s an understandable concern, but it isn’t really that valid if you do both,” Fauci responded. “We are, right now, vaccinating our own country, we’re going to be boosting as many people as we possibly can. But you can also simultaneously make doses available to the developing world.”

According to Fauci, the U.S. has given “over 300 million doses to over 100 countries.” The U.S. has pledged to give upward of “1.1 billion doses” and have given more assistance “than all of the other countries combined.”

After nearly two years of lockdowns, masking and consistent news about the longevity of the pandemic — Fauci said yearly boosters are a possibility — some people are experiencing “pandemic fatigue.” Touching on that, Stephanopoulos asked Fauci what signs of hope he sees for this holiday season.

“Well, we have the tools to protect ourselves,” Fauci said. With the vaccines, “We can go a long way to getting us through this cold winter season, which clearly is always associated with a spike in respiratory illnesses.”

There’s also fatigue — and protests — regarding masks, something Fauci hinted toward when talking about tools to stay safe.

“Masking is not going to be forever, but it can get us out of the very difficult situation we’re in now,” Fauci added.

Low vaccination rates in young children may be contributing to the difficult situation. Stephanopoulos noted less than one in five eligible children have been vaccinated so far.

Speaking directly to parents, Fauci said, “If your child is 5 years of age and older, please get them vaccinated. We need to protect the children. This idea that children are not vulnerable at all is not so.”

While children who contract COVID-19 don’t typically experience severe symptoms, “over 2 million children from 5 to 11 have been infected,” Fauci said. “There have been over 8,000 to 9,000 hospitalizations and well over 100 deaths.”

“So it’s not only good for the health of the child, but also to prevent the spread in the community,” he said.

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(NEW YORK) — Since the first case of the new Omicron variant was detected last month, early anecdotal reports indicate people infected seem to be experiencing mild illness — leading some scientists to wonder if this version of the virus could be less dangerous than prior variants.

But scientists have cautioned it’s too soon to know for sure.

It “looks less severe in really early data,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told ABC News Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton in an interview from CDC headquarters in Atlanta. “We’re certainly following and very interested in disease severity.”

Omicron was dubbed a “variant of concern” due to its many mutations. As a result, scientists are scrambling to determine if these changes lead to increased transmissibility or weakened response from vaccines. The World Health Organization said several studies are underway and that more information will emerge in the following days to weeks. Preliminary studies show that the Pfizer vaccine may be less effective against the Omicron variant, but, again, more research is needed.

Early clinical data from researchers in South Africa hint that the virus may cause less severe COVID-19 infections. The South African Medical Research Council has reported that very few hospitalized patients with the Omicron variant have required supplemental oxygen or were admitted to an ICU.

Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and professor with the Department of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, said that preliminary results are “very encouraging.”

The U.S reported its first Omicron case on Dec. 1 in California. Many subsequent cases in the U.S. have happened among younger, healthier and vaccinated people who already are less likely to become very sick from COVID-19. But there are still too few people with Omicron to draw meaningful conclusions about whether the variant itself causes a more mild illness, experts told ABC News.

With an increase in the number of cases, Brownstein said scientists “will be able to characterize the [variant] better.” This information will aid public health officials in establishing better guidelines and preventative measures.

If it turns out Omicron is more transmissible but less severe than other variants, some experts said that could bode well overall — perhaps signaling the virus will still circulate among people but become less life-threatening.

“I think Omicron may represent the first step in adaptation that you want to see, which is that it’s more contagious and less virulent,” said Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease pediatrician.

Even with all eyes on the Omicron variant, experts are reminding the public that the Delta variant remains the predominant circulating strain in the United States, where it’s still responsible for more than 99% of cases. Among best practices for avoiding all variants, officials continue to recommend vaccinations, obtaining booster shots as soon as eligible and following mask-wearing guidelines.

Bernadette Baker M.D., a family medicine resident physician with Emory School of Medicine, is a contributor to the ABC News Medical Unit. Sony Salzman is the unit’s coordinating producer.

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(NEW YORK) — When Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, takes stock of the coronavirus pandemic, she knows it’s far from over. But she also believes it won’t last forever.

For Walensky, one of the key signs the United States is exiting the pandemic will be when hospitals are no longer filled to the brim with COVID-19 patients. And when the number of daily deaths starts to plummet.

“We’ve gotten pretty cavalier about 1,100 deaths a day,” Walensky told ABC News Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton in a rare in-person interview from CDC headquarters in Atlanta.

“That’s an extraordinary amount of deaths in a single day from this disease,” Walensky said. “We can’t — I can’t — be in a position where that is OK.”

For the nation’s public health experts, deaths and hospitalizations have become a more reliable benchmark for progress than overall cases.

The more scientists have learned about the virus, the more they have moved away from concept of herd immunity — the idea that the virus will one day be stopped in its tracks when enough people are immune.

Instead, scientists agree that some mild breakthrough cases are still likely to happen, even among the vaccinated. In a world where almost everyone was vaccinated, COVID-19 cases would still happen.

The virus would still spread among us, akin to the seasonal flu. And like the flu, some people would still be hospitalized, and some would die — but dramatically fewer than 1,100 deaths per day.

Right now, roughly 65% of eligible Americans are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. The more people who get vaccinated, the more deaths and hospitalizations are driven down.

The CDC’s real-world data is already demonstrating this to be true, with unvaccinated people 14 times more likely to die and 11 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19.

Despite the grim daily death count, Walensky said she believes that one day we’ll leave behind one of the key symbols of the pandemic: the face mask.

“Masks are for now, they’re not forever,” Walensky said. “We have to find a way to be done with them.”

And the best way to put the pandemic — and masks — in the rearview mirror is to “lean in” to the current strategies we know work, Walensky said.

And for now, Walensky is urging patience as public health guidance evolves to reflect new science.

“Science is hard in a two-minute soundbite,” she said. “Know that every single decision — as hard as they are — have been grounded in science.”

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(ATLANTA) — With nearly 5 million children ages 5 to 11 now vaccinated against COVID-19, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky says real-world monitoring finds vaccines are safe for young children.

Crucially, the CDC hasn’t identified any concerns with the temporary heart inflammation known as myocarditis, a potential side effect of mRNA vaccines seen in rare circumstances in teenagers and young adults.

“We haven’t seen anything yet,” Walensky told ABC News Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton in a rare in-person interview from CDC headquarters in Atlanta. “We have an incredibly robust vaccine safety system, and so if [problems] were there, we would find it.”

Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine was authorized for children 5 to 11 years old in early November. Despite robust safety data, fewer than 1 in 5 children in this age group has receive their first dose.

Meanwhile, about two-thirds of parents of elementary school children said they didn’t want to vaccinate their children or are holding off for now, according to a poll from the nonprofit KFF.

Walensky said that while new data is constantly emerging, one thing is clear: Vaccines are safe for young children.

“If you want your children fully vaccinated by the holidays, now is the time,” Walensky said.

In rare access, Ashton was invited inside the CDC’s Emergency Operation Center, where the agency monitors data for potential threats to human health.

Another worrying trend the CDC is monitoring is the alarmingly low vaccination rate among pregnant women, despite overwhelming evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are safe for mother and infant.

Less than 20% of pregnant people have received a vaccine during pregnancy, according to the CDC.

“I’m very concerned,” said Walensky. “When I hear about a pregnant woman in the community who is not vaccinated, I personally pick up the phone and talk to them.”

There is no evidence COVID-19 vaccines impact fertility, nor is there any scientific reason to believe they might harm fertility in the future.

Walensky said misinformation about the vaccine’s impact on fertility has been one of her most challenging battles during the pandemic.

“The vaccines are safe, they are effective and they are even more important in pregnant women,” she said.

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