Health

(NEW YORK) — With schools back in session again, many parents around the country on edge — dreading the news of a positive coronavirus case in their children’s classes.

Coronavirus outbreaks have led to hundreds temporary school closures across the country, with tens of thousands of students forced to quarantine, just within the first weeks of school year.

With more than 48 million children under the age of 12 still ineligible to be vaccinated, and another 14 million eligible adolescents still unvaccinated, the quarantine process has left many families and educators frustrated at the prospect of another school year spent partially online, disruptions to work schedules and additional childcare expenses.

While many school districts are following guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which recommends that those who are unvaccinated and had close contact with an infected individual quarantine for 14 days, some are adopting a different approach called “Test to Stay.”

Under that protocol, being adopted by school districts from Utah to Massachusetts, asymptomatic students who are identified as close contacts of an infected student or staffer are allowed to remain in school, provided they take a daily rapid test for seven days, and adhere to other mitigations, such as mask wearing. If the student tests negative, they are cleared to be at school for the day.

It’s a protocol that has yet to be endorsed by the CDC, which is awaiting more data, but has the support of some parents, educators and medical experts.

Here’s what we know:

Test to Stay lauded by educators and experts

The new program has been supported by several studies, including recent findings out of the United Kingdom, which suggests that daily contact testing, following exposure at school, is “a safe alternative to home isolation.” According to the study, the rates of infection in school-based contacts were quite low.

The new protocol is currently used statewide in Massachusetts, and at The Park School, in Brookline, where weekly pool tests are administered for students and staff and the Test to Stay program is used when there is a case.

“We’ve actually had a number of cases, as we’ve come back into the school year,” Scott Young, the head of school at Park, told ABC News.

Outside the school building, socially distanced students, who may have been in contact with a COVID-19 positive person at school, are given rapid antigen tests. It takes 15 minutes for the test to register, and if it comes back negative, students are allowed in class.

In Utah, state law mandates that schools initiate Test to Stay when schools with 1,500 or more students have 2% of their students test positive for COVID-19, and when schools with fewer than 1,500 students have 30 students test positive for COVID-19, within a 14-day period.

Earlier this month, one high school in Tooele, Utah was forced to hold a Test to Stay event after a number of students tested positive. District school officials considered the program a “success” after it detected 30 cases among students when the testing session at Tooele High School.

“Last year, we had so many days where we had kids out of classes. And we see that in our data, we had numbers drop this year. A lot of this comes from our governor saying, our focus is education. We really want our students to be in class. We want our teachers teaching,” Marie Denson, a representative for the Tooele County School District told ABC News.

Such daily rapid testing has been shown to be an effective tool in prioritizing in-person learning, while seeking to maintain a safe learning environment, particularly when layered with additional measures, like masking and good ventilation, according to John Brownstein, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor.

“While rapid tests aren’t perfect, they do provide a robust measure of viral shedding which is a key measure of concern when trying to limit spread in a school,” Brownstein said. “If the goal is to keep kids in schools while reducing transmission, rapid tests actually may provide more value. And when you add the issue of improved timeliness and reduced costs, the utility of rapid tests becomes even more obvious.”

In addition, the seven consecutive days of testing diminishes the danger stemming from potential false negatives, Brownstein added.

Quarantines are highly disruptive, some say

Jami Wolf-Dolan, a psychologist and parent of two young children currently attending an elementary school in Brooklyn, New York, knows firsthand how incredibly disruptive quarantining can be for the entire family, explaining that she is “beyond slammed, right now,” after her son was abruptly shifted to remote schooling, when a classmate became infected in the first weeks of school.

“I have no childcare, I work from home and I have another kid in Pre-K. The impact of this reverberates,” she said.

Across the country, with pediatric coronavirus cases surging, thousands of children are being forced back into quarantine.

While over 21,000 K-12 students have tested positive since the onset of the school year in South Carolina, another 86,000 had to quarantine because of close contact with an infected individual, according to state data. And in Texas, more than 183,000 students have tested positive for the virus, since the onset of the academic year, impacting tens of thousands of other families.

Removing COVID-19 negative students from in-person learning for prolonged periods of time can affect a student’s educational, social and mental well-being, according to educational experts.

“The optimal place for students to learn is in school, because they are social beings, and that human connection is one of the things that is at the foundation, one of the most important components of effective instruction,” said Young. “When students are remote, they lose out on that human connection, on the opportunity to collaborate, the opportunity to work with their teacher closely, for the teacher to really be able to observe them closely.”

Lydia Alvarez, another parent in Brookyln, New York, concurred, explaining that her 7-year old son was forced to quarantine after attending school for only four days. The quarantine was an unwelcome reminder of last year, when remote learning forced her to quit her job to help her son with school.

“He absorbed nothing,” Alvarez told ABC News in regard to the last school year. “The greatest negative impact of homeschooling was a real resistance to learning. There was no joy associated with learning. I feel now that each time he gets yanked out for five days, that joy of learning gets kind of receded.”

“The best way for families to be supported is for them to know that their children can be in school,” Young said.

Mixed support among officials, but parents applaud the efforts to keep kids in school

Dr. Lee Savio Beers, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, has expressed her support for the “Test to Stay” approach.

“I think that it can be a really effective strategy to help make sure children are in school as much as possible. Again it has to be in the context of other important strategies, including vaccination and at least for right now masking, but testing can really help us keep our kids in school,” Beers said, testifying before Congress for a House at a subcommittee hearing on pediatric COVID, earlier this month.

The CDC, on the other hand, is not yet on-board with the Test to Stay protocol, awaiting more evidence before endorsing it.

“At this time, CDC does not recommend or endorse a Test to Stay program. CDC recommends all identified close contacts in the K–12 setting follow current quarantine guidance,” the CDC wrote in a statement to ABC News. “However, to gather more information, CDC is working with multiple jurisdictions who have chosen to use these approaches of more frequent testing to allow close contacts to remain in the classroom.”

But for many parents, the Test to Stay program is an effective way for children to experience the critical continuity and regularity of in-person school.

“The reaction of the community has been incredibly positive,” said Young. Parents, he said, “feel both a sense of safety, which is important, and they really do value the fact that their children can be in school, knowing that it is the best place for them.”

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(NEW YORK) — The frozen DiGiorno Crispy Pan Crust pepperoni pizza has been found to contain textured soy protein, a known allergen that is not declared on the label, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced Monday.

Nestle USA Inc. is recalling 27,872 pounds of the pizza product after a consumer complaint found that the frozen pepperoni pizza product carton may actually contain the frozen three-meat pizza, according to the FSIS release.

The recalled pizza products were produced on Jun. 30, 2021 and shipped nationwide.

There have been no confirmed reports of adverse reactions, the release stated.

ABC News reached out to Nestle for comment, but has not received word at this time.

 

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(WASHINGTON) — Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday it’s possible to provide both COVID-19 booster shots as well as doses for people who have not yet been vaccinated.

“I think it is also not the right thing to try to resolve it with an ‘or’ when you can resolve it with an ‘and,'” Bourla told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “It’s not, ‘Shall we give boosters or give primary doses to other people.’ I think the answer should be, ‘Let’s give both boosters and doses for other people.’”

With millions more Americans now newly eligible for a booster COVID-19 shot from Pfizer, Bourla’s optimism punctuates what’s become a protracted, hot-button issue amongst the scientific community over who needs the boost and when.

Just after midnight Friday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky endorsed her independent advisory panel’s recommendation for seniors and other medically vulnerable Americans to get a booster shot of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine six months after their second dose.

In a notable departure, Walensky partially overruled the panel by adding a recommendation for a third dose for people who are considered high risk due to where they work, such as nurses and teachers — a group the panel rejected in its recommendation.

The CDC’s final sign-off marked the starting gun for sleeves to start rolling up for a third shot at retail pharmacies and doctors’ offices across the country.

It also in part buttoned up what has become a seething scientific debate after the Biden administration announced there would be “boosters-for-all” before any review from the regulatory bodies or their independent groups. While the White House’s political appointees had endorsed President Joe Biden’s timeline, some of their career scientists and advisers vehemently objected to the incomplete data they were being asked to assess.

The booster debate has played out as the delta variant sweeps across states and threatens hard-fought gains against the virus here at home and as the World Health Organization continues to call for a moratorium on booster shots in the interest of more equitable distribution of primary vaccinations, as many still countries struggle with providing first and second doses.

Gathering world leaders virtually Wednesday on the U.N. General Assembly’s sidelines, Biden announced the U.S. would donate another half billion doses of Pfizer vaccine to lower-income nations.

Pfizer, the first vaccine maker to administer shots in the U.S. more than nine months ago, had cited data from Israel and elsewhere showing the vaccine’s robust protection began to wane with time. In April, Bourla predicted a third coronavirus dose was “likely” to be needed within a year of the primary two-dose course. In July, the company announced plans to ask the FDA to authorize a booster shot of the original vaccine six months after the second dose.

Earlier this month, Pfizer’s submitted brief to the FDA made the case that it’s time to “restore” full protection from the COVID-19 vaccines, even though they are still protecting most vaccinated people from being hospitalized.

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(NEW YORK) — One week after getting her first COVID-19 vaccine shot, Bernadette Ann Bowen said she started her period one day early.

Then, Bowen, a 31-year-old Ph.D. student at Bowling Green State University, said she experienced some of the worst menstrual cramps of her life.

“I started getting a headache and then started feeling cramps coming on,” Bowen told Good Morning America. “My nausea and abdominal pain became so severe at the peak of my cramps that I could barely stomach a few sips of water, as I laid there feeling like I was going to pass out from it all.”

After Bowen saw people on TikTok discussing similar changes in their menstrual cycles after being vaccinated, she said she was “stricken with fear” over what could happen when she received her second dose of the vaccine.

“A lot of people I saw said their experience was after the second shot, so I was literally stricken with fear for a whole month wondering what would happen,” she said. “I was so afraid that it would continue.”

Bowen though, like most women who have reported menstrual changes after the vaccine, experienced only the one-time change to her period.

Nonetheless, she described it as “unacceptable” that people who menstruate did not know ahead of time that the vaccine may cause changes to the timing or severity of their menstrual cycles, even if temporary.

“Not getting a single warning is unacceptable,” she said. “It would be one thing if we were given a single consideration, but just knowing the design of medicine is so biased that this wouldn’t have been reported as a warning, it’s telling.”

Now, nearly one year after the COVID-19 vaccines began to be distributed in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has committed $1.6 million in funding to “explore potential links between COVID-19 vaccination and menstrual changes,” according a news release.

The funding, announced last month, comes as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer booster shots Wednesday for high-risk Americans and adults over age 65. FDA’s acting commissioner, Dr. Janet Woodcock, said the list of high-risk Americans should include health care workers, teachers and grocery story workers, all industries with largely female workforces.

The research funding also comes months after people began to share on social media their experiences of short-term period side effects after being vaccinated.

Tens of thousands of people documented their side effects in an online database created by researchers Katharine Lee, of Washington University in St. Louis, and Kathryn Clancy, of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who each said they experienced unexpected menstrual cycles after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, and began to collect data.

The newly announced NIH funding, for which Lee and Clancy applied but were not selected, will go to researchers at five institutions: Boston University, Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University and Oregon Health and Science University.

The researchers will study everything from menstrual cycle changes reported on period tracking apps like Clue to menstrual changes in people with endometriosis and people trying to get pregnant, people who have not been vaccinated and teenagers. They will be examining how the vaccines may have affected flow, cycle length and pain, as well as exploring why COVID-19 vaccines may cause changes, according to Candace Tingen, Ph.D., program director of the Gynecologic Health and Disease Branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

“Exactly like you’d see on a medication, that it may cause drowsiness, we want to say to women, ‘If you get a booster, if you get a vaccine, you might have a slightly heavier period for a cycle or two,'” Tingen said. “That’s what we want when we go in to get vaccinated, so we know how to prepare.”

Data on menstrual side effects was not widely collected during clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines, which were conducted by the companies behind the vaccines, Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, according to Tingen.

She said the NIH was motivated to fund research both from reports of menstrual side effects as well as the misinformation that followed around menstrual changes and fertility.

“There was a lot of misinformation out there, and NIH sees its mandate as countering misinformation with accurate information,” Tingen said. “[Research] is something that we could do to step in and provide some real information about whether or not this is this is accurate.”

Experts in the medical community agree menstrual changes potentially linked to COVID-19 vaccines are likely to be temporary, and current evidence suggests that the vaccine has no impact on current or future fertility.

A possible explanation for temporary changes to period timing, flow and pain may have to do with how the body responds to physical and emotional stresses. Prior studies indicate that COVID-19 itself can be a stressor, leading to irregular menstrual cycles for some people.

Menstrual changes are also controlled by the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland in the brain, along with the ovaries, which use hormones as signals. These hormone signals can be disrupted when the body goes through changes that occur with an infection, and even a vaccine.

The research funded by NIH to help solidify these theories will include as many as 500,000 participants, some of whom are already involved in clinical studies, according to Tingen. She said because of the studies’ reach, transgender and nonbinary people will be included.

Dr. Laura Payne, director of the Clinical and Translational Pain Research Lab at McLean Hospital and an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is one of the five researchers receiving NIH funding.

She is studying teens ages 14 to 19 to explore why the COVID-19 vaccines may cause changes in periods.

Specifically, Payne is looking at whether the vaccines cause inflammatory markers to be released, which then affect estrogen, which then affects menstrual cycles.

“Right now, the data on this particular mechanism is pretty limited to animal studies so we don’t really know how inflammation affects estrogen,” Payne said. “I think if we can show that inflammation has an effect on the menstrual cycle, that can help us just better understand the different things that affect the menstrual cycle.”

“In the bigger scheme of things, we’re just putting the menstrual cycle and menstrual health to the forefront as an important part of medical research, and it just hasn’t been,” she said. “It’s certainly an additional variable, but it’s really important and it’s important for women even if it’s not causing any kind of dangerous condition, it’s an important measure of health for women.”

Payne called it a “miss” that changes to menstrual cycles were not looked at during the vaccine trials, but said she is hopeful that the work being done now will help prioritize menstrual research in the future.

“In the vaccine trials, what I’m guessing is that they were just looking for indicators of pretty severe health complications that would land somebody in the hospital and they didn’t feel like changes in the menstrual cycle were part of that,” she said. “There’s certainly an argument to be made for that, but I think with the anecdotal reports and with the research that myself and the other [principal investigators] will be doing, hopefully this will inform future trials to say maybe this isn’t a life-or-death situation, but it’s important to women and it’s important to include.”

In addition to speaking out like so many people did when it came to menstrual changes with the vaccines, Payne said people can also volunteer for clinical research in order to move research on menstruation forward.

“Volunteering for clinical research is one of the best things that you can do to support the type of research that you want to see,” she said. “One of the biggest obstacles that we face in clinical research is finding ways to access participants, particularly participants from diverse backgrounds, and that’s something that we really are focusing on and NIH is really committed so we get an understanding from diverse samples of people.”

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(NEW YORK) — A new study found that children whose mothers experienced depression during and soon after pregnancy are more likely to experience depression themselves.

While experts said more research is needed on the subject, they emphasized that this new finding reinforces the urgent need to identify and treat depression among pregnant women — not just for their sake, but potentially for the sake of their child as well.

“It’s definitely been proven that there’s genetic linkage for psychiatric disorders,” Dr. Gabrielle Shapiro, a child psychiatrist from the American Psychiatric Association, told ABC News. “And identifying [depression] in early childhood would be the best way to have an impact on … lifetime trajectory functioning” for children with mental illness.

In the study, researchers in the U.K. reviewed survey data from a large database of women who gave birth during the early 1990s. They focused on a subset of over 5,000 mothers and assessed their reported symptoms of depression, both during pregnancy and after they gave birth.

The children were also surveyed throughout childhood and young adulthood. Researchers found that children of depressed mothers not only had more symptoms of depression themselves but also that the symptoms escalated faster in them than they did in children without exposure to maternal depression.

“We found that the depression scores of offspring of mothers … increased at a greater rate over time — in other words, their scores went up by more points each year than offspring of non-depressed mothers,” Dr. Rebecca Pearson, co-author of the study, told ABC News.

The data also revealed a potential association between a father’s depression and childhood depression, though the study was not constructed to assess that relationship fully.

Although previous research has looked at the link between parental depression and childhood mental health, this study is the first to indicate that the timing of when a parent has depressive symptoms may contribute to a child’s mental health in a unique way.

In a press release, Dr. Joanne Black, chair of the Faculty of Perinatal Psychiatry at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said the study “shows that the timing of depression in parents (during pregnancy, after childbirth or both) and if the mother, father or both were affected, are all important risk factors for the child’s future mental health.”

Exactly why this timing appears to be important is still unknown, but may point to the importance of screening for depression during the peripartum period and supporting mothers with mental health conditions. It also begs the question: Are genetic factors that lead to depression passed from mother to child in the womb?

Although the findings are intriguing, it remains unclear if the results are applicable to the population at large, as this study was conducted in a part of the U.K. with little socioeconomic or racial diversity.

This matters to Shapiro, who stressed the importance of recognizing racial disparities in childhood mental health.

“It’s even more important to screen our [Black, indigenous, people of color] population and make it more acceptable for them to have early intervention and be OK with treatment discussions,” she said.

Moving forward, the study’s findings may help health care providers identify and treat children through supporting families with mental health needs.

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(NEW YORK) —  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent advisory panel has unanimously voted to recommend booster doses of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine for people aged 65 and older, along with long-term care facility residents, at least six months after their second dose.

The panel also voted to recommend booster doses for people between the ages of 50 and 64 years old who have underlying medical conditions, at least six months out from their second dose.

This recommendation roughly follows — but is slightly more specific — than authorization Wednesday night from the Food and Drug Administration, greenlighting the third shot for anyone 65 or older, as well as for people as young as 18, if they have a medical condition that puts them at risk of severe COVID-19 or if they work a frontline job that makes it more likely that they would get infected.

The vote also follows weeks of contentious back and forth amongst top health experts over who should get a booster dose and when — and whether it’s still premature to be asking the question. However, advisory panelists ultimately voted to recommend the booster shot, informed by data showing the gradually waning immunity from the vaccine impacting the elderly and high risk groups.

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(NEW YORK) — Pfizer just released its first safety data about COVID-19 vaccines for children ages 5 to 11, reassuring parents that a safe and effective vaccine soon could be available for those younger than 12.

A trial of 2,268 children showed that a smaller dose of Pfizer vaccine — one-third the amount given to adults and adolescents — provided robust and adequate immune responses among those ages 5 to 11.

If the FDA agrees with Pfizer’s assessment, finally those younger than 12 can get vaccinated — in this case, if authorized, with the smaller dosage.

But that smaller dosage has led some parents to question the vaccine’s effectiveness compared with a larger dose.

“You’ve got to have a cutoff point and do something that’s logistically feasible,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said Monday, speaking on CNN. “Parents should not be confused or concerned about that.”

Other experts have stressed that size isn’t everything. Because the lower dose still mounts a strong and sufficient antibody response to COVID-19, even an 11-year-old who’s taller or weighs more than a kid over 12 should be protected.

And experts involved in the Pfizer trial strongly recommend adhering to available dosage data for 5-to-11-year-olds because clinical research shows doing so is safe and effective — a different dose would just be an educated guess.

“This is clearly an important — very important — first step,” said Dr. Evan Anderson, a professor of pediatrics and medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and one of the principal investigators of the Pfizer trial for children.

At this point in the pandemic, more than 5 million American children — most not eligible for vaccination — have tested positive for COVID-19. Children make up 22.2% of the U.S. population but accounted for almost 30% of new COVID-19 cases in a single week, based on early September data compiled by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Prior clinical trials in adults and teens sought to identify a rough measure of vaccine efficacy, but because scientists already know vaccines are safe and effective, trials in younger children worked differently. Instead, this latest clinical trial focused on assessing children’s immune response based on analysis of their blood. These so-called immuno-bridging studies provide important information about the vaccine’s ability to mount immune responses for this group of children, none of whom could be vaccinated.

The Pfizer data showed that the smaller dose in younger children generated antibody levels comparable to 16-to-25 year-olds who received the standard 30-microgram doses.

“Despite the smaller dose, in the smaller children, the antibody response is as vigorous as what we find in older age groups. We’re seeing a robust antibody response meeting [a] protective threshold,” said Dr. Frank Esper, an infectious disease specialist at Cleveland Clinic Children’s.

In fact, researchers discovered that when 5-to-11-year-old children in the trial received the 30-microgram dose, they had more side effects. With the lower dosage, side effects mirrored those seen in teens and adults — pain at the injection site, headaches and fatigue.

Regardless of weight and size, children still should receive vaccine doses according to recommendations based on data, experts agreed, arguing it is better to stick to evidence rather than make an educated guess outside parameters of trials.

Dr. Robert Frenck, director of the Gamble Vaccine Research Center at Cincinnati Children’s and a principal investigator for the Pfizer trial, said the vaccine should not be given off-label with higher-than-recommended doses, citing the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society.

“I would stick with what the recommendation is for under 12 years of age,” he said. “I think it will be safe. I think it will be effective.”

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(NEW YORK) — In the early days of the pandemic, experts kept a close watch on the number of new cases — one of the key metrics signaling success or failure of public health measures. But with new variants leading to more frequent breakthrough infections, mild COVID-19 cases will likely still persist, even if every person in the country is fully vaccinated.

“Even before any vaccines were authorized … we knew that this was going to be an issue,” said Dr. Lynn Goldman, dean of the George Washington University’s Milken Institute of Public Health.

“No vaccine is 100% effective at preventing infection,” added Dr. Kimberly Fisher, professor of medicine at University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.

Now, public health and infectious disease experts are shifting their metric of success.

With vaccines still highly protective against severe illness, experts said we should focus less on cases, and instead on how many people are being hospitalized or dying.

“I think in some ways, the strong data around vaccines out of the gate created this illusion of perfection, which never was the case,” said John Brownstein, Ph.D., an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and a contributor to ABC News.

“The major goalposts should have always been the hospitalizations and deaths,” he said.

Many experts point to countries like Singapore as an example of living “with” the virus, rather than eradicating it completely. With more than 80% of the population fully vaccinated, the island nation is still seeing more than 1,000 cases on average per day, but very few deaths due to COVID-19.

Although there may be “increases in cases,” Brownstein said, “that is not resulting in real impact in hospitalizations and deaths. … That sort of divergence is super important.”

In the U.S., a peek into COVID-19 intensive care units around the country reveals an important and recurring theme: ICU cases and deaths are overwhelmingly among the unvaccinated. A study by the health department in North Carolina found unvaccinated individuals are 15 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than the vaccinated. Washington state’s King County, which includes Seattle, tracks the numbers daily with unvaccinated people being 42 times more likely to die over the past 30 days.

Emerging data from the post-COVID-19 vaccine era underscored vaccine success will not necessarily be measured in prevention of COVID-19, but overwhelming success at keeping people alive if they do.

“It makes sense to focus on rates of hospitalization and death for COVID-19 — both of which the vaccine is very effective at reducing,” said Kathleen Mazor, a professor of medicine at University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.

Public health experts hope that by focusing on this new metric for success, the nation can start prioritizing what’s important and readjust to the “new normal.”

Meanwhile, the overarching message to the vaccine-eligible population is clear: The vaccine is not simply intended to stop you from getting COVID, it’s so you live to talk about it if you do.

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(LOS ANGELES) — Karen Notzon’s daughter, Callie, began her first year of middle school this fall by opting out of in-person learning after initially deciding to return to the classroom.

The Huntington Beach, California, mother told ABC News there were many reasons why her daughter changed her decision — including the rising number of COVID-19 cases across the U.S. linked to the delta variant — but one of the biggest ones was that a particular circumstance left Callie ineligible for vaccination in time for classes.

The pre-teen turns 12 in November, and is not eligible for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine like some of her other classmates who had birthdays before her this year, Notzon said.

Many students like Callie, who are entering sixth or seventh grade this year, are anxiously waiting to get their shots.

While medical experts say there is little that can be done for those soon-to-be 12-year-olds until the vaccines are approved for younger people, they say there are some tips that schools and families can take to ensure that each child is safe this year.

Annette Anderson, the deputy director for the Johns Hopkins Center for Safe and Healthy Schools, told ABC News that middle and high schools are dealing with a tough time going back to classes as there are scores of students who haven’t received their COVID-19 vaccines. As of Sept. 13, 52% of Americans between 12 and 15 have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Anderson, a former public school administrator and parent of a teenager, said the situation is very frustrating for those waiting for their child to age into the eligibility threshold, and could be harmful to students’ emotional and mental wellbeing.

“This is a tough time for schools. We’ve never been in a situation like this,” she said. “You are building the plane as you’re flying it.”

Notzon said she is more comfortable keeping Callie at home until she is fully vaccinated for that very reason and because they have an elderly member of the family living in the house.

“We’ve had high anxiety putting our daughter in a position like that. It seems like a risk,” she said.

Dr. Jessica Justman, an associate professor of medicine in at the Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told ABC News that parents with children on the cusp of vaccine eligibility that choose in-person classes will have a better chance of staying safe if the school sticks to strict measures, especially with masking.

Until more students receive their shots, indoor masking is the only line of defense from catching the virus, she said.

“It won’t be perfect, but whatever amount of time they spend wearing a mask is more time protected,” Justman said.

Katie Berkaw of Austin, Texas, told ABC News that her family is taking those same precautions seriously for her son, Connor, who turns 12 in October.

Although the hospitalizations and COVID-19 cases in Texas have been skyrocketing over the last few weeks, Berkaw said her family ultimately decided that it was best for her to attend classes in person during that wait.

“Being back on campus is important for his social engagement,” she said.

In the meantime, Connor has been wearing a mask, as is required by his school district, washing his hands and avoiding big indoor events until he gets his shot, according to Berkaw.

“There is always a little bit of nervousness that he could get it,” she said. “But he understands the level of cleanliness that is needed for himself.”

Sharon Gucker, a single mom from Nassau County, New York, told ABC News that her 11-year-old son, Owen, has also been cautious at school, wearing a mask and avoiding big crowds, but he is near the end of the tunnel.

The seventh-grader, who is the youngest of Gucker’s three sons, turns 12 this Saturday and has already scheduled an appointment to get his vaccine at a New York state vaccination center, she said.

This has been a moment the entire family has been waiting for, as they’ve been putting off many big activities due to the wait, including visiting family members on the West Coast.

“We’re still going to still wear our masks, but I think after that we will feel like a great weight off our shoulders,” Gucker said.

Justman and the other experts said practicing patience is the best things parents with kids who turn 12 later in the school year can do.

While it is certainly a question of when the vaccines will be made eligible for people under 12 and not if, Justman said parents can have some relief knowing that their seventh- or sixth-grader is in a classroom with some classmates who have some protection against the virus.

“You can look at this from a glass half full perspective,” she said. “It’s more fortunate for these 11-year-olds to be in a classroom with so many people who are vaccinated.”

Anyone who needs help scheduling a free vaccine appointment can log onto vaccines.gov.

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(NEW YORK) — Sickle cell disease is an inherited red blood cell disorder that can cause debilitating pain and lead to lifelong complications. For years there have been limited improvements in awareness and treatment options, but that seems to be changing.

“My journey was kind of up and down like a roller coaster,” said Kim Jones, a 52-year-old woman in New York who shared her experience with ABC News about living with sickle cell disease since she was 3 years old. “When I was younger, I would get a lot of painful crises, usually in the joints, wrists, ankles.”

Jones became a second-grade teacher, but ultimately had to quit because her symptoms worsened due to the stressful demands of the job and what she felt was the lack of understanding and support from her school administration.

“There were days when I still went to work in so much pain. The doctor begged me to take days off and I couldn’t, I was scared I would lose my job. I ended up leaving that school,” she recalled.

Her experience with the disease has led her to advocate for sickle cell disease awareness and its scientific advancements.

September is Sickle Cell Awareness Month and Jones is sharing her experience so people become aware of the need to be screened, to raise the need for blood and bone marrow donors and to encourage the medical community to keep working on new medications and other treatments.

“In the past there has been very little support for people living with sickle disease, and minimal funding to research how to best treat it, at least in part due to racism in the medical system,” Dr. Susanna A. Curtis, assistant director of the Montefiore Adult Sickle Cell Center and assistant professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told ABC News.

But just last week, Curtis at Montefiore Medical Center received a five-year grant from the NIH to investigate the efficacy and safety of a drug called dronabinol, a THC-containing pill normally for nausea and vomiting, to see if it could treat chronic pain in adults living with sickle cell disease. This grant will also allow them to determine if dronabinol can reduce inflammation, which Curtis said “is known to play an important role in sickle disease.”

Her research grant could determine if dronabinol could be added to the toolkit of sickle cell therapies, potentially improving the quality of life in patients with the disease.

Blood cells are normally round, but in people with sickle cell disease, they form into a C-shape, causing the cells to clump up, leading to severe pain.

Sickle cell disease affects millions of people worldwide, but disproportionately those of African descent.

Experts aren’t sure exactly why people of African descent are more likely to inherit the disease, but it may be linked to the fact that the abnormally shaped blood cells from which the illness gets its name have one potentially small but unexpected benefit: protection from malaria, a blood-borne disease.

“Sickle cell trait is protective against the effects of malaria, so people who lived in high malaria areas are more likely to reproduce and pass on that trait,” said Dr. Renee Crichlow, vice-chair of Health Equity at Boston University School of Medicine and chief medical officer of Codman Square Health Center. “So people with African ancestry are more likely to have the sickle trait.”

It affects approximately 100,000 Americans and occurs in one out of every 365 Black or African-American births, according to the CDC.

The only cure for sickle cell disease is a bone marrow or stem cell transplant. This is a hospital based-procedure that takes healthy stem cells from a donor and puts them into someone’s bone marrow, allowing the person to make new healthy cells. According to the NIH, the treatment has been successful in about 85 out of 100 children. However, it is a risky procedure that not a lot of people can tolerate. “It is only for patients with such severe disease,” Crichlow said. “The treatment can be highly toxic, and as a result, there are very few of these transplants that are done.”

Other treatment options vary for each person and depend on the symptoms. Treatments can include: receiving blood transfusions, staying hydrated and taking medications to help with the pain. Painful crises are often triggered by things like cold or dehydration, so part of managing the illness has to do with understanding those triggers.

“A person with sickle cell disease may need to take both chronic medications, like hydroxyurea, to help prevent crises, need occasional blood transfusions, and occasionally very heavy medications, including pain medications to treat the severe acute symptoms as a result of a sickle cell crisis,” Crichlow said.

Kim has been taking hydroxyurea for the past five years. This drug, originally used for chemotherapy, was FDA-approved for sickle cell disease in adults in 1998 and then in 2017 for children. So as she grew up, there were limited amounts of innovations in sickle cell therapies. “I had to start realizing environments that would trigger a sickle cell crisis, like the weather, if it’s too cold. I would get chills and have to not participate in certain activities,” Jones said.

Thankfully, efforts are being made to change this. In 2020, Congress released a proclamation to highlight the need for research and treatment of sickle cell disease.

Experts also said more could be done by the public. One way to bring more attention to the disease — and the need to find a cure for it — is simply to normalize talking about it.

“There is a tremendous cloak of shame covering sickle cell disease,” said Ginger Davis, the development and communication consultant for the Sickle Cell Thalassemia Patients Network.

The disorder can seem invisible to those who don’t have it. And for people who have it, there is often the emotional challenge of trying to explain what is happening while going through a very physically painful and draining experience. This was something that personally affected Jones.

“I went to school and college without telling anybody,” she said. “I was with a friend of mine and I got sick and she had no idea how to help me because I never told her I had sickle cell.”

Since 2006, all newborns in the U.S. are screened for sickle cell at birth. However, everyone can and should be tested for sickle cell.

“If you were born before newborn testing began in 2006, you could ask your doctor for a simple blood test to determine if you carry the sickle-trait,” Crichlow said. Continued research and public efforts towards the awareness treatment of sickle cell disease can benefit the thousands of people living with it.

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