Dr. Birx Admits Trump Administration Has No Idea What Child Virus Transmission/Infection Rate is as They Push to Reopen Schools

As President Donald Trump pushes hard to reopen schools, Dr. Deborah Birx explained to reporters that there isn’t enough data to know the infection or transmission rate of the coronavirus among children.

At a White House coronavirus task force briefing Wednesday, there were many questions about the safety of reopening schools, particularly for vulnerable teachers, parents, and students with medical conditions.

CDC chief Dr. Robert Redfield tried to quiet some of those concerns by telling reporters that “we really don’t have evidence that children are driving the transmission cycle of this.”

But a few minutes later, Dr. Birx revealed the flaw in Redfield’s assurance when she was asked “What’s the infection rate among children and what’s the very latest in terms of how the virus presents in children, how children transmit the virus to older adults… and what’s the best practice in terms of testing children?”

Birx spent several minutes breezily explaining that the government doesn’t know what the infection or transmission rate is among children — most of whom have been out of school since the pandemic exploded.

Those are all good questions and I think it really comes to the evidence base of what do we have as far as testing in children. So if you look across all of the tests that we’ve done and when we have the age, the portion that is been the lowest tested portion is the under 10-year-olds. So we’re putting into place other ways to get testing results from them and looking at antibody in the discarded samples and try to really figure this out.

Because parents have really done an amazing job of protecting their children, I think Americans have done a great job in keeping infection rates low in children in the sheltering time, and keeping infection rates right now in this new cases, originally I think we saw great protection of people with comorbidities.

We are worried now that as cases spread, that it’s getting to the older parents and the grandparents. And I call and again every multi-general household get tested and protect those in the household. And we do know that there are children with vulnerabilities and certainly within the CDC plan and Department of Education it’s protecting those children also from getting exposed to the virus because we do know there are children with comorbidities, we know that there are children in America with cancer and undergoing chemotherapy.

But when you ask that question, the parents have so protected their children, and remember early on we said test if you have symptoms, and now we know that if you’re under 18, the majority of you don’t have symptoms. And so really figuring out, and there’s universities working around the country on a saliva test so it would be easy, easier for children to put saliva in a tube, to basically, what we call “spitting” into a tube, spitting through a straw into a tube, and looking at that kind of innovation and testing, and what admiral Giraud has been working on very hard is this antigen based testing and getting that equipment into the vulnerable areas like nursing homes assisted living and other places but also considering how a school district could use that would make it much easier to test and to use saliva.

So all of those are being worked on and it’s why we’ve been pushing on the antigen tests, I know you heard me talk about that in April. We’re pushing on that because we think it is important for testing of students and testing in universities. But we have, our data is skewed. Originally to people with symptoms, and then skewed to adults over 18. And so we are looking very closely into that category by using our antibody tests.

Dr. Birx went on to note that mortality among children — which doesn’t address transmission to others — has been low, but added “Until we know how many have been infected, we have no evidence that there is significant mortality in children without cause existing diseases.”

Trump has vowed to put “a lot of pressure” on states to reopen schools, and has even threatened to withhold funding for schools that do not resume in-person classes.

Watch the clip above via ABC11.