Jake Tapper Grills CDC Director on School Reopenings: ‘I Feel a Little Dispirited After This Conversation’

CNN’s Jake Tapper confronted CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky Sunday on when exactly schools can reopen across the country.

The CDC recently released new guidelines on how schools can be reopened, which emphasized the need for continued mitigation and contact tracing if it can be done safely.

Tapper directly asked Walensky, “Should all students be back in classrooms before the end of this school year?”

She said that they want to advocate for having more kids in school “as our community spread comes down.”

Tapper questioned why they don’t just open schools right now, asking, “Can you point to any scientific reasons for students in the United States not to return to in-person classes tomorrow as long as schools are taking the five steps that we referred to earlier — masking, cleansing, etc.?”

Walensky responded they don’t want to risk bringing community disease in the classroom, noting the high rate of transmission across the country, and emphasized the need for universal masking and social distancing.

“But what’s the science?” Tapper asked.

He noted the serious “psychological damage” on children during this pandemic and at one point said, “It seems to me like you’re saying the schools are safe to open as long as everybody takes these steps, but not everybody is taking these steps, therefore, we’re not going to open the schools. Do I have that right?”

Walesnky said they need to make sure all those steps are happening, including not just mitigation but cleaning of surfaces and hand-washing.

Towards the end of the interview, Tapper ended up saying, “I feel a little dispirited after this conversation, because I had high hopes that schools would be able to resume in-person learning because so many scientists and health officials, including you and Dr. Fauci and others, had been talking about the science supports opening the schools as much as possible.”

You can watch the full interview above, via CNN.

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