During Monday’s broadcast of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Dr. Anthony Fauci defended the move to require masks for children in kindergarten through third grade amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Fauci told host Hugh Hewitt that although it is a “difficult situation,” there is an uptick, as a result of the Delta variant of the coronavirus, of younger children being hospitalized with a “more severe disease.” He advised that the masking of that age group could be a “temporary thing.”

“[W]e have a disagreement that I want to air with you,” Hewitt said to Fauci. “My friend, Chuck Todd, disagrees with me, too. It’s about children K-3. And as the grandfather of three of them, and I talk to a lot of parents, they don’t believe masks are a good thing. They believe they are developmentally difficult to deal with. They can hide developmental disabilities. They impair speech and hearing, and that they’re not very effective. And boy, they feel this strongly, and it’s what the UK felt. My grandkids were in school in England last year. Why do you disagree with the UK specialists and with the Wall Street Journal this morning, article by Dr. Makary and Dr. Meissner?”

“You know, Hugh, that is a difficult situation because you really do have to balance the risk of transmission versus the real risk, and I’m not putting down what you’re saying. It’s not comfortable, obviously, for children to wear masks, particularly the younger children,” Fauci replied. “But you know, what we’re starting to see, Hugh, and I think it’s going to unfold even more as the weeks go by, that this virus not only is so extraordinarily transmissible, but we’re starting to see pediatric hospitals get more and more younger people and kids not only numerically, but what seems to be more severe disease.”

“Now we’re tracking that, the CDC is tracking that really very carefully, so it’s going to be a balance that we would feel very badly if we all of a sudden said OK, kids, don’t wear masks, then you find out retrospectively that this virus in a very, very strange and unusual way is really hitting kids really hard,” he added. “That’s the thing. Nobody feels comfortable at all about having children be put in a situation where it might ultimately, the way some people study, have some impact on them. But hopefully, this will be a temporary thing, temporary enough that it doesn’t have any lasting negative impact on them.”

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