What do we want to tell parents that they can do for our country right now, to make this a safer environment for students going back to school?
They should encourage and see to it that their children get vaccinated. We have a full approval by the FDA, the stamp of approval of the Pfizer vaccine and very likely, soon … the full approval for the Moderna vaccine. I believe you’re going to see many more mandates where colleges and universities, for example, are going to say that if you want to be present in class, in this particular institution, you’ve got to be vaccinated. I believe you’re going to see a lot of that throughout the country.
Do you believe that mask mandates violate freedom?
Although we respect people’s individual freedom, I think [mask mandates are] a good thing. If you want to protect the young people in school in the classroom, you want them to be vaccinated. In the elementary schools and middle schools, we can vaccinate kids 12 to 15 years old and older. For the children who are younger than that, you’ve got to provide a protective cocoon around them. You do this by making sure that the teachers and the personnel in the school are vaccinated. It is superimposed upon that, that you wear masks because some of the children are too young, at this point, to be vaccinated. You want to make sure the classroom is a safe place.
