The Director of the CDC Dr. Robert Redfield has admitted that schools are one of the “safest places” for kids.

According to The Daily Wire:

CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said on Thursday that K-12 schools should remain open because data shows that schools are among the “safest places” that kids can be from the pandemic, and attempts to close schools are nothing more than an “emotional response.”

“Today, there’s extensive data that we have—we’ve gathered over the last two to three months—that confirm that K-12 schools can operate with face-to-face learning and they can do it safely and they can do it responsibly,” Redfield said. “The infections that we’ve identified in schools when they’ve been evaluated were not acquired in schools. They were actually acquired in the community and in the household.”

“Today, as Dr. Birx said, our big threat for transmission is not the public square, it’s small family gatherings, family gatherings where people become more comfortable, they remove their face-mask when they get together and it’s this silent epidemic that begins to transmit,” Redfield continued. “But it’s not interschool transmission. The truth is, for kids K-12, one of the safest places they can be, from our perspective, is to remain in school, and it’s really important that following the data, making sure we don’t make emotional decisions about what to close and what not to close, and I’m here to say clearly the data strongly supports that K-12 schools—as well as institutes of higher learning—really are not where we’re having our challenges.”

He added, “And it would be counterproductive from my point of view, from a public health point of view, just in containing the epidemic, if there was an emotional response, to say, ‘Let’s close the schools.’”

Redfield admitted earlier this year that the risk of suicide, drugs, and the seasonal flu all represented a “far greater threat” to kids than COVID.