California will not require schoolchildren to be immunized for COVID-19 after Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday that he is pausing a state mandate set to go into effect before the upcoming academic year while an influential Democratic lawmaker said he will drop his bill pushing even stricter inoculation rules.

Newsom made headlines in October when he announced California would be the first state to mandate the vaccine in schools once shots were fully approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for children ages 12 and older, with the requirement going into effect by July 1.

On Thursday, the California Department of Public Health announced that the timeline will be pushed back to at least July 1, 2023, since the FDA has not yet fully approved the vaccine for children and the state will need time afterward to initiate its rule-making process.

Fauci: 'You Use Lockdowns to Get People Vaccinated'
The Daily Wire reported:

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said this week that governments use lockdowns to "get people vaccinated."

Fauci, who served on former President Donald Trump's White House Coronavirus Task Force and is now President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser on COVID-19, discussed coronavirus lockdowns in China on Wednesday during an interview on MSNBC. Fauci said that China has a "number of problems," noting that the country's strict lockdowns would never be able to be implemented in the United States, "although that prevents the spread of infection."

"But lockdown has its consequences," he continued. "You use lockdowns to get people vaccinated so that when you open up, you won't have a surge of infections, because you are dealing with an immunologically naive population, to the virus, because they've not really been exposed because of the lockdown."