Dr. Fauci got it wrong, and schoolchildren are paying a high price | Opinion
If you want proof that Anthony S. Fauci has no idea of the damage done by the pandemic lockdown policies he advocated, here it is: Asked by Fox News’s Neil Cavuto this week if he regrets the school closures that kept kids out of the classroom and “forever damaged them,” Fauci replied, “I don’t think it’s forever irreparably damaged anyone.”
His ignorance and lack of remorse are stunning. “Children fell far behind in school during the first year of the pandemic and have not caught up,” writes David Leonhardt of the New York Times. One study by Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research found that students who stayed home for most of 2020-2021 lost the equivalent of about 50 percent of a typical school year’s math learning. Black and Hispanic students, as well as students in schools with high poverty rates, were disproportionately damaged. A 2021 McKinsey & Company study found that schools with majority Black populations were six months behind in math and reading. A March Brookings study found that test-score gaps between students in low-poverty and high-poverty elementary schools grew approximately 20 percent in math and 15 percent in reading during the 2020-2021 school year. Curriculum Associates found that schools serving majority Black and Latino students reported “almost double the amount of unfinished learning” in third-grade reading and math than did schools schools where the majority of students were White.
This damage is irreparable: If kids don’t learn to read and do basic math, they can’t perform expected work in subsequent grades and will fall further and further behind. The cumulative learning losses, McKinsey noted, could reduce students’ lifetime earnings by $49,000 to $61,000. And a study by professors from Yale, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Amsterdam projects that “one year of school closures will cost ninth graders in the poorest communities a 25% decrease in their post-educational earning potential.”
No serious person disputes the irreparable damage from school closures — except Fauci. Lockdowns produced the “largest increase in educational inequity in a generation,” Thomas Kane, an author of the Harvard study, told the Times. “We haven’t seen this kind of academic achievement crisis in living memory,” says Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The American Academy of Pediatrics last October declared a pandemic-induced national state of emergency for children’s mental health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the number of emergency room visits for suspected suicide attempts by girls ages 12 to 17 rose 51% from early 2019 to the same period of 2021.
Fauci told Fox News he was “one of the people that said we have to do everything we can to get the children back in school.” But, in 2020, he argued for nationwide school closures and criticized Republican governors such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis who resisted them, warning that if “you don’t have a real good control over an outbreak and you allow children together, they will likely get infected.”
That summer, as students were supposed to be returning for the 2020-2021 school year, he urged that while the “default position” should be to open schools, this should apply to students in areas where transmission was low, while those in higher-risk zones should still be in hybrid or virtual learning. Yet according to Brown University economist Emily Oster, we had known for some time that schools were not superspreaders, even in high-risk areas. Fauci’s caveats gave an excuse for teachers unions to resist a return to in-person learning and ultimately kept millions of kids out of the classroom.
Moreover, school closures were rooted in the failure of the public health establishment — which Fauci helped lead — to recognize that kids were the least vulnerable to COVID. Schools were shut down because children are usually the most vulnerable to a contagion. But we now know that COVID is generally no more dangerous for kids than a typical flu. Indeed, Leonhardt says that “flu can be deadlier for children than COVID has been, even though most children receive a flu vaccine.” A 2021 German study found zero deaths from covid among healthy 5- to 17-year-olds from March 2020 to May 2021. Zero. Far from being vectors of transmission, schools were among the safest places to be in some areas — because the COVID case rate for students and staff in schools was lower than in the community.
School closures were just one element of Fauci’s disastrous pandemic leadership. From January to March 2020, Fauci incorrectly assured us the virus was not spreading in the United States when, in fact, it was spreading like wildfire. Then he told us not to wear masks because “people keep fiddling with the mask and touching their face,” which could make them sick. A few months later, he admitted that he said this because “masks were in very short supply” — and he wanted to save them for healthcare workers. His tenure encompassed catastrophic failures of detection, testing and masking, and he championed lockdown policies that had little to no effect on covid-19 mortality but imposed enormous economic and social costs we are still paying to this day.
Never has anyone who got so much wrong for so long been so lionized as Anthony Fauci.
Marc Thiessen writes a column for The Post on foreign and domestic policy.
The Washington Post
