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  • Fauci Claims He Had ‘Nothing to Do’ With School Closures. His Own Statements Suggest Otherwise

    The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped, “Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.”

    The line comes to mind after watching Dr. Anthony Fauci’s interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl over the weeknd. In the interview, Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was asked whether it was a “mistake” for schools to remain shut down for so long during the pandemic.

    “I don’t want to use the word ‘mistake,’ Jon, because if I do, it gets taken out of the context that you’re asking me the question on,” Fauci explained on Sunday. “We should realize, and have realized, that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that.”

    Fauci is correct that there were serious “deleterious” consequences of school closures. For example, it was recently reported that the class of 2022 saw average ACT scores plummet to the lowest level in more than thirty years, and there’s no reason to believe that younger students didn’t experience similar results. Lost learning is hardly the only “deleterious” consequence, however; the decline of mental health among youths during lockdowns has also been well chronicled.

    Some may see Fauci’s response as reasonable, because he’s now acknowledging the collateral damage of these policies. The problem is that Fauci is not actually conceding anything. Nobody—and I mean nobody—ever believed you could shut down schools (and society more broadly) for any meaningful amount of time and not experience some “deleterious” consequences.

    But it gets worse. Fauci goes on to claim he had nothing to do with the damaging policy.

    “I ask anybody to go back over the number of times that I have said we’ve got to do everything we can to keep the schools open, no one plays that clip,” Fauci told Karl. “They always come back and say, ‘Fauci was responsible for closing schools.’ I had nothing to do [with it].”

    Fauci may not have sat on a school board or wielded police power during the pandemic, but his claim that he bears no responsibility for school closing takes chutzpah. It’s undeniable that many schools, cities, and state governments shut down schools precisely because of what the White House’s top medical advisor was saying, and what Fauci was saying was clear.

    The journalist Jordan Schachtel has a timeline of Fauci’s statements on school reopenings, and it’s worth examining.

    Fauci calls for a nationwide shutdown of schools.

    “The one thing I do advise and I said this in multiple hearings and multiple briefings, that right now we have to start implementing both containment and mitigation. And what was done when you close the schools is mitigation.”

    The New York Times, America’s paper of record, reports that Fauci ‘gave his blessing’ to Mayor Bill DeBlasio to shut down the New York City school system.

    Fauci slams Ron DeSantis after the Florida governor announced he wanted to get schools open “as soon as possible.”

    “If you have a situation where you don’t have a real good control over an outbreak and you allow children together, they will likely get infected,” Fauci stated.

    Fauci has a testy exchange with Sen. Rand Paul, who argued schools should remain open.

    Fauci dismissed the idea that schools should be opened back up fully because “we don’t know everything about the virus.”

    CNBC reports: Fauci then turned Paul’s own phrasing on him. “You used the word we should be ‘humble’ about what we don’t know. I think that falls under the fact that we don’t know everything about this virus, and we really had better be very careful, particularly when it comes to children,” Fauci said. “Because the more and more we learn, we’re seeing things about what this virus can do that we didn’t see from the studies in China or in Europe. For example, right now children presenting with Covid-19 who actually have a very strange inflammatory syndrome, very similar to Kawasaki syndrome,” Fauci said.

    In August and September, Fauci was singing the same tune. Schools could open for instruction—after the virus was under control.

    Fauci’s about-face did not go unnoticed. Other health researchers questioned his attempt to distance himself from school closures.

    “Why is he saying he did not encourage, suggest and recommend lockdown and school closure?” asked Vinay Prasad, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. “Certainly he didn’t make the call by himself, but he used the weight of his reputation in science to advocate for these policies… .”

    This is not the first time Fauci has attempted to deflect blame for school closures and lockdowns. In a July interview with Newsweek deputy editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, Fauci was asked if he would recommend closing schools again, considering the amount of collateral damage the policies caused.

    “First of all, I didn’t recommend locking anything down,” Fauci responded, adding that that was the purview of the CDC.

    Fauci was correct that it was the proper purview of the CDC to make specific policy recommendations, not the head of NIAID, whose job was to see that his agency provided sound scientific research to the CDC. Yet this did not seem to stop the doctor from becoming essentially the official spokesman of the federal government’s public health response, conducting literally hundreds of interviews during the pandemic and posing for numerous magazine shoots. (Many public health experts I’ve spoken with say this is precisely why science became so politicized during the pandemic.)

    Now that these policies are rightly being criticized for their “deleterious” consequences, Fauci—who grew quite wealthy as a result of all the media attention he received—is claiming he had “nothing to do” with the policies.

    Fauci’s claims are almost too hard to believe, but they call to mind a piece of wisdom from economist Thomas Sowell.

    “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong,” Sowell once observed.

    The pandemic shows just how right Sowell was.


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


  • CDC: Schools With Mask Mandates Didn’t See Statistically Significant Different Rates of COVID Transmission From Schools With Optional Policies

    The ACLU on Tuesday announced it is bringing a lawsuit against South Carolina over its mask policy.

    The Palmetto State is one of seven states—along with Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Arizona, Utah, and Florida— that have policies in place banning schools from having mask policies. Thirteen states, meanwhile, have laws that mandate masks in schools. The majority of states (30) allow school districts to determine their own mask policies.

    “We’re suing to end South Carolina’s ban on mask requirements in schools, with Disability Rights South Carolina, Able South Carolina, and parents,” the ACLU said. “Students with disabilities are effectively being excluded from public schools because of this ban. Courts must intervene.”

    The ACLU’s action is the latest salvo in a battle over a question that divides America: should schools be able to compel children to wear face coverings in school?

    With fall approaching, many Americans are wondering whether they should send their children to school with a mask—or if they’ll even have a choice.

    A recent New York magazine article states that the science on masks “remains uncertain,” but noted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in May published a large-scale study of COVID transmission in US schools.

    The study, which analyzed some 90,000 elementary students in 169 Georgia schools from November 16 to December 11, found that there was no statistically significant difference in schools that required students to wear masks compared to schools where masks were optional.

    “The 21% lower incidence in schools that required mask use among students was not statistically significant compared with schools where mask use was optional,” the CDC said. “This finding might be attributed to higher effectiveness of masks among adults, who are at higher risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection but might also result from differences in mask-wearing behavior among students in schools with optional requirements.”

    As New York magazine’s David Zweig noted, these findings, as well as other statistically insignificant preventive measures, “cast doubt on the impact of many of the most common mitigation measures in American schools.”

    The CDC’s findings on masks and other preventive measures would not be particularly noteworthy or controversial outside the US. As New York magazine noted, many European nations have exempted students from mask mandates—including the UK, all of Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and even France and Italy—though with varying age cutoffs. The results have not been dire.

    “Conspicuously, there’s no evidence of more outbreaks in schools in those countries relative to schools in the U.S., where the solid majority of kids wore masks for an entire academic year and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future,” wrote Zweig. “These countries, along with the World Health Organization, whose child-masking guidance differs substantially from the CDC’s recommendations, have explicitly recognized that the decision to mask students carries with it potential academic and social harms for children and may lack a clear benefit.”

    These findings in the US, however, are another matter.

    Masks have been one of the most polarizing issues in the country during the pandemic, perhaps because US policy has whipsawed back and forth. Americans remain bitterly divided on the issue. There have been careers ruined, messy retractions, and endorsements lost.

    In particular, the CDC’s findings are not helpful to politicians and bureaucrats who continue to argue that students must be masked during school.

    “Whether [students] are vaccinated or not, they need to wear a mask,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said during a recent panel discussion streamed online.

    For this reason or some other, the CDC determined to not include its finding that “required mask use among students was not statistically significant compared with schools where mask use was optional” in the summary of its report, which has received very little media attention to date.

    Meanwhile, the mask wars are heating up.

    The Biden Administration recently directed Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to employ “all of his oversight authorities and legal actions” against governors preventing schools from passing mask mandates. Cardona acted swiftly.

    “These states are needlessly placing students, families, and educators at risk,” the Education Secretary wrote in a public letter. “Yet in each of these states, there are also educators and others who are taking steps to protect the health and safety of their school communities.”

    The CDC’s findings are hardly the only research on the issue of masks and COVID transmission, and the study will not be the final word—in large part because masks are too politically divisive to allow either side to “win.” The question is why.

    The economist Ludwig von Mises noted many years ago that a great deal of modern social conflict stems from a struggle over who gets to design the world, public authorities or individuals. Masks are no different. By removing this decision from the individual, public health officials turned masks into a political conflict.

    Masks are no longer simply a matter of individual or public health. Bear in mind, children face a low risk of falling sick or being hospitalized with COVID—with or without a face mask. Small children are far more likely to die of the flu, a car accident, a swimming pool, cancer or some other ailment than COVID-19, CDC data show. The battle of school masks mandates has now become a political conflict, part of a larger struggle between the individual and collectivism.

    “Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group—whether to a race, class or state does not matter,” Ayn Rand once observed. “Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called ‘the common good.’”

    In modern America, the common good now means using any means necessary to coerce individuals to get vaccinated and wear masks—including government coercion and public shame in various forms. The health of the collective—both literal and figurative—demands it.

    This is unhealthy, some say, and potentially dangerous.

    Martin Kulldorff, a professor at Harvard Medical School who studies infectious diseases, recently observed that the way we’re treating the spread of COVID-19 is unique compared to other pandemics throughout human history.

    “For thousands of years, disease pathogens have spread from person to person. Never before have carriers been blamed for infecting the next sick person,” Kulldorff noted on Twitter. “That is a very dangerous ideology.”

    Indeed it is.

    Whether masks promote health is unclear—many Europeans without mask mandates have far lower COVID mortality rates than the US. What is far more certain—in light of the lessons of history—is that a healthy society is one that empowers individuals with choice and freedom.

    Jon Miltimore


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


  • CT School District Apologizes For Blocking Conservative Websites

    On the website of Connecticut’s Regional School District 14 is a commendable, but somewhat out-of-context, commitment to relative Internet freedom for public school students, dated June 20.

    Regional School District 14 takes the position that while it is obviously critical to block specific categories of websites as required by law (e.g., pornography, etc.), the blocking of otherwise appropriate websites, regardless of political or religious viewpoints, is WRONG.

    The statement goes on to note that “On Region 14’s computers, some websites were blocked, while others were not,” and it was all a big technical error.

    A letter dated the previous day gives us a little of the awkward background in this story.

    In recent weeks, a student conducting research on the district’s network came upon a pattern of information access through the district’s content filtering service…

    the district has pressed Dell SonicWall for more information about how websites are assigned to categories and why there are apparent inconsistencies, as discovered by the student, in classifications particularly along conservative and liberal lines. Many of the liberal sites accessible to the student fell into the “not rated” category, which was unblocked while many of the conservative sites were in the “political/advocacy group” which is accessible to teachers but not to students. The district is trying to determine the reason for the inconsistency and if the bias is pervasive enough to justify switching to another content filtering provider.

    Uh huh. As it turns out, high school student Andrew Lampart was assigned to do a report on gun control, and quickly discovered that the school Internet connection allowed him access to only one side of the debate. Then he found that the school permitted access to only one side of many debates—permitting access to gun control groups and liberal organizations, but not their counterparts. Whoops.

    Full article: http://reason.com/bl … pologizes-for-blocki