Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top adviser to two presidential administrations during the COVID-19 pandemic, changed course in an interview Tuesday, agreeing that closing schools for more than a year due to the virus was a “ error”, while arguing that The initial decision to close the classrooms was correct.
“Keeping it away for a year was not a good idea,” the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) told “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil while discussing his new memoir “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey.” in public service.”
“So it was a mistake in hindsight?” -Dokoupil asked. “Will we not repeat it?”
“Absolutely, yes,” Fauci responded.
Fauci, 83, has previously maintained the recommendation that children be forced out of classrooms and into remote learning alternatives, both in sworn testimony in Congress and in comments to the press.
During the summer of 2020, as many schools were considering reopening, Fauci clashed with former President Donald Trump, touting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines that forced closures based on community spread in general.
“I disagree with @CDCgov on their very strict and expensive guidelines for opening schools. While they want them to be open, they are asking schools to do very impractical things. I will meet them!!!” Trump posted on Twitter on July 8, 2020.
“There may be some areas where the level of the virus is so high that it would be unwise to bring children back to school,” Fauci said in August, another time warning of an “insidious rise” in cases as schoolchildren prepared. for the pandemic. year.
That same month, when asked by “PBS NewsHour” host Judy Woodruff if “many months of virtual learning” would be the norm, Fauci responded: “In some places, Judy, that may be the case.”
In many interviews, the NIAID director warned that the “default position” should be to reopen classrooms, while emphasizing the importance of first ensuring transmission rates were low.
When some schools allowed students and teachers in September 2020, less than 1% showed cases of COVID-19, according to Brown University’s National COVID-19 School Response Data Dashboard.
In January 2021, a CDC study showed “little evidence that schools have contributed significantly to the increase in community transmission,” but following a pressure campaign by powerful teachers unions against the Biden administration, most Classrooms would remain closed until the next school year.
“I don’t want to use the word ‘mistake,’” Fauci told ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl in an October 2022 interview when asked about school closures after announcing his retirement as the House’s chief medical adviser. Blanca and director of the NIAID.
“If I do, it’s taken out of the context of what you’re asking me the question about,” Fauci said. “We should realize, and we have realized, that there will be detrimental collateral consequences when something like this is done.”
He also claimed that he had repeatedly said that officials should do “everything possible to keep schools open,” and complained that he was seen as a scapegoat as the architect of the closures.
“I had nothing to do (with it). I mean, let’s get to the facts,” Fauci told Karl.
In testimony this year before the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci revealed that the six-foot social distancing guidelines had no scientific support and he was “not convinced” they led to learning loss.
“It kind of showed up. I don’t remember,” he told the panel in an interview in January about the mandate that eliminated most in-person learning options. “Just an empirical decision that was not based on data or data that could be achieved.”
The U.S. Department of Education released statistics in September 2022 showing that reading scores among nine-year-olds had plummeted over the course of the pandemic to their lowest point in 30 years, while scores mathematics fell for the first time in half a century of tracking.
“The ‘science’ promoted by teachers unions and public health officials never justified prolonged school closures,” a spokesperson for the House COVID subcommittee majority told The Post.
“The top priority should have been getting our children back to school safely as soon as possible. In the face of a future pandemic, our public health officials must recognize this failure of the COVID era and never repeat it again.”
Elsewhere in Tuesday’s interview on “CBS Mornings,” Fauci said the real problem with the closures was that schools were not closed “immediately” and “completely,” while at times clinging to “significant social distancing.” ” as “the right thing to do.”
“I kept saying, ‘Close the bars, open the schools, open the schools as quickly and safely as possible,’” he recalled. “But initially closing it was the right thing to do.”
“One clear area seems to be school closures, which caused enormous harm to children on multiple levels,” Dokoupil said, “and did not appear to save lives. And I wonder: can we say today that that is a mistake?”
“No,” Fauci responded when asked about the harms of remote learning.
