As if our public health authorities needed another black eye, they got it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deferred to the nation’s largest teachers union, over the CDC’s own science, and changed guidance in February that would have encouraged all schools to reopen for in-person learning.
Emails show the American Federation of Teachers began lobbying the CDC shortly after President Joe Biden took office, pressuring the agency to delay its guidance encouraging school reopenings and instead issue a statement that was friendlier toward remote learning.
“Thank you again for Friday’s rich discussion about forthcoming CDC guidance and for your openness to the suggestions made by our president, Randi Weingarten, and the AFT,” AFT Senior Director for Health Issues Kelly Trautner wrote in one of the emails, which were first reported by the New York Post.
“We were able to review a copy of the draft guidance document over the weekend and were able to provide some initial feedback to several staff this morning about possible ways to strengthen the document,” Trautner continued. “We believe our experiences on the ground can inform and enrich thinking around what is practicable and prudent in future guidance documents.”
In a later email, Trautner thanked CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky for her “commitment to partnership” with the AFT. Several White House officials, including Carole Johnson, the White House coronavirus testing coordinator, and Will McIntee, an associate director of public engagement at the White House, were also involved in the email correspondence with the AFT as well.
As a result, the CDC changed its guidance to include language “suggestions” offered by the AFT. Instead of encouraging an immediate return to in-person learning, the CDC encouraged schools to remain flexible and keep remote learning as an option “in the event of high community-transmission results from a new variant of SARS-CoV-2.” The CDC also encouraged schools to allow teachers “who have documented high risk conditions or who are at increased risk for COVID-19,” regardless of whether they had been vaccinated, to work from home — another one of the AFT’s demands.
This should be a scandal. The CDC ignored its own scientific research that proved schools are not coronavirus superspreader sites and that in-person learning can be conducted safely in order to please one of the Biden administration’s political allies. CDC officials knew that students were not at risk and that the AFT’s demands were not based on scientific data. But they caved to the union’s wishes anyway.
They did so at the expense of America’s children. For more than a year, students across the country have been kept from the classroom because of a virus that has hardly affected any children seriously, and the results of the closures have been devastating. Students in low-income neighborhoods have lost years of academic achievement, once-high-achieving students have been earning F’s at an alarming rate, and younger children who are still developing socially are facing severe mental setbacks.
The CDC could have helped these students by allowing them to return to school earlier — not just in February but months before that. We knew last summer that COVID-19 posed virtually no threat to those aged 18 and under. And thanks to the private schools that reopened last fall, we knew that in-person learning could be conducted safely with just a few adjustments.
So why did it take the CDC until March 2021 to get on board with school reopenings? Because the agency was busy running interference for the teachers unions. Keep that in mind when the CDC releases “guidance” of any kind.
