School lockdowns during the pandemic have been exposed as a massive public health failure. It’s so bad that now, even Dr. Anthony Fauci wants to distance himself from it.
Fauci initially defended school shutdowns in an interview with ABC, pointing out that “we’ve lost close to 1,500 kids” during the pandemic. But he then ran to cover himself. “If you go back, and I ask anybody to go back over the number of times that I’ve said we’ve got to do everything we can to keep the schools open, no one plays that clip,” he said. “They always come back and say, ‘Fauci is responsible for closing the schools.’ I had nothing to do [with it], I mean, let’s get down to the facts.”
“Was it a mistake…to see schools closed as long as they were?”
FAUCI: “I had nothing to do with it!” pic.twitter.com/azgKnyd1VT
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 16, 2022
But Fauci was pretty late to that party. When Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) noted in May 2020 that the data clearly showed that children were not at serious risk from COVID, Fauci said, “I think we better be careful that we’re not cavalier, in thinking that children are completely immune to the deleterious effects.”
FAUCI’S NET WORTH DOUBLED DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC: WATCHDOG REPORT
Fauci continues to take that position in his interviews now. Yes, 1,310 children have died from COVID since the pandemic began, and that is a tragedy. Yet those 1,310 deaths over 34 months (around 38 deaths per month) are less than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate for a given flu season. The 2019-20 flu season saw 434 deaths over seven months or 62 deaths per month. There were 10 times more hospitalizations among children for the flu during that seven-month flu season than there were for COVID in the first 22 months of the pandemic.
More importantly, Fauci’s constant warnings against easing any sort of restrictions at schools only helped fuel the COVID lockdowns imposed on children. Fauci said that children who weren’t vaccinated should be masked, giving the idea that unvaccinated children were at serious risk from COVID-19. That inspired terrible policies in all kinds of cities. Washington, D.C., for example, planned to bar unvaccinated children from schools. New York City banned unvaccinated children from sports and restaurants.
Fauci also said “it is risky” to lift mask mandates in schools lest children contract a disease that is less dangerous to them than seasonal flu. And even when Fauci said schools should remain open, he hedged. In February 2021, Fauci said schools needed more money and resources to stay open safely, when schools were always safe for children.
Fauci’s “lockdown first, shrug off questions later” mindset, combined with his assertions that he is the king of science, did untold damage to the country, and children got the worst of it. It should have been made clear early and often that children were at no serious risk from the virus (which, again, was less dangerous to them than the flu) and that they should have been in school, in person, no matter what.
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Instead, Fauci hemmed and hawed and hedged as bureaucrats and politicians followed his zero-COVID recommendations and rhetoric. Given his position during the pandemic, he is as responsible for school shutdowns as anyone else.
