In an interview with CBS News, Dr. Anthony Fauci has belatedly conceded that the extended school closures he effectively supported as a high-ranking health official were a mistake. The school closures lasted for more than a year in some school districts. Fauci admitted that shutting down the schools for that long “was not a good idea,” and “a mistake.” The New York Post reports:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top adviser to two presidential administrations during the COVID-19 pandemic, reversed course in a Tuesday interview and agreed that shutting down schools for more than a year due to the virus was a “mistake.”
“Keeping it 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 talking about his new memoir “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service.”
“So, that was a mistake in retrospect?” Dokoupil asked. “We will not repeat it?”
“Absolutely, yeah,” Fauci responded.
That is a marked change from Fauci’s previous statements, including in his Congressional testimony. He claimed in the past that closing the schools was the right thing to do, “based on the best evidence we had at the time.”
“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 both White House chief medical adviser and NIAID director.
The guidelines Fauci endorsed in 2020 were “ridiculous,” notes Jazz Shaw. “Schools were forced to install massively expensive air filtration systems and rearrange desks and chairs to enforce ‘social distancing.’ We only learned later that Fauci and his friends had made up the entire idea of social distancing out of whole cloth with absolutely no clinical studies having been done to support its alleged efficacy. As you may recall, Donald Trump was pushing back against those guidelines at the time, but Fauci was fighting him.” These guidelines made it impractical for many schools to reopen.
As Jazz Shaw observes, “In reality, otherwise healthy children were among the least likely to contract COVID and also the least likely to die or experience severe symptoms. The virus could have spread through the schools in a mostly harmless fashion similar to the flu, leaving behind a population of children who would have had natural herd immunity. Of course, that was during a time when anyone who dared to mention the potential benefits of natural immunity was banned from social media and treated like a pariah, including prominent doctors of virology who were attempting to endorse such a strategy at the time.”
Many children became fatter when schools closed to in-person learning during the coronavirus pandemic. Childhood obesity rose at the fastest annual rate ever. “Overweight or obesity increased among 5- through 11-year-olds from 36.2% to 45.7% during the pandemic,” reported the Journal of the American Medical Association. Similarly, government lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic spawned obesity through things like “canceled soccer practices” and “shuttered dance rehearsals,” noted CNN.Skyrocketing obesity made suffering from the coronavirus worse. “The evidence linking obesity to adverse COVID-19 outcomes is ‘overwhelmingly clear,’” say medical experts. Most people hospitalized for the coronavirus were obese.
Shutting schools actually increases COVID-19 deaths, according to researchers at the University of Edinburgh. Moreover, “Schools do not, in fact, appear to be major spreaders of COVID-19,” said Brown University Professor Emily Oster. There is “little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to community transmission,” according to the federal Centers for Disease Control.
Under the Trump administration, the CDC had pointed out that closing schools “can lead to severe learning loss,” and that school closures kill more children than COVID. Moreover, “extended closures can be harmful to children’s mental health and can increase the likelihood that children engage in unhealthy behaviors.”
In the U.S., officials’ school-closing decisions were driven in part by teachers “union influence and politics, not safety,” reported Reason Magazine. Jon Valant, a researcher at the liberal Brookings Institution, found that decisions to keep schools closed were influenced by politics, not levels of “COVID-19 risk.” Leftist teachers unions repeatedly thwarted school reopenings. Some used “sick-outs” to shut down schools and force school boards to delay school openings.
By driving up obesity rates, school closings harmed students’ health. Obese people have higher death rates from the coronavirus, and higher rates of severe illness and complications. That may be because fat cells are literally “targets” of the coronavirus. As a journalist noted, “A study by primarily Stanford researches examines why obesity produces such bad COVID outcomes. It finds that COVID can infect fat cells, which means it not only causes severe illness but also *long COVID*.” As the study explains, fat cells are “targets of SARS-CoV-2 infection,” and support “pathogenic inflammation,” which “may explain the link between obesity and severe COVID-19.”
Yet, during the pandemic, government officials fostered obesity, by closing schools, gyms, parks, and other places where people could exercise and lose weight. In 2021, U.S. News reported on the big increase in obesity in America:
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the nation’s obesity epidemic, according to a new report. In 2020, 16 states had adult obesity rates at or above 35%, up from 12 states the previous year….Since the pandemic began, 42% of adults in the U.S. reported gaining an undesired amount of weight, according to a Harris Poll conducted in February 2021. U.S. adults reported gaining an average of 29 pounds.
“Closing schools to protect kids made them sick,” notes Pamela Hobart in Reason Magazine. “Children forced to Zoom into school ended up with suboptimal immune systems—the opposite of herd immunity.” As a result, children later suffered more from things like hand, foot, and mouth disease, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), she says.
As Hobart observes, “isolation does not put your immune system on pause; sometimes immunity follows a ‘use it or lose it’ rule. While they were Zooming in to school, children with existing partial immunity to endemic contagious diseases missed many opportunities to be exposed again, which would have refreshed their immune systems. We ended up with the opposite of herd immunity: a bunch of kids with suboptimal immune systems.”
Hobart discusses how school closings were followed by an “unprecedented, counterseasonal surge in communicable illnesses.” Amidst that, her “son fell ill with some demon strain of hand, foot, and mouth disease….It took more than a week for the hundreds of bubbly, fluid-filled -blisters coating his miserable body to dry up, and he spent most of that time crying and refusing to eat. The disease is not known to be fatal, thankfully, but it’s no picnic either. Shortly after that, my son and younger daughter both began coughing up their little lungs.”
