CV NEWS FEED // Dr. Anthony Fauci reportedly told members of Congress Tuesday that he is “not convinced” children experienced learning loss as a result of mass school closures.
The New York Post noted that Fauci “made the stunning admission on the second and final day of his 14-hour, closed-door interview with the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.”
Subcommittee member Rep. Michael Cloud, R-TX, told The Post that according to Fauci, the effects of school closings on children are “still really open for discussion.”
Cloud added: “I think [if] you ask any parent, they’ll tell you it was a major hit on their child’s development.”
In September 2022 – two-and-a-half years after the COVID lockdowns began – the Biden administration’s Department of Education released a batch of statistics confirming the damage COVID lockdowns did to schoolchildren.
As The Post noted, the government statistics showed that “reading scores among nine-year-olds had plummeted over the course of the pandemic to their lowest point in 30 years, while math scores fell for the first time ever in a half-century of tracking.”
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Commissioner Peggy Carr at the time acknowledged the “stunted … academic growth” of children during COVID school closures, calling the data “sobering.”
As officials prevented most children from accessing in-person education, schoolchildren nationwide were forced to switch to online classes – an effort that had been dubbed “remote learning” or “distance learning.”
Also in 2022, a study from the Harvard Graduate School of Education found “that families reported a rise in temper tantrums, anxiety, and a poor ability to manage emotions, especially among the young elementary-aged children during remote learning.”
The same year, PBS reported on the case of a mother who initially supported COVID school closures:
[Her] daughter became depressed and stopped doing school work or paying attention to online classes. The former honor-roll student failed nearly all of her eighth grade courses.
“She’s behind,” the mother told PBS. She agreed that the switch to distance learning “didn’t work at all.”
“Knowing what I know now, I would say they should have put them in school,” she added.
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Fauci’s critics quickly took to social media to slam his dismissal of the well-established facts relating to the negative effects of COVID school policies on children.
“Well, if The Science himself says so, it must be so. Right?” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya sardonically remarked on X (formerly Twitter) Tuesday.
He was likely referring to Fauci’s widely panned answer during a 2021 CBS interview in which he dismissed voices dissenting from his preferred policies. The doctor claimed that these individuals are “really criticizing science because I represent science.”
Parents rights advocate Nicki Neily struck a similar tone.
“Apparently, he’s still not following the science or reading the data,” she wrote. Neily is the foundress and president of Parents Defending Education.
“Only a ghoul refuses to acknowledge the learning loss caused by prolonged school closures,” wrote attorney and legal analyst Phil Holloway:
Fauci will never admit he was wrong. He can’t. To admit he was wrong would be to admit participating in a civil rights catastrophe
So he digs in. And he lies to himself and the world
During an October 2022 ABC News interview, Fauci said there was a “steep cost” of COVID school closures. He then went on to say that he “had nothing to do” with forcing children into remote learning.
“If you go back, and 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,” he stated.
Fauci has been a prominent figure in American public health for over four decades. As CatholicVote reported last month:
Fauci served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for 38 years – from 1984 until his retirement at the end of 2022. He spent almost the last two of these years concurrently serving as President Joe Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor.
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Former National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins also recently drew flak for comments regarding the COVID pandemic response. Collins was Fauci’s boss for nearly a third of his tenure as NIAID director. NIAID is an institute of NIH.
“If you’re a public health person, and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life,” Collins said last summer in a video that went viral two weeks ago.
“You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never might quite recover from,” he continued. “Collateral damage. This is a public health mindset.”
