Francis Collins Hopes You Have Forgotten the Pandemic

F rancis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health, has a piece in the Atlantic castigating the political class for promoting misinformation during the pandemic. He did his argument no favors when he wrote that former president Donald Trump advised “injecting bleach to treat COVID-19.”

The notion that Trump told vulnerable Americans to inoculate themselves with household disinfectants has become an article of faith among Democrats, and faith is all that buttresses the allegation. The former president’s remarks were typically muddled, but he suggested that the option should be studied — he did not himself recommend it. That may be a minor distinction, but it is one that the noblest of self-appointed truth-tellers should observe; particularly when they are relying on their authority to back up the argument that the pandemic’s lingering aftereffects were an unavoidable by-product of necessary public policy.

It speaks to the relevance of prolonged school closures and the enduring hardships they imposed on American families that Collins felt compelled to defend the stopgap of remote learning. “Given the lower risk of serious illness in children and young adults, the concern was only partly about their health,” he confessed. “It was also about preventing infected kids and young adults from bringing the disease home to vulnerable parents and grandparents.” Of course. So how did that and other efforts to truncate American social and economic life for the good of public health go? On the public-health bureaucracy’s own terms, not great:

Of the various measures, closing schools and universities and limiting gatherings to 10 people or fewer had the most significant effect. Closing nonessential businesses delivering personal services (such as gyms and hair salons) had a moderate effect. Targeted closures of face-to-face businesses with a high risk of infection, such as restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, had a small to moderate effect. Adding a stay-at-home order provided only a small additional benefit to these other measures. Those are the data.

Only the closing of educational institutions produced something like a “significant” effect in limiting the virus’s spread. Everything else produced, at best, “moderate” impacts on viral transmission rates — cold comfort given the disruptions they caused.

Collins’s data flies in the face of the experience in countries like Sweden, which never closed its primary schools but experienced maddeningly similar outcomes to countries with stricter pandemic-mitigation regimes. But what Sweden did not experience are the educational deficits that the public-health and educational apparatus euphemistically call “learning loss.”

Collins is not contrite, but nor is he defiant. “The school closures were supposed to be temporary,” he observed. And yet, “because the alarm about the risks of transmission had already been raised, it became hard for parents, teachers, and public-health officers across the country to retreat from these recommendations, despite the growing potential harm to children’s learning and socialization.”

It is in the former NIH director’s interest to present the persistence of school closures as a whole-of-society initiative to which we were all dedicated. That is, of course, nonsense. As early as June 2020, 56 percent of parents told Gallup pollsters they hoped to see children back in school full-time by the fall. That was even more pronounced in places where politicians and public-sector unions were most committed to the experiment, like New York City. There, fully three-quarters of school-age parents wanted their kids back in the classroom. These parents saw early on the damage remote-learning arrangements were doing to their children’s academic performance and mental health. Ultimately, in deference to the demands of this vital constituent group, municipalities large and small made plans for a soft reopening by the fall of 2020. Then the backlash began.

Educational professionals and teachers’ union representatives railed against the expectation that they should put their lives on the line for children — a dubious characterization of the risk to teachers given what we knew (even at the time) about how the virus transmitted among pre-adolescent youths. They went on strike. They demanded early access to vaccines. They sought and secured taxpayer funds for wholesale renovations of their schools as a prerequisite for reopening. Educational journals coached their readers to dismiss the threat to academic performance or the psychological maladies that accompanied extended social isolation. Extended school closures, particularly in Democrat-led municipalities, might have gone on much longer than they did if the Republican Party hadn’t routed Democrats in 2021’s off-year elections. The GOP’s victories finally created some tangible incentives for Democrats to buck the education-establishment consensus and the unions that dictated it.

Last year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) took the full measure of the pandemic’s lasting effects on America’s children, and the results were not good. Children’s scores in reading and math had declined to record or near-record lows, and the correlation between poor academic performance and the length of time a school remained closed to in-person education during the pandemic was hard to mistake. Those are also “the data.”

Collins should get some credit for abandoning the rearguard action his fellow public-health practitioners performed in an attempt to defend the untenable situation they imposed on their fellow citizens. “There is nothing in this data that allows us to draw a straight line from remote learning to student performance,” said Peggy Carr, the head of the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2022. “There is no straight line like people want to draw.” Kids “are resilient,” we were told ad nauseam. “They adapt better than adults do,” New York governor Kathy Hochul observed. Collins isn’t playing that game, at least.

“We urgently need to learn from what happened here,” he wrote at the close of his Atlantic article. “Politicians piled on with a shocking willingness to distribute information that served their own purposes but was of questionable validity.” But when it comes to schools, the politicians promulgating misinformation and leaning hard on local, state, and federal officials to mislead the public about the relative safety of in-person education wasn’t coming from the GOP. Collins’s effort to recast himself as a straight shooter founders on his decision to abstain from candor.