Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s foremost public-health official during the coronavirus pandemic, admitted in a recent interview that school closures went on for too long.
“Shutting down everything immediately — and we didn’t shut it down completely — but essentially major social distancing and even schools was the right thing,” Fauci told CBS during an interview to promote his new memoir. Fauci worked in the federal government for decades and at one point was the highest paid federal employee.
“How long you kept it was the problem, because there was a disparity throughout the country. If you go back and look at the YouTube, I kept on saying, ‘Close the bars, open the schools. Open the schools as quickly and as safely as you possibly can.’ But initially to close it down was correct. Keeping it for a year was not a good idea.”
School closures across the U.S. were instituted upon recommendations by Fauci and other leading public-health authorities. In some areas, the school closures lasted for more than a year, especially those with powerful left-wing teachers unions, according to multiple academic studies.
Red states and localities, particularly Florida, opened schools much quicker than their Democratic counterparts and adhered less to stringent coronavirus lockdown policies. Florida voters rewarded Republican governor Ron DeSantis with a nearly 20-point reelection victory in 2022 for his handling of the pandemic.
Lengthy school closures contributed to generational learning loss, reflected in the generational declines in reading and math test scores observed by the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s report card. The learning losses particularly impacted minority and lower-income students unable to afford tutors and other online educational resources. Academic rebounding from the lost learning could take as long as five years.
Dissatisfaction over school closures is widely believed to have played a role in Republican Glenn Youngkin’s upset victory in Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial election. School closures have also helped strengthen the push for giving parents school vouchers as an alternative to public schools, a movement that has grown significantly in red states.
Earlier this year, Fauci testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and conceded that six-feet apart social-distancing rules appeared out of nowhere, according to a recently released transcript. He also failed to recall the scientific evidence for masking children in schools, and suggested he was not the final decision-maker on school closures.
Fauci’s colleague, former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, similarly admitted the six-feet-apart guidance from the Centers for Disease Control lacked scientific evidence to back it up, as NR first reported.
At a public hearing earlier this month, Fauci distanced himself from his top adviser, who appears to have conspired to evade federal records laws on questions central to the public’s understanding of the coronavirus pandemic.