During the throes of the COVID pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci was the country’s point person on the coronavirus and what Americans needed to do to keep from getting it.
Even when his advice changed.
“Right now, in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks,” Fauci told “60 Minutes” in March of 2020. In November of that year, he was touting the “uniform wearing of masks” to help curb the coronavirus surge.
At the time, he told CNN, Americans needed “to intensify public health strategies,” which include the masks, washing hands and avoiding places where people gather.
Businesses shuttered offices or closed for the duration, some never to come back. Schools across the country scrambled to teach students remotely. It was a hit-or-miss affair.
Four years later, COVID has gone from nightmare to occasional bad dream, and the country is dealing with the fallout from all those lockdowns.
Especially the children.
The US Department of Education released statistics in September 2022 showing 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, the New York Post reported,
Fauci’s not buying it.
Fauci told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Tuesday he was “not convinced” that children suffered learning loss due to school closures his agency supported, according to two of its members.
“He says he’s still not convinced that there was learning loss — that in his view, that’s still really open for discussion,” Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas), who sits on the panel, told The Post.
What about his mantra of “stick with the science,” which is what Fauci told the Associated Press in a December 2022 interview as he exited his post.
Test scores are pretty quantitative evidence of how well children are learning. The numbers don’t lie, but they do paint the picture of what remote learning, intermittent classroom sessions, and missed lessons had on young minds.
Though Fauci kept calling for social distancing, masking and lockdowns, he is washing his hands of responsibility for bad outcomes.
“Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did,” he told The New York Times Magazine in April 2023, when he was asked about his support for the “heavy-handed” policies.
“I gave a public health recommendation that echoed the CDC’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that,” he said.
That’s some mighty fine parsing there, doc.
Cloud said Fauci had showed an “amazing ability to either forget what happened or then to find ways to shirk any sort of responsibility for the influence that was had,” during his marathon session on Capitol Hill.
After Fauci’s testimony, Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic issued a statement, which said in part: “Should a future pandemic arise, America’s response must be guided by scientific facts and conclusive data.”
We thought they were. Fauci’s testimony did accomplish something during his testimony: he further undermined trust in our government institutions.
