Dr. Anthony Fauci was the face of the U.S. government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. He has sought to defend his own tenure in government in a new memoir published this week. He has also faced renewed congressional scrutiny in recent weeks. This Washington Examiner series, Fauci Unmasked, will look at his record and legacy. Part 1 looked at Fauci’s record of statements on masks, social distancing, and vaccines. Part 2 reviewed his role as a person of interest in the investigation into the origins of the pandemic. Part 3 explored the loss of trust in institutions over the past few years. Part 4 focuses on the long-term consequences of school closures.
Dr. Anthony Fauci’s legacy is inextricably linked to the controversial protocols he advocated during the coronavirus pandemic, but perhaps no group of Americans saw greater detrimental impact than the children whose schools were closed.
Four years on, the decisions made by the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases are coming under new scrutiny thanks both to a congressional inquiry and the publication of his new memoir. One area of particular interest is the consequences of his recommendations for schoolchildren.
Shutting down schools came with some predictable outcomes, such as learning loss and stunted social development. But the shutdowns also led to unforeseeable developments as well, such as the rise of a movement of parents seeking reform after being confronted by what their children were learning in school, namely critical race theory and gender theory.
“Immediately the alarm was raised from Fauci and others so that there was enough fear that was transmitted, and a shortage of information, so that the most natural reflex from school leaders was to say, ‘Well, look, we have to close schools till we know you know enough to make an informed decision,'” Jonathan Butcher, senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, told the Washington Examiner.
But the recommendations coming out of the federal government about what to do with schools were a conglomeration of some measures of questionable efficacy, such as masking and social distancing, from a variety of health officials, as well as pressure from special interest groups like teachers’ unions to keep schools shuttered for as long as possible.
Earlier this year, Fauci testified before Congress that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s six-foot social distancing guidance, which made virtually all in-person schooling impossible due to proximity, lacked scientific foundation, telling a House panel in January, “It sort of just appeared. I don’t recall,” adding it was “just an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data or even data that could be accomplished.”
Butcher said that the health experts in the government were never fully focused on trying to open schools, even after knowing that the virus had little effect on children and that keeping schools closed was going to harm children and set them back years in educational and social development.
“Even early on, they were never recommendations that said, ‘Here’s how schools can open to get kids back in person,’ or ‘Here is what we should expect,'” Butcher said. “There was never something that we felt like was coming from the CDC that gave us confidence that we could trust in the research that we had saying that the effects on children were limited.”
By May 2020, Butcher explained, everyone knew of the limited impact the virus had on children, but “Fauci and others issued no such guidance; they issued nothing even remotely close to that.” They were looking for a “100% guarantee that there would be no COVID transmission,” he said, adding, “And of course, that was impossible.”
As part of his book promotion, Fauci has been making the rounds in both Congress and in the media defending his decision-making, and, to critics, twisting the sequence of events in order to brush off responsibility for the consequences, particularly to children.
On Tuesday, Fauci told CBS Mornings that shutting down schools was “not a good idea” and that he “kept saying, ‘Close the bars, open the schools.'”
“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 the outlet. “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.”
“Fauci is rewriting history. He led the way for school closures and then he consistently supported the teachers unions to keep them closed for over a year,” Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, co-founders of Moms for Liberty, an organization that formed to fight school closures and mask mandates, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “He owes all parents an apology. But, he’s not apologizing. He is blatantly rewriting history by saying he didn’t support school closures.”
Last year, Fauci was more defensive in an interview with the New York Times, saying, “Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the CDC’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that.”
Fauci’s role in some ways is convoluted, and in others more concrete. It is true he never had the power to shut anything down, and any decision to close schools and businesses, or to impose social distancing, masking, or vaccine mandates was made primarily at the state, local, or business leadership levels.
Although he did not have the power to impose the recommendations, he and others in the government had the influence to pressure decision-makers to do so through federal guidance, for which Fauci was a head architect.
Fauci even publicly undermined then-President Donald Trump in 2020 after supporting the CDC’s guidance that directed schools to shut down based on spread in the community, not necessarily in schools.
While Trump posted to social media on July 8, 2020, “I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools. While they want them open, they are asking schools to do very impractical things. I will be meeting with them!!!,” Fauci turned around the next month endorsing prolonged shutdowns, saying, “There may be some areas where the level of virus is so high that it would not be prudent to bring children back to school,” and warning of an “insidious increase” in cases.
In an interview with PBS News Hour after being asked if children would be forced into “many months of virtual learning,” Fauci said, “In some places … that may be the case.”
School closures and virtual learning created serious problems for children.
According to the most recent federal statistics from the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, reading scores among 9-year-olds dropped to their lowest point in 30 years during the pandemic, and math scores fell for the first time in 50 years, with nearly 40% of eighth graders not understanding basic concepts.
Some studies show that it could take students more than five years to recover from the protocols academically, according to a review from the Northwest Evaluation Association, an education research organization.
However, academic struggles were not the only thing wrought by the shutdowns.
Researchers have connected the growing youth mental health crisis to school shutdowns, with multiple studies finding spikes in anxiety and depression, as well as increases in unhealthy behaviors like more screen time and less physical activity.
According to one study in Sage Journals, children rely on schools to grow social skills and develop core human competencies. The loneliness brought by the closures contributed to depression and anxiety, which the study says can persist for up to nine years in the future. Lockdowns were also linked to suicide attempts more than doubling in a study in China.
By 2022, the CDC released 2020 data showing 44% of American teenagers having “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” while nearly 20% seriously considered suicide, and 9% actually attempted suicide.
Federal officials like Fauci were not the only ones with their thumbs on the scales of pandemic protocols in schools, as many of the guidelines issued by the CDC, and touted publicly by Fauci, were directly from the playbook of teachers unions like the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.
In 2021, a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that the AFT had been in contact with then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and the top brass at the CDC in order to promulgate the February 2021 school reopening guidelines that halted reopening in the face of mounting evidence at the time that schools were not major factors in the spread of the virus.
CNN’s Jake Tapper at the time asked Walensky, “Can you point to any scientific reason for students in the United States not to return to in person classes tomorrow?
“If you’re in middle school or high school, we would advocate for virtual learning for that group. … We really don’t want to bring community disease into the classroom,” Walensky said. “We also know that mask breaching is among the reasons that we have transmission within schools when it happens. Somewhere around 60% of students are reliably masking. That has to be universal. So we have work to do.”
The AFT and NEA even contacted the White House to align their media messaging strategies for the guidance rollout.
Even earlier than the February 2021 guidance, however, both the NEA and AFT issued 2020 school re-opening guidelines that demanded nearly impossible concessions from public officials, Butcher said.
“They were making demands on what they thought was necessary for in-person learning where there was almost no amount of money, or no amount of changing policies that would have allowed them to open,” Butcher said. “The recommendations that they made were not recommendations for opening. They were recommendations for how to keep closed.”
While the overall impact of the coronavirus protocols have been extremely negative for the students and families who were forced to endure them, many parents point to one silver lining: Access the the curriculum.
Through virtual learning, parents across the country were confronted with what public schools were teaching their children, in most cases for the first time. Much of what they saw, they found objectionable, including an intense focus on race through critical race theory; instruction on a gender spectrum and gender nonconformity; highly sexualized, pornographic books, and even materials depicting pedophilic acts, in school; and the clandestine gender transition of children without parental knowledge or consent.
Those revelations brought with them a massive wave of parental rights movements, the start of local organizations like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, and a media firestorm regarding the radicalization of K-12 curriculum under the noses of nearly every parent in the country.
“Education transmits values and the sense of American identity,” Butcher said. The shutdowns “accelerated the process of parents saying, ‘Wait a minute. This is not what we stand for. These values don’t represent who we are.'”
While some conservatives noticed issues in K-12 education prior to the pandemic protocols, a genuine grassroots effort came out of the pandemic-era access to classroom materials.
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“Education was front center on everybody’s minds during the pandemic,” Butcher added. “Suddenly you’re talking about everything. We’re talking about school choice, we’re talking about curriculum, you’re talking about curriculum transparency, you’re talking about do we want kids in learning pods.”
Since then, education as a political issue, something that typically favors Democrats, has been flipped on its head, giving Republicans the advantage. Republicans and conservatives across the country have won elections based on the education issue alone, perhaps most prominently with Republicans flipping the Virginia governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and state House from Democratic control.