Better in their words…

First, let me be clear: I think that it was forgivable to have closed schools for 4-6 weeks in March 2020. It wasn’t the right call, but it was forgivable because of uncertainty. The correct call was to keep elementary schools open, as Sweden did, but I don’t blame the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, and the US for closing school briefly. Of course, the story doesn’t end there.

A few weeks later it became clear: schools could be run safety (largely through Sweden’s experience), the risks to children were low, teachers did not have vastly elevated risks of death, and, by late summer, a German study proved that opening school did not drive substantive community transmission.

Many European nations reopened after 6 weeks (e.g. Switzerland) in the spring of 2020, while nearly all reopened by the fall of 2020. Some US states managed to reopen rapidly too, such as Florida, Texas and Rhode Island. But many cities remained closed: DC, Chicago, SF, Portland, Los Angeles.

During these months, Fauci went on television stirring up fear that reopening schools was dangerous. This would be disastrous advocacy. Even now, in 2022, with the benefit of hindsight, Fauci comments remain full of errors. He still doesn’t not get it— He was wrong; Spectacularly wrong; Once in a century error sort of wrong.

Let’s consider the errors in the quote.

1. Fauci says it was OK to wait till you had “vaccines available for the general population” to reopen schools. This is profound ignorance. It is contradicted by the experience of nearly all European nations, as well as many US states (FL/ RI/ TX). The truth is that adult vaccines were not necessary to reopen schools, and many places on earth did not wait— to the benefit of their children.
2. Fauci says shutdowns weren’t prolonged. This is false. Cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles closed schools to kids from March 2020, until the Fall of 2021. They did not reopen in the Spring of 2021—even after vaccines were prioritized to teachers (who took them, but whose unions still resisted return to school). Fauci appears to be ignorant of recent events.

Fauci elaborates in the interview to further fear-monger about the harms to children, but many of his statistics and comments are inaccurate.

Here are some errors. Fauci laments the loss of 1400 kids, but the CDC tracker as of 9/21/22 says 1282, but more to point: it is unclear which deaths are due to COVID and which are from COVID. Fauci also doesn’t distinguish the risks to elementary kids which are profoundly different than teenagers. He doesn’t distinguish risks to health kids vs. those with co-morbidities. Finally, he has no evidence that school closure lowered this number! The best studies shows that closure did nearly nothing to alter it.

Fauci talks about long covid in kids, but this relies almost entirely on low quality research. Hirt and colleagues performed a systematic review of long-covid in kids and they find, “The reported proportion of children with post-COVID syndrome was up to 66.5% in children with and 53.3% in children without SARS-CoV-2 infection. All studies had seriously limited validity due to critical and serious risk of bias in multiple domains.”

In conclusion, Anthony Fauci did position himself initially as a forceful defender of school closure. When much of Western Europe and Ron DeSantis reopened— Fauci went on TV to criticize the Florida governor. Even now, 2 years later, Fauci clings to delusional ideas to justify closures. He denies the reality that many US cities—with strong allegiance to him— closed the longest. Fauci’s comments show a person not capable admitting error. I suspect these comments will not age well in history.