The Patriot Post® · Biden Ignores Science on Schools Reopening

“The school issue is a settled science. There’s more consensus on that issue than there is on tobacco.”

So said the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s Dr. Marty Makary on Fox News yesterday, while also noting the New England Journal of Medicine’s acknowledgement of “little evidence that schools are contributing to transmission.”

There’s even less evidence in North Carolina. Zero evidence, in fact. A recent joint study between Duke and the University of North Carolina monitored 11 school districts with nearly 100,000 staff and students, and found not a single transmission from a child to a teacher. Not one.

“As a pediatrician, I am really seeing the negative impacts of these school closures on children,” Dr. Danielle Dooley, a medical director at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC told NPR back in October. She listed mental health problems, hunger, obesity due to inactivity, missing routine medical care and the risk of child abuse — on top of the loss of education. “Going to school is really vital for children. They get their meals in school, their physical activity, their health care, their education, of course.”

Remember that the next time you hear a leftist say, “It’s for the children.”

Given this ever-growing mountain of evidence as to the safety of getting our children back into the classroom, it’s hard to know what’s driving the opposition of the teachers unions. Greed? Cowardice? Equal parts of both? Whatever it is, it certainly isn’t science.

Apparently, the unions can’t take a hint. They lost the American people many months ago with their greed and their anti-science approach to getting our kids back in the classroom. But when they’ve lost even Chicago’s hard-left Mayor Lori Lightfoot, there’s not much left to lose besides immediate family. At a press conference last week, Lightfoot told the unions “enough is enough,” and that suffering students “cannot wait any longer.”

But kids are still waiting all across the country, thanks to the Biden administration’s fealty to the unions and their refusal to “follow the science.” As The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board sardonically put it, “President Biden made an early pandemic show by promising that a majority of American schools would reopen in his first 100 days in office. But on Tuesday we learned that this depends on the meaning of the word ‘reopen.’”

As The Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra reports, “Numerous critics, including a high-profile doctor, are calling out the Biden administration after White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Tuesday that it was the administration’s goal to have ‘more than 50 percent’ of schools open ‘at least one day per week’ by the administration’s 100-day mark.”

That high-profile doctor was Nicole Saphier, and her Twitter posts aren’t known for their profanity. So it’s no surprise that the physician and mother of three attracted plenty of attention Tuesday when she tweeted, “The White House says schools with in-person classes ‘one day a week’ count as reopened. Not only is keeping children out of full-time in person school anti-science but also complete horsesh—t.”

Conservative columnist Allie Beth Stuckey wasn’t much more restrained, and she put the blame right at Joe Biden’s feet. “Children are dying by suicide, depressed, lonely and behind academically,” she tweeted, “and this administration could not care less.”

As for “following the science,” the Biden administration won’t even listen to its own hand-picked CDC director. Earlier this month, Dr. Rochelle Walensky said, “There is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated in order to reopen safely.”

Well, Joe, we’re waiting. And our kids are suffering.