Anthony Fauci sabotaged school reopening in 2020 - Let's read his own words

Time to take a walk down memory lane

In a recent soft-ball interview from the New York Times from April 2023, Fauci said:

“But when people say, “Fauci shut down the economy” — it wasn’t Fauci. The C.D.C. was the organization that made those recommendations. I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations. But 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 C.D.C.’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that.”

Is that accurate? Was Fauci an innocent bystanders who softly made suggestions? Or was his role more active? Did he use his gravitas and position to scare schools out of reopening? Let’s take a walk down memory lane

This was an actual headline from Education Week (2020)

Fauci says :

And the response was predictable

Of course this is what Randy Weingarten said:

But that wasn’t the first of Fauci’s rhetoric that sabotaged reopening. In May 2020, Fauci got into an exchange with Rand Paul

Rand Paul

Rand Paul pointed to the very low rate of complications in kids.

Fauci evoked the specter of MIS-C

Focusing on MIS-C when students were losing years of learning was catastrophically poor thinking. It is like worrying that a tourniquet would leave a mark on the skin, when the patient is exsanguinating.

Fauci on DeSantis reopening schools (Spring 2020)

And all of this led to the predictable outcome, noted by my UCSF colleague

Rand Paul was right. Fauci inappropriately cast aspersions on reopening.

So, forgive me, if you are the NIAID director and you continuously fear-monger about schools, and tell teachers that reopening isn an ‘experiment’— even though Sweden never closed and was doing fine— you can’t say you had nothing to do with school closure. You leveraged your massive media reach to poison public opinion. You were the architect of closure.

That action did more harm to American children than anything else this century.

Fauci owns school closure. He needs to move out of the denial phase and either defend his conduct or apologize. Personally, I see no defense. The closest modern analogy was Colin Powell’s UN speech. Well, if the speech was non-stop speeches for months, paired with private advising, all working to promote a faulty narrative.