Dr. Adalja: We Kept Schools Open Safely Before We Had Vaccines, ‘Going Back to’ ‘Old Mindset’ Doesn’t Make Sense

On Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Stephanie Ruhle Reports,” Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security Dr. Amesh Adalja stated that we could keep schools safe even in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic before we had the tools we have now, we saw that in school openings that happened before the vaccines, and “going back to that old mindset” of closing schools is making children suffer.

Adalja said that keeping children in school “has to be a priority,” and that “We have lots of tools now, in 2022, that we didn’t have in the early days of the pandemic, and we could even keep schools safe back then.”

He added, “We had schools open in the midwest, for example, before there were vaccines, when the pandemic was raging outside the doors, and we didn’t see schools getting impacted. So, I think it’s odd that we’re kind of going back to that old mindset, when we’ve learned so much, we’ve seen that schools can be open. In Europe, it’s the default to keep schools open, they’re the first things to open, the last things to close. But here in the United States, it’s the exact opposite, and the children suffer because of it.”

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