COVID Select Subcommittee: ‘Science Never Justified Prolonged School Closures’

“Science” never justified the prolonged closure of schools during the coronavirus pandemic, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which has concluded its two-year-long investigation into the coronavirus pandemic, said, offering its findings this week.

The subcommittee concluded its investigation and provided a 520-page report detailing the massive failures committed throughout the pandemic, from mask and vaccine mandates to public health officials suppressing and dismissing narratives — such as the reality of natural immunity — that they did not like and that would not support their draconian policies.

One major point of controversy throughout the pandemic was the so-called “science” behind prolonged school closures. As it turns out — and as many already have known — there was none.

“The ‘science’ never justified prolonged school closures,” a summary of the report reads, explaining that children were not likely to contribute to the spread of the virus, and they were not likely to suffer from “severe illness or mortality.”

“Instead, as a result of school closures, children experienced historic learning loss, higher rates of psychological distress, and decreased physical well-being,” the summary continues.

The report itself notes that the CDC originally was not convinced that school closures would have a real impact on controlling the virus, either. Yet, the country went on to do just that, shutting down schools under the Biden-Harris administration for far longer than imagined.

The report reveals:

Still, even the CDC appeared to not be convinced that short- or medium-term school closures would have any substantial impact on transmission, citing data retrieved from Hong Kong and Singapore showing that countries that closed schools did not have more success reducing transmission than places that did not. Nonetheless, by the end of March 2020, nearly all schools across the country were closed.

Perhaps what is worse, the subcommittee found that the Biden Administration’s CDC “broke precedent and provided a political teachers organization with access to its scientific school reopening guidance.”

“Former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky asked the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to provide specific language for the guidance and even went so far as to accept numerous edits made by AFT,” per the summary. The report itself states that “many schools remained closed because of AFT and Ms. Weingarten’s political interference into the CDC issuance of the Biden Administration’s first school reopening guidance entitled ‘Operational Strategy for K-12 Schools through Phased Prevention’ [hereinafter “Operational Strategy”] on February 12, 2021.”

Ultimately, the subcommittee said these school closures were simply not rooted in science:

As more data related to COVID-19 became readily available, it was clear that the “science” did not justify school closures. Early data from Wuhan, China—the epicenter of the outbreak—showed that children were unlikely to suffer serious illness or death as a result of COVID-19. This was later confirmed by CDC data showing that children comprised less than 0.01 percent of hospitalizations and 0.0005 percent of COVID-19 deaths between March 1, 2020 and July 25, 2020.

Moreover, subsequently acquired data confirmed the CDC’s previous suspicion that school closures were unlikely to stem the transmission of COVID-19. The science indicated that schools were not vectors for viral spread. Early data from Iceland showed that young children were less likely than adults to transmit COVID-19. Teachers, individually, were also shown by early data to have no higher risk of infection and of developing serious COVID-19
than other professionals.

These prolonged closures had a “negative impact” on students, the report continued, citing not only academic problems but physical and mental health issues.

“These consequences—which only worsened the longer schools remained closed— could hardly have come as a surprise, as previous closures had been understood to result in negative outcomes for students,” the report continued, noting that these realities apparently did nothing to stop public health officials, who continued to ignore science and advocate for school closures.

“Instead, many advocates of closures seemingly relied only on favorable data or wrongly attempted to mischaracterize, misrepresent, or exaggerate data,” the report reads.

The AFT’s involvement was deeper than most know, and the report found this: “The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Accepted American Federation of Teachers Edits to the Operational Strategy.”

Further, the subcommittee found that the impacts of the corruption and blatantly bad policy will adversely impact academic performance for “years” to come.

Per the report:

There has been a significant decline in students’ academic performance because of pandemic-era school closure policies. Standardized test scores show that children lost decades worth of academic progress. The performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading declined to levels recorded two decades ago, and the average composite score for the ACT by high school graduates dropped below 20 for the first time since 1991. The students whose classes were less disrupted in the 2020-2021 school year lost about 20 percent of math learning compared to losses of 50 percent for students who did not have access to in-person instruction.

Disturbingly, these declines were the most significant among low-income children and children from racial minorities. Schools in urban areas attended by low income and minority children were kept closed longer. Accordingly, Black and Latino students and low-income students fell further behind in learning than their peers.

The effects of pandemic-era school closure policies continue to impact students today. Students are not rebounding from the effect of the school closure policies: “Analyses of student test scores have repeatedly shown severe declines in academic achievement… accelerating student learning… is notoriously challenging.” More troubling than students’ inability to “catch up” with where they should be academically, though, is the fact that the problem is growing worse: “except for the youngest learners, students are progressing more slowly than their pre-pandemic peers – furthering widening academic gaps.”

Read the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic’s entire report here.