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Posts Tagged ‘School Closures’

Fauci’s Failures Are Firing Offenses – Issues & Insights

Posted by M. C. on March 4, 2021

Just a week ago, Fauci made what to some was a stunning admission: “We’ve done worse than most any country” in managing the outbreak, he said. We say “stunning” because Fauci, as head of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is the official most responsible for the U.S. response.

Same is true of school closures. As one blogger aptly noted, “Fauci’s ‘evolving’ positions’ … went all the way from ‘close schools immediately’ to ‘close the bars, open schools’ to ‘schools can only open if the Biden stimulus bill passes.’ “

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/02/faucis-failures-are-firing-offenses/

by I & I Editorial Board

Dr. Anthony Fauci. Photo: NIAID, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en).

I&I Editorial

Dr. Anthony Fauci has impressive credentials and a lengthy tenure as a top-level government health official dating back to 1984. But his performance during the COVID-19 pandemic has been abysmal, with politicized non-science-based edicts and frequently reversed “medical advice” that have confused and frightened Americans.

Just a week ago, Fauci made what to some was a stunning admission: “We’ve done worse than most any country” in managing the outbreak, he said. We say “stunning” because Fauci, as head of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is the official most responsible for the U.S. response.

His 2019 pay of $417,608 makes him the nation’s highest paid federal official. As a scientist, he’s held in very high esteem by many, particularly those on the left, who see his sweeping powers – lockdowns, masking, social distancing – as a nifty means of social control. It’s control of 330 million people via social isolation and nonstop browbeating of those who dare to diverge from the oppressive “new normal” we all now experience on a daily basis.

The big problem has been Fauci’s pronunciamentos are often nonsensical, not supported by science or contradictory. “These are my principles,” Groucho Marx once said. “If you don’t like these, I have others.” That’s Fauci.

Take masking, for instance. The Daily Wire counted five different mask policies by Fauci as of Feb. 11. Oops! Make that six. After calling masking “largely symbolic” last spring and telling Americans “don’t wear masks,” he now suggests we need to “double mask” and that it might last into 2022.

This, despite some doctors and researchers claims that masking doesn’t do much. After reviewing multiple studies, the group Science-Based Medicine concluded that “the benefit (of masking) is likely to be modest. It should not be considered full protection, but just a way to reduce the chance of spread a little bit.”

Others note that masking may even hurt users by raising their carbon dioxide intake. Heck, Fauci himself even downplayed masking’s positive effects.

Then there’s his bizarre recent edict that even those vaccinated shouldn’t be allowed to dine inside a restaurant or go to the movies. Why not? No way to know. We do know that neither movie theaters nor restaurants are “superspreader” sites, or even “spreader” sites, for that matter.

The Centers for Disease Control claims from its own very limited survey that restaurants pose a major threat to spreading the virus. But literally tens of thousands of data points from surveys in New York and Minnesota show minuscule infection rates: Just 1.4% of New York cases resulted from restaurants, while 1.7% in Minnesota did.

By the way, data for retailers, gyms, and “hair & personal care” salons were even lower.

This compares with roughly 74% of cases contracted in the home. Should people stop going there, too?

Same is true of school closures. As one blogger aptly noted, “Fauci’s ‘evolving’ positions’ … went all the way from ‘close schools immediately’ to ‘close the bars, open schools’ to ‘schools can only open if the Biden stimulus bill passes.’ “

In short, another incoherent policy robbing millions of children of a year or more of in-place schooling, largely dictated by leftist teachers unions that have shown how little they care about educating kids.

What about the whole idea of “herd immunity”? When the outbreak began, Fauci suggested that 60% or 70% being vaccinated would be enough to stop COVID-19’s march. Now, he says it’s more like 90%, after admitting to The New York Times and others that he basically lied to manipulate people into doing what he wanted them to do.

It’s like a bizarre game of “Simon Says,” with Dr. Fauci as Simon. But it’s not “science,” the left’s new god, that Fauci’s guided by. No, he uses deceptive propaganda and policy pronouncements on behalf of dubious bureaucratic goals that have little to do with hard science, but a lot to do with politics.

Once the Democrats understood that Fauci was politically malleable, the left media followed suit and adopted him as their new hero. He could do no wrong. He even became a heartthrob of sorts, leading the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn to call him “sexy” and CNN’s Alisyn Camerota to wax ecstatic about his many qualities. And, no joke, Rolling Stone ran a piece titled, “We Read Dr. Anthony Fauci-inspired Erotic Fiction So That You Don’t Have To.”

Turning Fauci into a fetish object whose every utterance is treated as scientific gospel has only served to punish the rest of us with interminable lockdowns, quarantines, preventable suicides, isolation, chronic fear, clinical depression, school-less children, lost businesses and jobs, and absurd social distancing rules based on nothing more than guesses,

We’re now well into a massive vaccination program, thanks to former President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, announced just 10 months ago. By the end of the year, it produced not one but two and now three vaccines to help us banish COVID-19 and return to normal life. With herd immunity on the horizon, we’re almost there.

That is, unless we continue to follow the wrong turns, reversals, delays and just plain bad science that have resulted from Fauci’s bureaucratic malpractice. With half a million dead from a virus that’s only a little more deadly than a bad flu strain, Fauci’s poor policy prescriptions have come up far short of what one might expect of the nation’s highest-paid federal official.

None of the above includes his other, often forgotten policy failures and missteps during earlier disease outbreaks (including ebola in 2014 and AIDs in the 1980s). It’s time for the president and Congress to ask Fauci to resign after 37 years of less-than-spectacular performance. If not, his failures will become theirs.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

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The Case For Lockdowns, Masks, School Closures, ‘Distancing’ Has Just Collapsed

Posted by M. C. on August 21, 2020

The whole narrative is falling apart. New studies every day are proving beyond a doubt that the measures taken worldwide – with a few exceptions – to “fight” what they claimed was a “new” coronavirus have not only failed to slow or stop the disease, they have been counterproductive. It turns out that people develop lasting T-cell immunities, that patients have been successfully treated with T-cells from asymptomatic test-positive cases, and that the virus rarely spreads outside the family setting. What are the authoritarians going to do when it is no longer possible to keep this information hidden? How will they keep people shut down. Plus today: Utah shows a way out of corona-tyranny, big party in Wuhan, they are still cooking the books, and…enemy of the week!

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The School Closures Are a Big Threat to the Power of Public Schools | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on May 15, 2020

Nonetheless, working-class and lower-income parents are likely to return their children to the schools when they open again. Many believe they have no other choice.

Attitudes among the middle classes will be a little different, however, and may be more politically damaging to the future of the public schools.

In addition to this, many parents who were on autopilot in terms of assuming they were getting their money’s worth may suddenly be realizing that public schools—even when they were physically open—weren’t that much of a bargain after all. As Gary North recently observed,

https://mises.org/wire/school-closures-are-big-threat-power-public-schools?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=3efde05a0f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-3efde05a0f-228343965

Twenty twenty is likely to be a watershed year in the history of public schooling. And things aren’t looking good for the public schools.

For decades, we’ve been fed a near-daily diet of claims that public schooling is one of the most important—if not the most important—institutions in America. We’re also told that there’s not nearly enough of it, and this leads to demands for longer school hours, longer school years, and ever larger amounts of money spent on more facilities and more tech.

And then, all of sudden, with the panic over COVID-19, it was gone.

It turns out that public schooling wasn’t actually all that important after all, and that extending the lives of the over-seventy demographic takes precedence.

Yes, the schools have tried to keep up the ruse that students are all diligently doing their school work at home, but by late April it was already apparent that the old model of “doing public school” via internet isn’t working. In some places, class participation has collapsed by 60 percent, as students simply aren’t showing up for the virtual lessons.

The political repercussions of all this will be sizable.

Changing Attitudes among the Middle Classes

Ironically, public schools have essentially ditched lower-income families almost completely even though school district bureaucrats have long based the political legitimacy of public schools on the idea that they are an essential resource for low-income students. So as long as the physical schools remain closed, this claim will become increasingly unconvincing. After all, “virtual” public schooling simply doesn’t work for these families, since lower-income households are more likely to depend on both parents’ incomes and parents may have less flexible job schedules. This means less time for parents to make sure little Sally logs on to her virtual classes. Many lower-income households don’t even have internet access or computing equipment beyond their smartphones. Only 56 percent of households with incomes under $30,000 have access to broadband internet.

Nonetheless, working-class and lower-income parents are likely to return their children to the schools when they open again. Many believe they have no other choice.

Attitudes among the middle classes will be a little different, however, and may be more politically damaging to the future of the public schools.

Like their lower-income counterparts, middle class parents have long been happy to take advantage of the schools as a child-care service. But the non-educational amenities didn’t stop there. Middle-class parents especially have long  embraced the idea that billions of dollars spent on school music programs, school sports, and other extracurriculars were all absolutely essential to student success. Sports provided an important social function for both the students and the larger community.

But as the list of amenities we once associated with schooling gets shorter and shorter, households at all income levels will start to wonder what exactly they’re paying for.

Stripped of the non-academic side of things,  public schools now must sell themselves only as providers of academic skills. Many parents are likely to be left unimpressed, and this will be all the more true for middle class families where the parents are able to readily adopt homeschooling as a real substitute. The households that do have the infrastructure to do this are now far more likely to conclude that they simply don’t need the public schools much of the time. There are now so many resources provided for free outside the schools—such as Khan Academy, to just name one—that those who are already savvy with online informational resources will quickly understand that the schools aren’t essential.

In addition to this, many parents who were on autopilot in terms of assuming they were getting their money’s worth may suddenly be realizing that public schools—even when they were physically open—weren’t that much of a bargain after all. As Gary North recently observed,

For the first time, parents can see exactly what is being taught to their children. They can see the quality of the teachers. They can learn about the content of the educational materials.

Many parents may not like what they see, and as many increasingly take on the job of providing in-person instruction, school teachers won’t look quite like the highly trained heroes they have long claimed to be.

Budget Cuts

With the image of schools as indispensable social institutions quickly fading, the political advantage they have long enjoyed will rapidly disappear as well. It wasn’t long ago that schools could go back to the taxpayers again and again with with demands for more money, more resources, and higher salaries. Teacher unions endlessly lectured the taxpayers about how getting your child into a classroom with one of their teachers was of the utmost importance. Voters, regardless of political ideology or party, were often amendable to the idea.

That narrative is already greatly in danger, and the longer the COVID-19 panic ensures that schools remain closed, the more distant the memory of the old narrative will become. As school budgets contract, school districts from Las Vegas to Denver and across the nation are bracing for furloughs and layoffs.

With smaller staff, fewer teachers, and smaller budgets, expect virtual public learning to become even more bare bones, and less rewarding and engaging for students.

What Will Things Look like This Fall?

Even if schools open this fall, the reforms currently being pushed will ensure that schools continue to lack many of the amenities many have come to expect. If these reforms are adopted, students can forget about social events. They can expect shorter school days, and an ongoing role for online schooling. Team sports will be gone. Old notions of universal mandatory attendance and long days will seem increasingly quaint and old fashioned—or possibly even dangerous.

For many parents, this will just reinforce their growing suspicions that public schools just aren’t worth it anymore. Maybe they never were.

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