Fauci Asserts He ‘Had Nothing to Do With’ School Lockdowns During COVID Pandemic

Fauci Asserts He ‘Had Nothing to Do With’ School Lockdowns During COVID Pandemic

As White House medical advisor and covid godlet Dr. Anthony Fauci prepare to retire, he is desperately reworking his legacy.

This weekend, speaking to ABC News, Fauci denied that he was responsible for driving the public health consensus that schools should have discontinued in-person instruction for many months as part of pandemic mitigation measures.

“Was it a mistake in so many states, in so many localities, to see schools closed as long as they were?” host Jonathan Karl asked.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘mistake’ John because if I do it gets taken out of the context that you’re asking me the question on,” Fauci replied. “Could there be too high a price?” Karl clarified, likely referencing the plummeting academic performance, social isolation, and mental health crisis that school closures fueled.

“What we should realize, and have realized, is that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that,” he said. “The idea that this virus doesn’t affect children is not so. We’ve already lost close to 1500 kids so far.”

Karl interjected, “But much less than the older population obviously.” Despite the fact that children faces significantly lower risk of developing severe health complications after contracting Covid-19, they were forced to mask in schools for nearly two years. New York City only recently dropped its mask mandate for public pre-school and daycare kids.

Fauci reminded Karl that he, allegedly, repeatedly urged school districts to keep schools open as long as possible. “No one plays that clip. They always say ‘Fauci was responsible for closing schools.’ I had nothing to do [with it]. I mean, let’s get down to the facts,” he asserted.

“Was it a mistake…to see schools closed as long as they were?”

FAUCI: “I had nothing to do with it!” pic.twitter.com/azgKnyd1VT

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 16, 2022

The trouble for Fauci is that he has taken both sides of any position regarding covid. Let’s focus on some of his statements and actions that specifically deal with school lockdowns.

To begin with, Fauci was on the Coronavirus Task Force, which created the Presidential Guidelines promoted as “Two Weeks to Stop the Spread” that morphed into 30 days…and then, in some parts, two years and still continuing.

And, as the President said, we continue to urge every American over the next 15 days to put into practice the principles in the President’s coronavirus guidelines. By every American practicing these principles, we believe that we can slow the spread of the coronavirus. In fact, our experts have told our taskforce that if every American acts on the President’s coronavirus guidelines, we could see a substantial reduction in the spread of the coronavirus.

South Dakota was the only state that did not shut down its schools (among seven that did not direct businesses to close except for non-essential activity). South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem noted the dire predictions about her state that Fauci made, which turned out to be completely wrong.

In South Dakota, I provided all of the information that we had to our people, and then I trusted to make the best decisions for themselves [on how to prevent the spread of the virus] for their families and in turn their communities,” she said.

“We never focused on the case numbers. Instead, we kept our eye on hospital capacity. Now, Dr. Fauci, he told me that on my worst day I’d have ten thousand patients in the hospital on our worst day, we had a little over six hundred.”

“I don’t I don’t if you agree with me, but Dr. Fauci is wrong a lot.”

Fauci created a stir with his comments about “kids could get infected‘ when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis boldly opened his state’s businesses and schools in April 2020.

“If you have a situation where you don’t have a real good control over an outbreak and you allow children together, they will likely get infected,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during the daily news briefing of the White House coronavirus task force.

Fauci, who has become the medical face of nation’s pandemic response, said he was not “specifically speaking about Florida,” but he was responding directly to a reporter’s question about DeSantis, who on Thursday said that opening schools in May was at least a consideration.

Fauci has a few regrets, given the magnitude of failure associated with “Two Weeks to Stop the Spread” and other pandemic policies to contain the uncontainable virus.

[Washington Post national health reporter Dan] Diamond asked Fauci if there was anything he wished he would have done differently throughout the pandemic given the risk for information becoming “gobbled” by social media, as Fauci put it.

“You know, the answer is yes, Dan. I mean, my goodness, no one’s perfect. Certainly I am not,” Fauci said.

“When I go back in the early months, I probably should have tried to be much, much more careful in getting the message to repeat — the uncertainty of what we’re going through,” Fauci said.

He recalled how in the very early days in the pandemic, he had advised that lifestyle changes were not necessary at the time when cases were extremely low, while also adding the caveat that conditions could “change rapidly and we need to be prepared.”

In conclusion, Fauci was one of the policymakers who created the guidelines used to lockdown schools, ginning up fear about those rules not being followed and hedging answers that provided school districts bureaucrats across the nation the excuse to keep schools closed. He has everything to do with the adverse impacts on schoolchildren we will deal with for the next several years.

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