The sad legacy of masked children and school closures is still with us long after the pandemic is over. When you think of institutions that failed the public during the coronavirus pandemic, would teachers’ unions come to mind? A recent report by the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee, Coronavirus Pandemic found just that when examining the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) role.
Enormous pressure from parents, teachers and their unions prompted a switch to remote learning, which closed almost all schools by the end of March 2020. AFT President Randi Weingarten remarked, “Closing schools is an agonizing decision, but, with caveats, it’s the inevitable and correct one … .”
On March 13, 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a document advising schools on implementing temporary closures. However, the CDC was not sure closures would help. Hong Kong and Singapore data showed that countries that closed schools had about the same COVID-19 transmission rates as countries where schools remained open.
It was never likely that children would become superspreaders. A May 2020 paper by Lara S. Shekerdemian in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that “children are at far greater risk of critical illness from influenza than from COVID-19,” indicating that the risk of severe illness from COVID-19 is lower for children compared to adults.By August 7, 2020, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report found that U.S. children were only 0.01 per cent of hospitalizations and 0.0005 per cent of COVID-19 deaths between March 1, 2020 and July 25, 2020.
On April 29, 2020, the AFT released “A Plan to Safely Reopen America’s Schools and Communities” but made it a leftist wish list. The plan called for more public investment in improving broadband Internet access, increasing Medicaid benefits, and cancelling student loans, all to combat “inequity.” The plan insisted, “It is not the time to be concerned about deficits.”
In the summer of 2020, Weingarten called President Trump’s incentives to reopen schools “reckless,” “callous” and “cruel.” The AFT published an ad claiming that students were “being used as guinea pigs”. The union supported efforts by other teachers’ unions to sue states that tried to resume in person instruction.
An August 14, 2020, press release by Weingarten said, “The push to physically reopen schools full time … ignores science, safety, and basic humanity.” The AFT even called on affiliate organizations to conduct safety strikes if they deemed the COVID mitigation measures inappropriate.
Strangely, the Chicago Teachers Union tweeted that “[t]he push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny” and held safety strikes as late as January 2022. The United Teachers of Los Angeles cited safety concerns for its strike, but the union also demanded a millionaire tax, defunding the police, and providing universal Medicaid.
The House report determined, “AFT is not a scientific organization‒it does not employ epidemiologists or immunologists. Instead, a political union committed to activism on behalf of its 1.7 million members donated $2.4 million to Democrat candidates during the 2020 election cycle.”
Nevertheless, the tail wagged the dog as the Biden administration approached AFT for advice on reopening schools. AFT even told the CDC on a phone call on January 29, 2021, to put in school closure targets if COVID-19 positivity rates exceeded a certain threshold. AFT also recommended vaccine mandates for teachers and mask mandates for everyone in school. The CDC resisted some AFT proposals, but many of AFT’s draft changes made it into the final version of the CDC’s operational strategy.
It was common practice to mask U.S. children as young as two years old. However, the World Health Organization (WHO) said young children had a low risk of illness and could not wear a mask effectively. The WHO also said that for psychological reasons, children aged six to 11 should not routinely wear a mask, especially not on the playground because masks hinder breathing during intense activity.
A 2023 survey by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association found two-thirds of its speech-language pathologists had more client referrals than usual after 2020. The House report suggested this was likely due to mask-wearing.
School closures eroded students’ mental health. A stunning 44 per cent of high schoolers felt sad or hopeless in 2021. Suicide attempts among 12- to 17-year-old girls rose by 51 per cent between early 2019 and early 2021. Many teens turned to drugs to self-medicate.
The ban on sports furthered the decline in children’s physical health. The report found that “the rate of BMI [Body Mass Index] increases for children ages 2-19 approximately doubled from pre-pandemic rates. The number of new cases of Type 2 diabetes among children during the first year of the pandemic increased 182 percent from pre-pandemic levels.”
The report concluded that “[i]gnoring the science and facts of COVID-19 and the harms of masking young children was profoundly immoral on behalf of the leadership of the country’s public health officials. The future consequences of these types of draconian policies are not yet known, but public health leaders in the future should remember that all policy must be decided in a balanced manner.”
The same could probably be said of Canada. The problem is that Parliament has done little to find out.
Lee Harding is the Research Fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
