One of Joe Biden’s primary arguments for being elected was to set the country on a more evidence-based policy approach. So far, the results are disappointing.
We’ve known since last summer that the COVID risk that goes with being in a school is minuscule.
M any Democrats questioned whether the Trump administration was interfering politically with questions of science and evidence throughout the COVID-19 pandemic last year. Democrats made many claims that were eventually proven false regarding the potential rushing of development and production of vaccines, even going so far as to say people should not take the vaccine unless there was “independent verification.” Those claims have all been debunked over time. However, there is certainly evidence that Trump injected himself actively into the proceedings of his own task force, and that Vice President Mike Pence’s office tried to steer the CDC to filing reports that were more conducive to the president’s political narrative.
One of Joe Biden’s primary arguments for being elected president was to change all that and set the country on a more evidence-based policy approach. So far, the results are disappointing.
The most recent episode began with the White House challenging the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) itself. Biden’s choice to helm the organization is the widely respected Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who was previously the chief of infectious disease at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Walensky was asked when she believed schools could open, based on her understanding of the scientific evidence to date. Her answer was not to many Democrats’ liking:
There is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told reporters during a White House news briefing on Covid-19.
“Vaccinations of teachers is not a prerequisite for safely reopening schools,” she added.
This statement raised the ire of teachers’ unions around the nation, many of which have been proclaiming for months that schools could not open safely without a myriad of reforms and the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars. Over the last few months, they have moved the goalposts again, saying we can open safely only when every teacher has been vaccinated. Some unions have gone so far as to say not only all teachers, but all students, must be vaccinated before in-person learning can begin anew.
The White House immediately started backtracking from the statement of its own lead scientific expert:
During a press briefing later Wednesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki walked back Walensky’s comments, saying that they were not “official guidance” from the CDC.
If Walensky were here, she would say “that they have not released their official guidance from the CDC yet on the vaccination of teachers and what would be needed to ensure the safe reopening of schools,” Psaki said.
The reality is that Dr. Walensky was simply reiterating the widely accepted data on school openings, not only from the United States, but worldwide, and not only in developed nations, but from countries of all cultural and wealth statuses. The CDC published data and recommendations last August that said schools were safe to open. Additionally, the prestigious National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (a nonpartisan, non-governmental agency) declared at the same time that it was safe and essential to open schools as quickly as possible. Nobody supporting the claims of teachers has yet to show that either recommendation was incorrect.
The established science doesn’t stop there. The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted to put “frontline essential workers,” which include teachers, next in line to receive a COVID-19 vaccine after first prioritizing health-care workers and long-term–care–facility residents. Even so, the scientific community has found little evidence of significant risks in the classroom even without vaccines. A CDC study published in January found almost no evidence of significant transmission of virus in schools with students below the age of 13, when normal, readily available precautionary measures such as wearing masks and social distancing were followed.
Dr. Walensky, a steadfast scientist first and political appointee second, has repeatedly said that schools should be the first to open and the last to close in this pandemic. Although President Biden has repeatedly said he wants schools to “reopen and stay open,” his silence on Walensky’s statement is worrisome, at best.
To compound matters, not a single scientist of note, partisan or otherwise, has really opposed Dr. Walensky’s analysis. Dr. Tom Frieden, CDC director under President Barack Obama, largely echoed Walensky’s statement. “We can’t hold up reopening schools for vaccination,” Frieden said Friday in an interview on CBSN. “The fact is, that we have seen very little spread in academic settings in schools. Most of what we see is spread in the community.” Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University School of Public Health, has consistently argued that schools should be the last public entities to close, and reopening of schools right now is reasonable and medically safe. He co-wrote an editorial in November stating the following:
Schools, particularly grades K–8, should be exempt from closure requirements. They should be given authority to determine, based on the broader state of the pandemic at any given time, what percentage of their students are educated remotely or in person, but we must ensure that the schools remain able to serve, at all times, those students who need in-person instruction. Families should have a critical voice in making that determination.
Science on this matter has been overwhelming and increasingly is becoming difficult to ignore. So what does science specifically show us? To evaluate this, we need to dig deeper into several recent studies.
First was a CDC study evaluating COVID transmission among rural schools in Wisconsin late last year. This study of 17 Wisconsin schools identified only a few instances of COVID spreading within school buildings during September and November of last year. This time period was also critical, because the virus was raging through the state of Wisconsin during this time. Although 58 staff members contracted COVID during that time, not a single case could be directly linked to schools, even during a period of high viral activity. Only seven students were found to have contracted the virus in school. What is clear from this study is that even with very high rates of community spread, schools are not a significant source of spread.
One of the largest studies, led by Brown University economist Emily Oster, analyzed in-school infection data from 47 states over the last two weeks of September. Among more than 200,000 students and 63,000 staff who had returned to school, Oster reported an infection rate of 0.13 percent among students and 0.24 percent among staff. The students rarely spread infections to the staff. In other words, students may pass the virus among themselves but are not at serious risk. Moreover, teachers are not at significantly higher risk in schools than they are in the wider community, and schools are not locations of super spreader events.
Why is this the case? That science is still vague, but we do have some evidence that children simply don’t spread the virus as easily as adults. A study from Duke University found that children carry large amounts of the virus in their respiratory systems. This could potentially mean children might not transmit the virus as effectively as adults; for instance, children may not generate aerosols as effectively as older children and adults when they cough, sneeze, or breathe. Because researchers have found that people transmit the coronavirus even when they experience mild or no symptoms, Kelly cautions that “trying to use symptom-based screening strategies may not effectively pick up infections among school-aged children.” In short, schools using symptom or temperature checks likely are not improving protection of the school from the virus.
The week after Joe Biden took the oath of office, an editorial was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that brought all these issues together. They wrote the following:
A case-control study of exposures among children aged 0 through 18 years with and without SARS-CoV-2 infection in Mississippi found that having attended gatherings and social functions outside the home as well as having had visitors in the home was associated with increased risk of infection; however, in-person school attendance during the 14 days prior to diagnosis was not. In the fall of 2020, 11 school districts in North Carolina with more than 90,000 students and staff were open for in-person education for 9 weeks. During this time, within-school transmissions were very rare (32 infections acquired in schools; 773 community-acquired infections) and there were no cases of student-to-staff transmission. . . .
A European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control report from December 2020 that included findings from 17 country-level surveys found that 12 countries reported from 1 (Latvia) to 400 (Spain) school-based clusters of 2 or more epidemiologically linked SARS-CoV-2 infections, but that overall cluster sizes were small (most <10 cases) and could often not be definitively linked to in-school vs community-based transmission. The investigators concluded that these data, together with the observation that rates of infection among teachers and nonteachers were generally similar, indicated that schools were not associated with accelerating community transmission.
The European Union has been far more aggressive in opening schools than the United States, largely because they have forced themselves to follow the science first. Across Europe, schools and child-care centers have stayed open for most of this year, even as many businesses and gathering places are shut or restricted. Countries such as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom appear to be following the evidence that young children going to school are not a risk factor to themselves, their families, or teachers. Meanwhile, American children have been left behind.
The list of studies, from Europe, Asia, Africa and elsewhere, supporting these findings is immense. Almost all the studies show that children, especially below the age of 13, are not effective spreaders of COVID. Teachers and staff are at a much higher risk of contracting the virus in their daily routines than they are catching the virus in classrooms.
Biden’s medical and science experts are well aware of these facts. The science is clear, the evidence is mounting, the data are difficult to challenge.
The problem is with politics.
For all his promises to make sure schools open within the first 100 days, Joe Biden simply lacks the courage to take on the largest base of support in the national Democratic Party today. Teachers’ unions are as much a core of the modern Democrats as anyone.
That is why the White House and congressional Democrats keep putting up roadblocks to the opening of schools. Biden’s chief of staff, former Ebola czar Ron Klain, has suggested that schools need $130 billion in funding in order to open safely. This is a ridiculous number, especially considering that Congress has already allocated $70 billion to schools as of December, and less than a quarter of that money has been spent. This is excuse making, nothing more, especially when about two-thirds of private schools are currently open for in-person learning, without any evidence of increased infections to either students or staff.
This leads to the obvious conundrum: Many teachers’ unions and their members simply fear returning, regardless of the evidence. The data and evidence simply don’t override their innate emotional concerns. As such, they are now at loggerheads with school districts (many run by Democrats too) and parents across the nation.
In Chicago, the city and its teachers’ union have been talking past each other for months. The union has produced a moving target for the safe opening of schools. The newest demand was vaccination for all teachers, during a period of time in which even health-care workers and the elderly cannot find the vaccine. The school district has been planning for pre-K and special-education programs to resume in-person learning first, followed by students in kindergarten through fifth grade, and a month later with sixth through eighth grades. There has not been any indication of when high schools will reopen. When schools were to be opened the first week of January, half of the city’s teachers refused to report to work. The union threatened an all-out strike (which would be, in the current setting, illegal under state law) if the entire district’s teachers were ordered to return without appropriate reforms.
Finally this week, 68 percent of the union’s members voted to approve the school reopening plan. This plan puts teachers on the fast track to vaccines, but otherwise the union was forced to mostly accept the school district’s safety plans. One of the union’s major requests, improved ventilation, has been rejected not only by city leaders, but by the Biden administration itself. Even still, union members remain disgruntled. “Let me be clear. This plan is not what any of us deserve. Not us. Not our students. Not their families. The fact that CPS could not delay reopening a few short weeks to ramp up vaccinations and preparations in schools is a disgrace,” union president Jesse Sharkey wrote.
In Fairfax County, Va., in suburban Washington, D.C., a similar fight is occurring in the high-income area, with even dumber results. The county is planning on opening schools, with in-person learning, but without many of their teachers. The county is planning on hiring classroom monitors for the one out of six teachers that are going to remain at home during their classes. Students will be in-person only two days a week, but many of them will not be in person with their teachers themselves, resulting in a situation that is almost as bad as virtual learning in the first place. This has not stopped teachers from being vaccinated, however, even if they are continuing to work from home, making the absurdity all that much more blatant. Furthermore, there has been no promise to vaccinate the classroom monitors, which makes the logical fallacy even worse.
The political dilemma for the president is obvious: Scientists are repeatedly telling him it is safe, even before widespread vaccination of the general public, to open schools with the appropriate limitations and safety guidelines. However, teachers’ unions, among his biggest supporters, refuse to accept the science, with fear being their driving motive to stay in a virtual environment. At this rate, there is no reason to believe we will have anything close to normal school days even as schools prepare for virtual learning into next fall.
Teachers have legitimate concerns regarding safety, but public-health experts and physicians have answered those questions, with extensive research showing the safety of such a school environment. It is time for Democrats, led by President Biden, to take a stand based on science, and in defense of educating our children. This is a gulf that cannot be crossed with more science or more data. The scientific evidence is clear. It is time to follow the science, or else admit that Democrats simply aren’t the party of science. There is no compromise or middle ground in this case, when the science is so clear. Joe Biden must choose, and choose wisely.