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CNN’s Chief School-Closure Advocate Backtracks

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Dr. Peter Hotez appears on CNN, November 27, 2021 (Screenshot via CNN/YouTube)

Dr. Hotez was a constant presence on CNN advocating school closures. Now he claims he was a ‘tireless advocate’ of reopening.

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Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we guard against revisionism from the worst pandemic-era actors, marvel at an atrocious Father’s Day headline, and hit more media misses.

School-Closure Revisionism

It was inevitable that those who advocated a course as disastrous as keeping schools closed years into the pandemic would seek to rewrite their role in history.

The data are unambiguous and damning: School closures took an enormous and devastating toll on American children and parents alike. As Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has acknowledged, “the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically altered young peoples’ experiences at home, at school, and in the community,” in no small part because “they missed first days of school, months or even years of in-person schooling, graduation ceremonies, sports competitions, playdates, and time with relatives.” 

Emergency Room visits for suicide attempts by adolescent females were up by 51 percent in 2021 as compared with 2019. Adolescent males saw a much more modest increase of 4 percent.

The consequences appear to be as enduring as they are injurious: One UCLA study released last month “found that the declines in [emergency department] and hospital discharges for primary psychiatric diagnoses after statewide school closure orders were two to three times less than those for general medical conditions.” And all of that is to say nothing about learning loss. 

Of course, all kinds of policy decisions have unforeseen adverse effects, and at the time, the initial shutdown of schools and other services seemed to be almost unanimously accepted as a reasonable response to the arrival of a deadly and novel disease. The outlier scientists and other experts — and there were a notable handful from Yale, Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford — who presciently voiced skepticism of the lockdowns and warned of the negative long-term consequences were booted from social-media platforms and otherwise sidelined. And now, the stubborn refusal of many lockdown advocates to reflect on what followed from their keeping kids out of their schools and routines over the long term is too frustrating — and potentially destructive — to abide.

Professor Peter Hotez of Baylor University’s medical school, for example, responded to criticism of his school-closure advocacy over the weekend by claiming to have “worked tirelessly with school teachers, principals, school board advising them on how to keep schools open safely” and having done “a lot more to keep schools open than the wing nuts.”

As AG Hamilton points out, Hotez has made a lying dog-faced pony soldier of himself.

In August 2020, Hotez was jumping in front of any and every camera he could find in an effort to ensure America’s children could not return to normalcy that fall.

That September, he accused the Trump administration of trying “to mislead educators into opening schools even in areas of high virus transmission.”

Yet it quickly became clear that returning to schools was possible as many schools in Europe reopened far more quickly than schools in the U.S.; schools never closed in Sweden. In July 2020, Sweden reported that Covid-19 outbreaks among its 1 million school children were not any worse than those in Finland, which closed schools.

When schools in the U.S. began to return to in-person instruction in fall 2020, they did not become hubs of uncontrollable spread either: As of November that year, just 0.19 percent of the 123,500 COVID tests administered in NYC schools were positive.

Even after the release of the coronavirus vaccines, Hotez repeated his doomsaying in August 2021, relentlessly and unashamedly trying to keep kids out of the classroom a year and a half after the start of the pandemic.

The Omicron variant presented yet another opportunity for Hotez to beat the drum last winter while lamenting “how we unfairly ask educators to create mini public health departments for testing/tracing.”

Hotez has no shortage of concerns – for educators and, most important, for his reputation —  but none of them seem to be over the plight of this country’s children. 

Of course, Hotez is neither the first nor the last of the Covid-era fearmongers trying to gaslight the public in an effort to salvage their shattered credibility. Randi Weingarten, the highly paid lobbyist working against children’s interests at the head of the American Federation of Teachers, has poured resources into a years-long campaign — aided by the media — to trick the public into thinking she was in favor of returning to in-person instruction, even as she worked toward the opposite end.

But the damage to their reputations is done. And the next time these charlatans see a chance to strike, the rest of us will be there to remind them that it was they who are responsible for it.

Headline Fail of the Week

NBC’s Today.com chose an unusual way to celebrate Father’s Day this year: publishing an article where “Eight dads share how abortion shaped their lives.” 

The article begins by explaining, “Eight dads are sharing how abortion has helped them become the fathers they are today, on what experts believe will likely be the last Father’s Day before the Supreme Court issues a ruling that would overturn Roe v Wade.”

One father, who now has a five-year-old son, reportedly told Today.com, “I wouldn’t be a father without abortion.” 

He said he and his wife had each been in prior relationships where they made decisions with their partners to abort their unborn children. He said he and his wife were able to bond over the experience.

“If we had not been able to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, we wouldn’t be happily married with a 5-year-old. It would have taken both of our lives in completely different directions,” he said.

“I consider my role as a man and a father to put a dude out into the world that knows abortion is normal; that knows that with every unwanted pregnancy, there’s a man involved,” he added. “Our voices have been very very quiet, if non-existent, but abortion has allowed me to live my life and make the choices that I think everyone should get to make.”

Media Misses

— The Associated Press fact-checked a screenshot from Twitter of a faux Atlantic headline that reads “The Heroism of Biden’s Bike Fall.” 

“No such story or headline can be found on The Atlantic’s website, or in archived versions of the site from Saturday captured by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine,” explained the wire service’s Josh Kelety, who assured readers that no one had written that “the President gracefully illustrated an important lesson for all Americans – when we fall, we must get back up,” for the magazine. As ridiculous as the AP’s running with the fact check may seem, it probably says more about what the public expects from The Atlantic.

— CBS News wonders why credit card companies won’t just participate in the state’s effort to surveil the population and sift between Good and Bad citizens.

— Not sure we want to know what comes next in this series from Jacobin.

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