Anthony Fauci – ��

In Diary, Fauci Bragged of Role in School Closures. At Hearing, He Took the 5th

Linda Jacobson — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 20:44:09 +0000

In a three-hour hearing Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the influential scientist who led the national response to COVID, refused to respond to questions about his role in school closures and the mask and social distancing guidelines that experts say have drastically set back students’ learning.

Subpoenaed by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the Republican chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Fauci repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right to decline to respond, and accused the senator of an “unhinged obsession” with putting him in jail. Former President Joe Biden for any crimes he may have committed dating back to 2014 in his official roles with the government, but Paul threatened “repercussions” over Fauci’s refusal to answer questions and said the committee will vote next week on contempt charges.

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“You argue that you did not personally issue every lockdown order, close schools or impose every mandate, but officials across the country invoked your authority to justify these decisions,” said Paul, who described Fauci as more concerned about his celebrity status than scientific evidence. “Children lost years of education.”

The hearing followed Paul’s recent release of Fauci kept during the height of the COVID crisis. The entries reveal his conflict with President Donald Trump over keeping schools open and his sense of pride that officials, like former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff, followed his guidance on closing schools. On June 29, 2020, for example, he noted with former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, about allowing in-person learning to resume that fall. “Since this is the first decision among governors regarding opening for the fall term, he feels that he will be the example,” Fauci wrote. “I recommended that he delay decision for two weeks.”

Democrats praised Fauci for his decades of service under both Republican and Democratic presidents and characterized the hearing as a personal vendetta by Paul. , the ranking Democrat on the committee, said the hearing was a distraction from some of the current public health issues facing the public, including a rise in measles cases. With staff cuts, he added, “the administration has hollowed out the public health workforce.”

Republicans, he said, are just “relitigating the past.”

Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican and chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, tried to get Dr. Anthony Fauci to apologize to the nation, but Fauci refused to answer questions. (Alex WROBLEWSKI / AFP via Getty Images)

Much of the questioning focused on whether Fauci misled the public about the source of the virus, saying that it originated in a Chinese market, while he wrote to himself that the market was only an “amplifier.” Since 2021, Paul has accused Fauci of lying about the National Institutes of Health funding the type of lab research in China that created COVID.

“Many people would say, ‘Well gosh, that doesn’t sound like a really good idea, to create viruses that don’t exist in nature to see if they’ll infect human cells,’ ” Paul said. “The American people deserve an apology.”

‘Slower in learning’

The nation’s schools shut down in mid-March 2020 as states responded to calls from Trump, under Fauci’s advice, to “slow the spread” of the disease. But what most assumed would be short-term measures turned into more than a year of on-again, off-again closures and intense battles over mask and vaccine mandates. By October of 2020, education researchers began to estimate that students had lost more than a year of learning in reading and math.

Those predictions held up. Data from the most recent shows that overall, students still haven’t reached pre-pandemic levels in reading and math.

Children are “slower in learning language now because they couldn’t watch someone’s lips moving,” said Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, a Republican.

He also pressed Fauci on a May 6, 2020 conversation he had with Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over the fact that 1 million children had missed their measles vaccinations because of the shutdown.

“This is terrible and needs to be addressed since on that basis alone, there would be far, far more excess deaths from measles among children than coronavirus deaths among children,” Fauci wrote.

But Sen. Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat, blamed the current administration for the rise in measles cases. So far this year, there have been over 2,300 reported measles cases, .

“Children are dying because there has been increased vaccine hesitancy fueled by Robert F. Kennedy,” Hassan said about the Health and Human Services secretary.

During the hearing, Trump took credit for the rapid development of the COVID vaccine. But he said he relied less on Fauci’s advice over time.

“I didn’t let him shut the country down, although he wanted to,” Trump wrote. “I went the Federalist way, and let the governors decide.”

The public, however, thought the president didn’t respond quickly enough to the outbreak. In an April 2020 , 65% of Americans said Trump was too slow to take major steps to address the threat.

Some experts say what schools needed at the time was strong federal guidance on reopening.

“It’s one thing to close for a couple weeks, which is what we all thought was going to happen,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which launched one of the of schools’ responses to the virus. “A couple weeks turned into months and years in some cases. That’s where the real cost to kids came in.”

She declined to say Fauci is to blame for the prolonged damage to students’ learning and mental health. But she said neither the Trump nor the Biden administrations protected schools from the political storm over reopening and COVID protocols.

“Everybody involved bears responsibility,” she said. “So many things went wrong.”

Union Head Pushes Back on GOP Claims of ‘Undue Influence’ on School Closures

Greg Toppo — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 22:48:00 +0000

Congressional lawmakers on Wednesday pressed American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten to admit that the union had a hand in crafting CDC guidelines on how schools should respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

And Weingarten largely complied, saying it “made sense to consult with the CDC” as the pandemic progressed in 2021.

But in testimony on Wednesday before the House , Weingarten pushed back forcefully against GOP claims that the union exerted “inappropriate influence” over the guidance or worked behind the scenes to keep U.S. public schools closed for longer than necessary.

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She said any allegations of undue influence over prolonged closures are inaccurate, noting that the CDC approved just “one particular edit” to a policy about accommodations for immunocompromised teachers.

Weingarten also noted that neither the CDC nor teachers unions had the authority to open or close schools, despite the AFT’s aggressive moves to ensure members’ workplaces were safe. In one instance in 2020, the union threatened “” if school reopening plans didn’t meet their health and safety standards.

The subcommittee’s Republican chairman, U.S. Rep. Brad Wenstrup of Ohio, last month previewed Wednesday’s hearing, alleging in a March 28 that the CDC let the AFT edit its operational strategy for reopening schools prior to its February 2021 release. The guidance, Wenstrup said, advised keeping schools closed in more than 90 percent of U.S. counties, “contrary to the prevailing science.”

He said the AFT and Weingarten got “uncommon” access to the draft plan, even making line-by-line additions that “coincidently shifted the CDC’s guidance to align with AFT’s agenda — keeping schools closed.”

The issue of closures remains contentious more than three years after the pandemic shuttered virtually every public school in America. Researchers are quantifying their human cost in lost learning time, lower school attendance, worsening mental health, deteriorating school behavior and lower childhood vaccination rates, among other indicators.

have shown that widespread reliance on remote and hybrid schooling during the pandemic had “profound consequences” for achievement, with students, especially those in high-poverty areas, losing more ground in math the longer they learned remotely. Learning gaps in math didn’t worsen in places where schools remained in-person.

During the hearing, Weingarten said it was appropriate for public health authorities to consult with education groups — she said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky noted that the agency conferred with more than 50 organizations about the guidance.

“It was not only appropriate for the CDC to confer with educators. It would have been irresponsible for them not to,” Weingarten said.

She told committee members that it was the Biden administration’s idea to approach the AFT about the guidance, not the other way around. But she denied that the AFT provided, in Wenstrup’s words, “suggested revisions to the CDC’s operational strategy regarding school closures or reopenings.”

“What we suggested, sir, was ideas,” she said.

But Republicans on the committee, trying to make the case that the politically powerful union shouldn’t have a hand in U.S. health policy, pushed to tie Weingarten as closely as possible to the Biden administration. At one point, Rep. Debbie Lesko of Arizona told her, “I’m a member of Congress that sits on two committees that deal with the CDC. I don’t have a direct number to Director Walensky. Do you?”

Weingarten admitted she did.

“Well, hopefully she’ll give it to me too,” Lesko said.

The hearing was delayed for nearly half an hour as House lawmakers approved legislation to raise the U.S.’s debt ceiling while cutting federal spending, including President Biden’s proposal to forgive student debt.

While Weingarten was Wednesday’s only witness, the subcommittee has also requested documents from other education groups about advice they gave to the CDC. They include the the and the , among others.

Midway through the hearing, Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, told Wenstrup, “I’ve been to some weird hearings in this Congress, Mr. Chairman, but this one might be the weirdest, because it’s convened in order to accuse a federal agency of the crime of consorting with American citizens.”

People rallied to reopen the schools and put students back in the classroom during the coronavirus pandemic. (Michael Siluk/Getty Images)

The AFT expected a contentious hearing: In preparation, it hired veteran Washington, D.C., attorney Michael Bromwich, a former U.S. Justice Department inspector general, who has already complained of “scapegoating built on false allegations that appear to be the basis for this Subcommittee’s ‘investigation.’ ”

For the hearing, the AFT also released a lengthy letter from Bromwich, who last week told Wenstrup and ranking member Rep. Raul Ruiz of California that the union’s role in CDC school closure policies “has been exaggerated and falsified to support pre-conceived conclusions” about closure strategy.

Actually, he said, the AFT’s role was “extremely limited,” amounting to a few sentences in a 38-page document. He noted that the union’s February 2021 proposal of a “trigger” threshold of positive COVID cases that would signal schools to close was actually rejected by the CDC.

Asked during the hearing if she had any regrets about the AFT’s work during the pandemic, Weingarten said, “I regret the fear that was there. And part of the reason we wanted clear information was because we had a role in terms of overcoming fear.”

She noted that proper ventilation and testing, for instance, turned out to be more important than social distancing. “There were things that we really didn’t get right.”

While Republicans sharply criticized the union’s role in often-disastrous closures, one line of questioning, from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, drew a sharp rebuke from Democrats. Greene asked Weingarten, a lesbian, “Are you a mother?”

Weingarten replied, “I am a mother by marriage.” In 2018, she , who came to the relationship with two daughters.

Greene said she questioned Weingarten’s recommendations to the CDC “as not a medical doctor, not a biological mother, and really not a teacher either.” She later added, “Let me tell you: I am a mother, and all three of my children were directly affected by the school closures, by your recommendations, which is something that you really can’t understand.”

Democrats on the committee asked that Greene’s comments be stricken from the record — a request Wenstrup denied.

International that schools weren’t associated with accelerating community transmission of the disease during the pandemic. While infections affected schools, researchers found, most of the outbreaks were small, with fewer than 10 cases. And they couldn’t be definitively linked to in-school transmission.

Yet evidence from other nations suggests that the U.S. took a much more cautious approach to reopening. Andreas Schleicher of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in November 2020 that while schools in Europe were initially closed, “Research has shown that if you put social distancing protocols in place, school is actually quite a safe environment, certainly safer than having children running around outside school.”

Prolonged U.S. public school closures have long been a sore spot for educators and public health officials, who now admit that policies keeping students out of school for months could have been rethought.

In an with The New York Times, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the recently retired head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, “I certainly think things could have been done differently — and better … Anybody who thinks that what we or anybody else did was perfect is not looking at reality.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the recently retired head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said of the administration’s pandemic response, “I certainly think things could have been done differently — and better.” (Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)