The mainstream media has admitted extended Covid school closures were a disaster. When will CDC?

We need a pandemic response report sooner rather than later.

Slowly, but surely, the mainstream media seems to finally be acknowledging that extended Covid school closures were a tragedy for American children — they didn’t slow the virus’ spread and caused catastrophic learning loss and developmental delays. On Monday, the New York Times published a data-centered piece evaluating their harms:

The more time students spent in remote instruction, the further they fell behind. And, experts say, extended closures did little to stop the spread of Covid.

And, Wednesday, CNN anchor Jake Tapper reported on the New York Times’ findings and declared that lengthy pandemic school closures damaged children and reflected a “horrible, horrible series of decisions.”

While the federal government has admitted that significant learning loss happened, there has been no recognition from our leading public health agency — one whose misguided social distancing guidance led to some children missing 1.5 years of formal schooling — that extended school closures failed to slow the spread while damaging the holistic health of American children. Why? Politics, it seems.

The Biden administration has indicated they see no political advantage in a 9/11-style pandemic response commission and CDC director Mandy Cohen was, in part, chosen by White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients because of a belief she wouldn’t undermine the president’s reelection campaign with actions taken at the agency:

Biden officials involved in the search came away from discussions with Cohen impressed by her broad range of health experience at the federal and state levels, two of the people said, and convinced she had the ability to manage the nearly 11,000-person agency and the broader political dynamics of an administration gearing up for Biden’s re-election run.

This means that the likelihood of CDC producing a pandemic response report — let alone Congress launching a bipartisan commission — is slim to none in an election year. The U.S. federal government stands in stark contrast to multiple European governments — Germany, Sweden, Norway, England, and Wales come to mind — where official commissions or health ministries have explicitly stated that extended school closures caused more harms than benefits. (Closer to home, New Jersey produced a 900-page pandemic response report that concluded “New Jersey students would have benefited from schools opening sooner.”)

Miracles can happen, however, and with enough pressure from academia, civil society, and a handful of politicians, I believe Cohen could be convinced to task CDC with producing a report evaluating the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical measures (e.g. school closures, travel bans, mask mandates, social distancing, etc.) deployed during the pandemic. Opposition from the White House would be fierce, but Cohen does appear to be more committed to restoring trust in CDC than her predecessor.

Think about extended school closures as effectively the domestic policy equivalent of the Iraq War. Imagine if government hadn’t attempted to explore the CIA and Bush administration mistakes that led to one of the most catastrophic foreign policy decisions in U.S. history. Few Americans would have accepted that outcome.

Dr. Vinay Prasad — a vocal opponent of pandemic school closures — compared them to the Iraq War in April 2021.

The reality is that another pandemic is inevitable. Recall that Covid-19 arrived a decade after swine flu. And due to local control of schools in the United States, more extended school closures are bound to happen when the next pandemic arrives unless there’s a national consensus — institutional, political, and perhaps even legal — against them, as existed in Sweden. Without action from CDC to document school closure harms and their inefficacy as an epidemiological control measure, major districts will be tempted to repeat the same mistakes again, and another generation of children will suffer.