Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted in an interview on CBS Mornings that prolonged school closures were a “mistake.”
“The school closures, which did enormous harm to kids on multiple levels and didn’t seem to save lives, and I wonder, can we say today that that is a mistake?” the reporter asked Fauci.
Fauci responded, “I think what was not a mistake was the actual closure, because when we had a shutdown that 15-day to flatten the curve, we were in a tsunami of cases. Right here in New York, you had freezer trucks in front of Elmhurst Hospital.”
“I’m not talking about the initial, I’m talking about the depth and the prolonged-” the reporter interjected.
“And the issue is shutting down everything immediately (…) major social distancing, and even schools was the right thing,” Fauci said. “How long you kept it was the problem.”
“Keeping it for a year was not a good idea,” he admitted.”
The reporter asked Fauci to confirm his admission, saying, “So that was a mistake, in retrospect? We will not repeat it.”
“Absolutely, yeah,” Fauci stated.
Prolonged school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic has been linked to an increase of youth suicidality.
A report published in the JAMA Network revealed an “association between longer school closures in the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic and increases in youth suicidality,” the authors of the report wrote.
Comparing youth suicidality rates between Texas and Massachusetts, the researchers found that Massachusetts had greater emergency department visits among youths aged 12-17.
Massachusetts had prolonged school closures from the 2020 pandemic.
