Just when it seemed those in power no longer cared about the nation’s K–12 education system, schools are generating earthquakes. Classrooms and playgrounds are not shaking—yet. Instead, the epicenters are located below public health departments and university research centers.
Yet schools must take credit—or blame, if you prefer—for November’s earth-rattling events. Had school closures not been so prolonged from 2020 to 2022, President-elect Donald Trump would not be able convince the Senate to confirm Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Marty Makary to be the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to be his director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
When Covid struck in March 2020, public health bureaucrats ordered schools to close, teachers and children to wear masks, and everyone to sit six feet apart. No one complained at first. Indeed, Makary had urged these measures even prior to the declaration of a public emergency by President Trump on the advice of NIH coronavirus expert Dr. Anthony Fauci.
When the disruptions continued until the end of the school year, the more sensitive seismic sensors began to detect tremors hinting at what was to come. It soon became apparent that only a tiny percentage of children required hospitalization, that children were safer at school than at home, and that children were inefficient spreaders of the diseases. Further, previous school closures (induced by storms, strikes, and wars) left children socially isolated, emotionally distraught, and academically behind. When many schools did not open the following fall, a growing group of public health experts, led by Bhattacharya, signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which warned that “[c]urrent lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health . . . leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.”
Fauci attacked the Declaration, saying, “Quite frankly that is nonsense, and anybody who knows anything about epidemiology will tell you that that is nonsense and very dangerous.” Similarly, Francis Collins, director of the NIH at the time of the Declaration, also called it “dangerous” and its signers a “fringe component of epidemiology” who were outside the scientific “mainstream.” Shifting from lockdowns to a focus on the ill and aged would cause unnecessary illnesses and deaths, he insisted. At the behest of public health authorities, Twitter banned Bhattacharya and promotions of the Declaration from its social media platform.
It was the great German sociologist Max Weber who said Americans “prefer having people in office whom we can spit upon, rather than a caste of officials who spit upon us.” A high caste of public health bureaucrats had forgotten America’s commitment to liberty. It was only a matter of time before elites would begin to feel the ground opening beneath them.
