The bonkers (and false) union-media effort to claim in-person school was a mass killer of teachers
Timothy P. Carney
Video Embed
Beginning in the summer of 2020, the news media, Democrats, and teachers unions all got together and started spreading the lie that sending children back to school would kill teachers in huge numbers. This was always false and cruel, yet today, some people think it was a good argument.
https://twitter.com/JReinerMD/status/1651776901478772740?s=20
It was never a good argument, and it was always grounded in fact-free hysteria.
THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT THE LOCKDOWNERS NOW REALIZE THEY WERE ALL WRONG
President Joe Biden’s Democratic National Committee helped set the tone, campaigning in the summer of 2020 against reopening schools, which then-President Donald Trump was advocating at the time. Letting children back into the classroom was “risking teachers’ and parents’ lives,” Biden’s DNC said in a July 27 ad.
The teachers unions ramped up the hysteria.
“Children cannot focus on schoolwork if their family members or teachers are in the hospital or dying,” said Frankie Cook, a kindergarten teacher in Brooklyn.
The news media played along.
That fall, the news media started rolling out totally misleading stories obviously intended to terrify parents.
Here was the Hill:
PBS declared, “Teacher deaths from COVID-19 raise alarms as new school year begins,” leading its article with this scare story: “Teachers in at least three states have died after bouts with the coronavirus since the dawn of the new school year.”
The Washington Post used the deaths of six teachers to tell a tale of “fears that school campuses will become a breeding ground for the virus.”
What they didn’t tell you about these stories is all of these teachers got sick over summer vacation, and there was no reason whatsoever to believe any of these teacher deaths had any connection to in-person teaching.
Later that month, teachers held rallies against in-person school, declaring #WeWillNotDieForDOE.
By October, the evidence was pretty clear that open schools weren’t causing the virus to spread.
Still, media hysterics such as Dana Milbank were getting away with falsehoods like this: “Even with the limited school reopenings so far, the disproportionate number of teachers appearing in COVID-19 obituaries is striking.”
Even in February 2021, teachers unions were holding protests against opening peppered with sensationalistic claims. “Keep the schools shut,” one speaker at a union anti-school protest demanded. “You will not sacrifice our lives, disrupt our communities, and endanger our students, for what? Test scores? Or a few folks to get their free babysitters back?”
“No Tributes. No Hunger Games. We are NOT expendable,” read one teacher’s sign.
This was all false.
An exhaustive study in the British Medical Journal’s Evidence-Based Medicine found that all the evidence undermined the notion that teaching in person was dangerous. The authors wrote, “In Scotland, school teachers had a lower risk of severe COVID-19 than the general population, and in Sweden the age-adjusted risk of intensive care admission for school teachers was not statistically different” from the general population.
It gets better: “A study in England and Wales between March and December 2020 found the absolute mortality rates for deaths with COVID-19 were low among those working in schools … relative to many other occupations. … These data highlight low risk of exposure to families and school staff from in-person school, even prior to the availability of vaccines.”
One June 2022 study found that 90% of teachers and students who got COVID had gotten it outside of school.
What’s more, the evidence showed that remote teaching was bad for teachers’ health.
https://twitter.com/TheNickFoy/status/1406615823914082308
School closures were bad for students and bad for teachers. Everyone pushing them in the summer of 2020 should feel bad about what they did.