The Democrats’ Covid Amnesia
5 min read
If it weren’t for Americans’ collective amnesia, politicians would have to spend considerably more time taking pains to tell the truth. But, unburdened by what has been, President Joe Biden claimed on Monday night with a straight face that his vice president and designated successor accomplished a task that surely escaped your notice.
“Well, during the pandemic, Kamala helped states and cities get their schools back open,” the president said.
In fact, America’s public schools were kept closed in Democratic-run cities and states well into the Biden administration, as a direct result of Biden-administration policies. Democrats might count on Americans to be forgiving, but they are not stupid, and they would do well to not let the pageantry of televised politics obfuscate the fact that they are being lied to.
Republicans, too, are guilty of mass forgetting. Donald Trump was in charge when schools closed in March 2020, and it was under his watch that the CDC came up with the six-foot social-distancing and mask-wearing rules, strictures he conveniently forgets when he foists disastrous COVID policies on Biden. More generally, he’s tried to erase 2020 from the record books, such as when his campaign asks voters, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
Well, yes, we are. Four years ago, we were terrified that the human race was about to be decimated, sitting ducks for remedies good and bad, which makes it especially important that we don’t fall for the same stories, regardless of which party is telling them.
During the 2020 election, many of us were reeling from Trump’s handling of the pandemic; he was the one who told the whoppers, who suggested that people inject bleach. We needed to be rescued, and the only ship in sight flew a blue flag. All aboard!
But then we couldn’t get off. We were captive to decisions sold in the name of science but created more crudely by teachers’ unions and political appointees. Children were among the worst off as America—blue America, really, like the host city to the Democratic National Convention—kept its schools closed longer than any peer country.
Does the Biden administration expect voters to not remember this? In our supposed exuberance over Kamala Harris, are we somehow supposed to invent a memory of her heroic effort to pry open schools? Although gaslighting is a term we should probably retire for overuse, it’s worth keeping in mind as we look at the 2020–21 school-reopening timeline we are being asked to magically revise in 2024, with an eye toward what, if anything, Harris had to do with it.
Biden promised during the 2020 campaign to get schools open once it was safe. That December, after he’d won the election but before taking office, Biden further vowed to reopen schools within the first 100 days. That pledge raised concerns with teachers, who did not want to go back to the classroom unless they received certain assurances.
In February, their campaign received an assist from CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who, after back-channel meetings with a variety of influential players—including Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association—came out with long-awaited reopening guidelines. These included a recommendation that schools in designated COVID hot spots maintain six-foot distancing. Sound reasonable? It wasn’t. Distancing makes in-school learning extremely difficult, and at the time, the great majority of students lived in what the CDC considered a high-transmission area. Although many red states had the good sense to ignore the CDC’s advice, many blue states did not, and Democratic cities dominated by teachers’ unions condemned their students to remote schooling indefinitely. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki provided cold comfort when she told the media that Biden’s goal was to have “more than 50 percent [of schools] open by day 100 … at least one day a week.”
Walensky later told CNN’s Jake Tapper she could not guarantee that all kids would be back in school by the end of the academic year. When he asked her to “point to any scientific reason for students in the United States not to return to in-person classes tomorrow,” Walensky suggested that kids just weren’t good enough at masking.
I can hardly lay blame for Walensky’s fecklessness at Harris’s feet—but as far as I’m aware, Harris also didn’t do anything to change the administration’s policies. Instead of facing down the teachers’ unions and urging local jurisdictions to reopen their schools immediately, the Biden administration decided to try buying their cooperation. On March 5, Harris made what might be seen as her debut on the school-reopening stage, when she cast the tiebreaking vote that allowed the Senate to keep discussing the proposed American Rescue Plan. A week later, Biden signed it into law, allowing $200 billion to flow to K–12 schools—much of it for staffing, but also for improved HVAC and other upgrades that teachers had requested.
The Biden administration brags that, in the year after the bill’s passage, the percentage of schools open for full-time, in-person instruction increased from 46 percent to 99 percent. But for far too many students, the pace of those reopenings was catastrophically slow. Not until the fall of 2022 could parents in much of the country count on finding school doors open—and even then, spot closures persisted.
So what did Biden mean when he said Harris “helped states and cities get their schools back open”? That one vote? I asked the Harris campaign for comment but did not hear back.
America still hasn’t reckoned with its pandemic failures, and that’s true well beyond school closures. Many questions about pandemic policy have not been answered. Instead, decision makers ask voters to understand that if mistakes were made, everyone was doing their best during a hard and confusing time. This past January, Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, admitted to Congress that there was no science behind the six-feet rule, that during the Trump administration it “sort of just appeared.”
Are we all still trying to digest the pandemic era? Yes. Like the python that swallowed the pig, it’s just too big. But the American people don’t need to hear that things were hard and confusing; we need honesty about the past. In hindsight, we see the many mistakes, how fear and panic had us putting faith in bad ideas (masking toddlers! disinfecting groceries!), only to find ourselves facing altered life trajectories—kids who lost years, adults who lost community tethers, loved ones we could not be with when they grew sick and died.
Keeping schools closed for so long was a mistake, and the Democrats shouldn’t pretend Harris is responsible for opening them. Nor should voters allow Democrats to pretend that she did.
