The damage done by the lockdowns has been devastating, but with the arrival of a new Covid variant, what comes next?
In late August, the U.S. Department of Education issued a press release asserting, “When President Biden took office, less than half of K-12 students were going to school in person. Today, thanks to the President’s swift actions and historic investments, every school in America is open safely for in-person instruction.”
“Swift actions?!”
A new book reveals that in January 2021, Biden was in touch with American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, who launched a drive to get the CDC to halt a quick reopening of schools, and Biden obediently fell into line, assuring the union boss, “I am not abandoning you.”
Weingarten’s union lobbied the CDC on – and even proposed language for – the agency’s school-reopening guidance released in February 2021. Quite obviously, the lobbying paid off since, in at least two instances, language suggestions offered by the union were adopted nearly verbatim in the final text of the CDC document.
In reality, kids almost never transmit Covid. The results of a study released in August show that in the fall of 2021, in 34 Massachusetts schools with 18,000 children, there were 44 potential cases of in-school transmission, including no infections of teachers or other staff members.
It cannot be stressed enough that the closures were a political decision, one that was rejected throughout Europe, in American private schools, and in Republican states like Wyoming, Montana, Florida, Arkansas, South Dakota, Texas, etc.
Then, after the lockdowns, the Democrats did what they do best: spending ungodly sums of taxpayer money. The so-called American Rescue Plan, which Biden called “historical” (but was really hysterical), saw the feds throw $190 billion at the problem. However, a 10-month examination by The 74 shows that many districts never used the funds as intended. Some have barely tapped monies that advocates say are “critical for academic recovery, while others have pumped millions of dollars into major classroom additions, upgrading athletic fields, and other expenditures unrelated to the pandemic.”
But even worse than fleecing the taxpayers was the damage done to children. In a recent interview, Stanford economist Eric Hanushek claimed that students subjected to lockdowns would earn 5.6% less over the course of their lives than students educated just before the pandemic. Hanushek maintains that “the losses could total $28 trillion over the rest of this century” and that “the economic costs of the learning losses will swamp business cycle losses.” The projected cost, in lifetime earnings, to the children whose lives were put on hold during the Covid-era, will total about $70,000 per person.
