Dr. Anthony Fauci’s latest lie triggered a whirlwind of fierce responses from everybody from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to conservative commentator Megyn Kelly.
Appearing before a House committee on Tuesday, he reportedly said he doesn’t believe children suffered any learning losses because of pandemic-era school closures.
“He says he’s still not convinced that there was learning loss — that in his view, that’s still really open for discussion,” committee member Rep. Michael Cloud told the New York Post following the hearing.
“I think [if] you ask any parent, they’ll tell you it was a major hit on their child’s development,” Cloud added.
It appears that DeSantis, the parent of three children, concurs:
We cannot allow Anthony Fauci to escape accountability. I am the only candidate who will bring a reckoning for what tyrants like Fauci did to our country during COVID. https://t.co/xlbDZDGeG8 — Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) January 10, 2024
“We cannot allow Anthony Fauci to escape accountability. I am the only candidate who will bring a reckoning for what tyrants like Fauci did to our country during COVID,” he tweeted Wednesday afternoon.
Kelly also concurs.
“I’m begging you liberals, throw away your Fauci dolls. Admit the truth: he’s a villain. He hurt millions. He lined his own pockets. He lied under oath. And he continues to lie,” she tweeted Wednesday.
Look:
I’m begging you liberals, throw away your Fauci dolls. Admit the truth: he’s a villain. He hurt millions. He lined his own pockets. He lied under oath. And he continues to lie. https://t.co/Qy9D4JfNeP — Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) January 10, 2024
Everyday Americans also expressed frustration over Fauci’s lies.
“What would he know about children?” one X user tweeted. “He’s an out of touch 83 year old. He couldn’t care less he shut kids out of school for a year. That’s why we need to get the senior citizens out of government. They don’t have to live with the consequences of their actions.”
“I’m not convinced Fauci cares about anything other than advancing his own career,” another X user added.
See more responses below:
What a scumbag — Vince Langman (@LangmanVince) January 10, 2024
Well Mr. Science doesn’t think children suffered. Wow. Jail time for Mr. Science. — Logic Reason Compassion (@rt50484) January 10, 2024
Of course not. His family has never been affected by it. They are the privileged ones ! — Maddone (@Maddone123) January 10, 2024
If you’d like to know more about Anthony Fauci look into his role in the AIDS pandemic of the 80’s. Similar playbook. Dude is legit the mad scientist you see in the movies — Rondiments (@JoeG727) January 10, 2024
With them kicking kids out of school to make them learn remotely while illegals take up residence in the school, admitting the lockdowns did damage to students’ learning would work against his own handlers. — Derrik Behler (BEE-Ler) (@DPGBehler) January 10, 2024
The truth is that outside of Fauci’s “alternative facts” universe, everybody admits and accepts that unnecessary COVID school closures hurt children, including even The New York Times’ notoriously leftist editorial board.
In an op-ed published this past November, the board explicitly said that the pandemic-era school closures “may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education.”
NY Times finally admits the obvious about COVID school closures https://t.co/GqHckMAMnd via @BIZPACReview — BPR based (@DumpstrFireNews) November 19, 2023
The Atlantic, another major left-wing publication, similarly ran a piece in October of 2022 highlighting that the “pandemic learning losses are real.”
“On Monday, the National Assessment of Educational Progress released its first national ‘report card’ since the beginning of the pandemic,” the piece reads. “The unmistakable conclusion: Student achievement plummeted during COVID.”
“The survey of fourth and eighth graders found that math scores fell in nearly every state. No state showed significant improvements in reading. The lowest-performing students saw the largest declines in achievement,” the piece continues.
The author, Derek Thompson, then offered up a litany of evidence proving that school closures were the culprit behind these declines, including a 2022 paper from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research that said the shift to remote school “had profound consequences for student achievement.”
“Using testing data from more than 2 million students in 10,000 schools across the country, a team of researchers from CALDER, the Northwest Evaluation Association, Harvard, and Dartmouth College found that learning gaps in math ‘did not widen in areas that remained in-person,'” Thompson explained.
“But they found that, especially in high-poverty areas, students lost more ground the longer they were remote. ‘If the achievement losses become permanent,’ they wrote in their conclusion, ‘there will be major implications for future earnings, racial equity and income inequality,'” he continued.