While the policies coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic set U.S. student achievement levels back by two decades, according to the federal government’s determinations, parents were misled by that same government into thinking the school closures and quarantine policies were based on actual science.
Protect the Public’s Trust, a watchdog group, filed a complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services regarding guidance given to the Department of Education by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy on August 26, 2021 that set the “physical distancing” recommendations to stop the spread of Covid-19 in schools. Dr. Murthy’s specific statement was that if “students maintain 3-6 feet of social distancing and are not within 3 feet of a person who has tested positive for more than 15 minutes then they do not need to quarantine.”
Protect the Public Trust filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get the evidence on which Murthy based his guidance.
“We received only a 33-page report titled, ‘Operational Strategy for K-12 Schools through Phased Prevention,’ and none of the evidence in the report supports the Surgeon General’s claims about social distancing. The five studies cited in the report did not look at the effectiveness of social distancing in isolation and did not attempt to study the correct distance to use to avoid spread. One studied SARS-COV-1, not COVID-19, ‘in a hospital setting,’ not a school setting,” the watchdog group reported.
Another claim in that study was based on a non-peer reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association opinion piece, another referenced multiple studies in which a variety of social distances were employed with inconsistent results. The other cited studies either did not address social or physical distancing at all, were silent on the optimal distance or actually appeared to undermine the claims made by the Surgeon General, the group said.
“The education establishment often points to academic research demonstrating that school suspensions, even those for misbehavior, can have deleterious impacts on student performance, attendance, and behavior. Quarantining students who have been exposed to the virus is the functional equivalent of an out-of-school suspension, and was imposed on students who had merely been exposed to someone who appeared to have been affected, even though most of them never exhibited symptoms nor tested positive for COVID-19. The use of arbitrary, unproven social distances to help determine who was exposed shows how unserious these policies were,” the group wrote.
Within days of taking office, President Biden issued the Memorandum on Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking stating that “[s]cientific finding should never be distorted or influenced by political considerations,” and vowing that his administration would “make evidence-based decisions guided by the best available science and data.”
Among the principles laid out in the HHS scientific integrity policies are that “HHS agencies shall ensure that the scientific information used to inform and support policy decisions represents the best science available,” and “HHS shall convey scientific and technological information to the public such that the presentation is accurate, transparent, and informative.”
“This episode merely represents the latest revelation of an ongoing string of episodes in which, despite the Biden administration’s professed fealty to scientific integrity, these principles appear to have been cast aside or ignored. PPT has documented many of these in our Science Undermined series,” Protect the Public
