How do we move on after the COVID-19 pandemic? Writing for The Washington Post back in July, columnist Alyssa Rosenberg implored, “It’s not useful to focus on what should have been done to help children. The better question: What can we do for them now?”
And in The Atlantic this week, Brown economist Emily Oster argued for pandemic amnesty, saying, “We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”
Noting that “some of these choices turned out better than others,” Oster used as an example the closure of schools. There is, she wrote, “an an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high.”
She went on: “The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people — people who cared about children and teachers — advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.”
I respect both women immensely, but they couldn’t be more wrong.
When we discuss mistakes made during COVID-19, it’s important that we first distinguish what transpired between March or April of 2020, and misguided policies that dragged on throughout 2021 and even 2022.
Washing our groceries on April Fool’s Day in 2020, a dumb but victimless endeavor, is very different from autistic kids being shut out of school and essential therapies over the next two years. Even now, at the end of 2022, children who are speech-delayed — thanks to being surrounded by masked caregivers during a critical developmental stage— are, in some areas, expected to do speech therapy while wearing a mask, with a masked therapist. We cannot move on, let alone grant amnesty, when children are still being harmed.
Determining the “why” is also a critical distinction between those who advocated for excessive mitigation out of a misguided sense of caution, and those who did so driven by politics and the desire for fame.
My kids’ elderly pottery teacher wouldn’t teach a class until summer 2022 without everyone in masks because she was so scared of COVID-19.
That is not the same as what the American Academy of Pediatrics did. The academy, which knew that kids would be best served learning in a classroom, couldn’t advocate for keeping schools open in the spring of 2020 because it was the position of then-President Donald Trump.
What does it mean to forgive? What would that look like in practice? And, most importantly, what is the future of those who advocated for dangerously wrong pandemic mitigation strategies, strategies that harmed and continue to harm children?
Take, for example, former Alexandria City (Virginia) Public Schools Superintendent Gregory C. Hutchings Jr., who was recently hired by the School of Education at American University. Despite advocating for virtual learning that set back children in his district, Hutchings’ children were attending a local Catholic school that operated under a “hybrid” model of both in-person and virtual schooling. Should Hutchings be entitled to the golden parachute into academia to teach the next generation of American teachers? Was this a wise hire on the part of American University?
Or take Dr. Lena Wen, a CNN and Washington Post contributor who changed her tune on schools and masks in summer of 2021, advocating for more personal choice instead of mandates. She explained, “Masking has harmed our son’s language development, and limiting both kids’ extracurriculars and social interactions would negatively affect their childhood and hinder my and my husband’s ability to work.”
You would think that Wen would admit her mistakes and rue the damage they caused, but instead she claimed, “The science has changed.”
Utterly absurd.
There’s a big difference between sending Hutchings and Wen to the stocks and entrusting them with future educational and public health decisions. We should decline to do the former, but we absolutely cannot allow the latter.
We’re all adults here, or at least we should be. Those who advocated for disastrous public policies don’t need forgiveness any more than I, who was called a “grandma killer” for questioning these policies, am due an apology.
It’s time to move on, yes, but we cannot do so without internalizing the lessons and acknowledging that mistakes were made. And let’s have no talk of amnesty until we ensure that the arsonists are no longer running the fire department.
Bethany Mandel is a contributing writer for Deseret News. She is a home-schooling mother of five and a widely published writer on politics, culture and Judaism. She is an editor for the children’s book series “Heroes of Liberty.”