I'm all in on the blame game

As the Left likes to say about cancellation, it's about accountability.

I haven’t had any time to write this past week because I’ve been working on the documentary film I’m making called Generation Covid. I’ve been in Greeley, Colorado with our little team, interviewing two teenage girls — cousins — who nearly failed out of high school and are now struggling to get their lives back on track.

Lezly Martinez (left) and Arlett Quintana Cruz (right)

I’m not going to focus here on rehashing and tearing apart Randi Weingarten’s Congressional testimony from this past week — which was riddled with lies. Shameless lies like this one: “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.”

I’m not going to re-litigate the misleading statements in Fauci’s interview with Christiane Amanpour on CNN in which he said: “I kept on saying . . . we’ve got to get the children back in school as quickly as possible.” He did no such thing.

And I’m not going to cheer for Scott Jennings’ lambasting of Weingarten on CNN; like when he looked right at her and said: “I hear no remorse.” Though that one deserves a hefty round of applause.

Ok, maybe I’m going to do those things, just a little bit.

Let’s not ever forget that THIS is what Weingarten spent 2020 and 2021 actually doing.

No, Weingarten did not spend every day from “February on” (what year Randi?) trying to get schools open. She did the exact opposite. She did everything in her power to keep them closed. She had a direct line to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and she used it to inform impossible-to-meet “guidelines” for the opening of public schools, ensuring that they stayed closed in blue cities and states for a year and a half.

Weingarten and the CDC ignored all evidence that open schools did not increase risk and spread in communities. Evidence in red states, in Sweden, in Denmark and all across Europe abounded, as early as spring and summer 2020. There was no guessing needed. We knew.

As early as April 10, 2020, Martin Kulldorff, a distinguished Harvard biostatistician and epidemiologist, published this article on LinkedIn titled: “Covid-19 Counter Measures Should be Age Specific.” Why did he publish it on LinkedIn? No one else would publish it, the censoring and silencing of debate already in full-swing.

Kulldorff wrote:

“Among COVID-19 exposed individuals, people in their 70s have roughly twice the mortality of those in their 60s, 10 times the mortality of those in their 50s, 40 times that of those in their 40s, 100 times that of those in their 30s, 300 times that of those in their 20s, and a mortality that is more than 3000 times higher than for children. Since COVID-19 operates in a highly age specific manner, mandated counter measures must also be age specific. If not, lives will be unnecessarily lost.”

And so, despite Fauci claiming to Amanpour on CNN that criticizing prolonged public school closures now is much ado about nothing because we couldn’t have known these counter measures would be ineffective and harmful (a bunch of “Monday morning quarterbacking,” as he called it), we knew. We knew risk was extremely age stratified. And we knew kids would be harmed with uniform, blanket restrictions.

But rather than look at the evidence or just for a moment consider that an education is a right, Fauci used his platform to spread fear and panic about kids and covid — well into 2022. First it was everyone is at equal risk, then it was kids are asymptomatic super-spreaders, then it was kids will get debilitating MIS-C, then it was ok kids won’t end up in the hospital but they’ll get long covid and kill their grandparents and on and on. Rather than calm parents about actual risk, he lied and exaggerated risk. And when one lie didn’t come true, he made up another one.

May 2020 Senate hearing

The fact that Weingarten and Fauci are doing everything they can at this point to distance themselves from their persistent closed schools position, is proof that it was a mistake that no one wants to be associated with. And yes, it’s more than a little frustrating that moms like me were vilified for advocating for a position that Fauci and Weingarten now seem to want to pretend to own, despite all evidence to the contrary. Some of us even lost our jobs. I think it’s fair to say that if Weingarten and Fauci were actually open schools advocates, I’d still be employed with Levi’s. Right?

But rather than wallow, I’m going to tell you about these two teenagers in Greeley. Because nothing challenges Weingarten and Fauci’s lies — and confirms Jennings’ assertions — more than hearing the stories of these two girls.