The first set of guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control warned that schools needed to take safety precautions to protect students and staff before reopening. Then in July, Trump and DeVos insisted that schools should reopen in full, even as Trump and his allies blocked passage of appropriations that provided the resources needed by schools to reopen safely. Trump’s highest priority was getting the economy open by getting parents back to work.
I wrote last July that the Trump administration pressured the CDC to revise its guidelines, emphasizing the importance of reopening and downplaying the safety guidelines. Getting re-elected meant more to Trump than the health of our nation’s students.
The New York Times tells the story:
Top White House officials pressured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this summer to play down the risk of sending children back to school, a strikingly political intervention in one of the most sensitive public health debates of the pandemic, according to documents and interviews with current and former government officials.
As part of their behind-the-scenes effort, White House officials also tried to circumvent the C.D.C. in a search for alternate data showing that the pandemic was weakening and posed little danger to children.
The documents and interviews show how the White House spent weeks trying to press public health professionals to fall in line with President Trump’s election-year agenda of pushing to reopen schools and the economy as quickly as possible. The president and his team have remained defiant in their demand for schools to get back to normal, even as coronavirus cases have once again ticked up, in some cases linked to school and college reopenings.
The effort included Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, and officials working for Vice President Mike Pence, who led the task force. It left officials at the C.D.C., long considered the world’s premier public health agency, alarmed at the degree of pressure from the White House.
One member of Mr. Pence’s staff said she was repeatedly asked by Marc Short, the vice president’s chief of staff, to get the C.D.C. to produce more reports and charts showing a decline in coronavirus cases among young people.
The staff member, Olivia Troye, one of Mr. Pence’s top aides on the task force, said she regretted being “complicit” in the effort. But she said she tried as much as possible to shield the C.D.C. from the White House pressure, which she saw as driven by the president’s determination to have schools open by the time voters cast ballots.
“You’re impacting people’s lives for whatever political agenda. You’re exchanging votes for lives, and I have a serious problem with that,” said Ms. Troye, who left the White House in August and has begun speaking out publicly against Mr. Trump.
According to Ms. Troye, Mr. Short dispatched other members of the vice president’s staff to circumvent the C.D.C. in search of data he thought might better support the White House’s position.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
We are as surprised by this as we are by the sun rising each morning.
There is an Old Texas Football Coaches saying: If you take a bucket of manure and put perfume on it and make it look nice, in the end it is still a bucket of manure.
There was crap coming out of the WH.
There is crap coming out of the WH.
There will always being crap coming out of the WH of 45
#86451132020
The Son Also rises
The Son of Frederick Trump
Is rising o’er the dump
It happens every day
Like clockwork, as they say
It’s shameful how little the Trump Administration did for public schools and public school students. Even I was shocked at the complete lack of interest and effort and I’ve know they have contempt for our schools and students since the day they came to power.
I wouldn’t have predicted that their response to a nationwide crisis in public schools would be to launch a national voucher campaign, but that’s exactly what happened.
Utterly abandoned 90% of students and families. Just no effort at all.
Always glad to be of help.
No surprise. It’s always been about opening up the economy at the risk of lives. I guess some people are starting grow a conscious and have decided they don’t want to be on the wrong side in their “afterlife”.
Besides federal tax dollars, what exactly does the federal government do to or do for public schools? 🤔🔔
Well, they also sponsor Races (to the Flop), in which no shyster is left behind.
Oh, and National Shamdards (The Conman Corps)
Hope that helps.
It does, sorta. What races? 🤔
Race to the Flop was Arne Duncan’s (or was it Bill Gates ?) Brilliant idea
And of course, Race to the Chapel is Betsy’s brilliant idea.
Thanks somesamnpoet. 🙂
Mandates and money
In a way, that doesn’t sound like much. 😐
How about womandates?
Do they provide those too?
Mates to the Top??
Thanks, dianeravitch. 🙂
Trading children’s lives for votes? Glad I don’t have young children.
Actually I think what they’re trading is the lives of older folk: the teachers, admins & other school staff who may bring the virus in through community exposure, and the parents, grandparents et al caregivers to whom the children thus exposed will spread it. Or the reverse. Either way the kids are the biggest losers going forward.
But look at ALL that Trump is doing to help our schools./s This comes from Epoch Times, another far R media.
There are SO many far R email ‘news’ media. I doubt that the L has anything comparable. I guess we all are now supposed to congratulate Trump for caring about public schools. [Now it is the Chinese Communist Party Virus.]
Has anyone else heard of this happening?
……………………………………
US to Ship 150 Million CCP Virus Tests to Reopen Schools, Economies
The Epoch Times
Updated: September 28, 2020
President Donald Trump announced on Sept. 28 that the U.S. government will start distributing 150 million rapid COVID-19 tests to states this week in a bid to help governors safely reopen K–12 schools and economies.
Of the total, the administration is dedicating 100 million tests for schools and measures to help reopen economies. An additional 50 million tests will target the most vulnerable elderly population in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and home health and hospice sites.
“This continues our critical effort to use testing to protect high-risk communities,” Trump said.
The administration has already shipped 2.1 million of the new tests to nursing homes, and more than 900,000 tests to assisted living facilities, Adm. Brett Giroir, the administration’s lead on testing, said during the White House announcement. Long-term care facilities account for a sliver of the U.S. population but more than 40 percent of deaths from the CCP virus.
The new tests, once produced and delivered, will allow the United States to more than double the 111 million tests it has already performed to screen for the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.
There are no restrictions on how the 100 million tests meant for schools and economies can be used, but the Trump administration will urge governors to prioritize for settings that need rapid, low-tech methods of testing, such as schools, first-responder facilities, and areas where outbreaks are detected, Giroir said. The administration plans to ship 6.5 million tests from the school allotment this week…
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-to-ship-150-millio
Who gets rich off these tests? Jared or some other member of the Trump clan. I hope the tests actually work. Some of these rapid response tests have been duds. Who knows if these tests will actually arrive or not? There is nothing this guy says that can be relied on.
The rapid tests are awful! Many false /positives that need a follow up PCR test with a turn around time of 2-7 days. The biggest problem is that there are many false/negatives and then you have asymptomatic people walking around spreading the virus without knowing they even have the virus….or until they become symptomatic and then get a PCR test. This is likely the Fed Gov’t getting rid of the stockpile of useless tests that they purchased early on. They are just trying to make themselves look good close to election time. My child’s private school is open hybrid at 25% and they will NOT except the results from rapid tests.
Even PCr tests can have a significant false negative rate.
A recent article in the New England Journal of medicine put the rate between 2% and 29%.
And antibody tests can be no better than a coin flip, with false negative rates of 50%.
Unfortinately most people (including most politicians) dont understand these critically important facts, which means they are basing their decisions on bare “positivity” rates that might bear little semblance to the actual infection rates.
Trump made it clear that he wanted the United States to end up with herd immunity and that meant letting 80-percent or more of the population to become infected with COVID-19 leading to at least 3,000,0000 deaths or more.
The first word out of Trump’s mouth was turd quickly corrected to herd “mentality.”
Maybe saying turd or herd mentality was this malignant narcissist’s Freudian slip revealing what he really wants everyone to do and why he encourages his base to not wear masks and that all of OUR children (not his) must return to school and crowded classrooms?
Because there is nothing Trump wants more than to get rid of the US Constitution and the balance of power between the courts, Congress, and him. He wants to be the only voice the herd obeys, and we the people are that herd.
I heard today that the US is now at 10% immunity to Covid. We’ve lost roughly 200,000 lives. We cannot afford to ignore the mass casualties this would take to achieve herd immunity. We also have some evidence that immunity is not a permanent state with this virus since some people have contracted it more than once. There is still too much we do not understand with this disease justify such a drastic measure.
It’s really not possible to say that the US is at 10% immunity to covid19 – or any percentage, for that matter.
There is still no consensus about whether getting covid19 even provides long term immunity and, in fact, as you mention, there is evidence that it may not, since there are several documented cases of covid19 victims being reinfected with the virus.
Anyone who claims they know the US is at 10% immunity is not basing their claim on science.
The thing that gets me about this article: that the WH uses its power to twist facts released to the public, to make it appear that science supports the lowest common denominator. The uninformed, the irrational, all those who deny reality out of fear. It’s like the opposite of leadership.
The public even before this crap was already loaded with covid-deniers who cherry-pick 6-mo-old studies saying kids don’t seem to spread covid, and ignore updates. They put that together with fingers-in-ears “la-la-la” re: the fact that schools are taught/ administered/ serviced by older folks who can bring it in from outside the schools & are required to congregate in the same space. There’s another group who admits kids may spread it, especially over age 10, but, “they don’t get very sick or die from it” ends the conversation. They’re fingers-in-ears “la-la-la” re: not only adult school staff but the children’s adult family members & caregivers.
And neither group looks at the bigger picture: they fuzzy-think that “reopening schools fully” magically returns everyone to in-person work & things will go on as if there were no such thing as covid. Oblivious to facts on the ground, i.e., no one w/an adult brain any longer shops in person, goes to the office, takes an in-person meeting or public transportation, travels, eats in restaurants, goes to a conference or a dentist or a doctor, or gathers in any group of strangers—unless they have to. Resulting in what we already have, a major recession w/millions out of work and countless folded businesses.
Why? Not because many schools are not doing in-person teaching. Because COVID. Covid which continues to spread at outsize levels compared to other wealthy economies, because we haven’t the sort of national leadership that could have mitigated it, & no plan in sight for the concerted testing/ quarantining/ contact-tracing that has helped other more rational nations move step-wise slowly toward a new normal.
The entire nation’s welfare is risked, subjugated to it45’s laser focus on re-election via turning out his easily-manipulated base—unchecked by the rest of his party, who look only to holding their majority post-covid.
Here’s the nut: “the relative risks posed by the virus to young people are outweighed by the risks of keeping children out of school indefinitely.” [Brian Morgenstein, a spokesman expressing WH POV in a July back&forth w/scientists on policy]
“To young people” ignores teachers, admin, service staff—and families of students.
But “indefinitely” is the most important piece.
Schools are waiting for covid stats to go down in their communities, which will help parents and teachers to feel safe to re-open. In many of those regions, they’re not seeing safety precautions among the public (or perhaps in local colleges) that encourage confidence. In some densely-populated areas like NYC which have already experienced being an ‘epicenter,’ even current low stats aren’t enough, because they’ve seen how quickly spread occurs: they’re looking for the kind of safety protocols that their schools can’t currently provide.
“Indefinitely”—as a message from WH admin—strongly implies there is no national plan in place, nor will there be, to mitigate the spread of covid. Waiting for Defense Production Act on N-95 masks for all? Waiting for funding to revamp ventilation in school buildings & acquire additional space & teachers to accommodate distancing & ‘pods’? Wait for Godot. That’s “indefinite.” The alternative clearly suggested by WH: “just do it,” a la Nike.
I read all the currently published comments, and a story came to mind.
Two English Gentlemen were sitting in a club while another gentleman held court about the amazing dog he had recently purchased. At the conclusion, one of the two gentlemen turned to the other and remarked,
“I don’t see why he bought a dog when he does all the barking.”
Which is why I am wondering if anyone has a copy of the initial CDC guidelines released in May of this year? And if they do, would they be kind enough to share it.
It just seems that a careful comparison and contrast of original documents would be called for, to consider the argument intelligently.
I will greatly appreciate any help in this regard.
“I have a duty to myself and my country not to waste time on nonproductive emotions. And to that end, I have chained anger and hate while emancipating love, compassion, and understanding.”
~ Aiken Faque