Dr. Anthony Fauci flagged an article in an email to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), highlighting portions that said the CDC’s guidance to impose 6-foot social distancing in schools was not based on science.
Fauci highlighted several paragraphs from the article, penned by Dr. Vinay Prasad and political science professor Vladimir Kogan, including a line that says the social distancing guidance was “not supported by science.”
In contrast with authorities in the United States and some other countries, the World Health Organization and other health bodies advised distancing of one meter, or about 3 feet.
Some school officials later said they were unable to fully reopen schools because of the distancing guidance, since only a certain number of students could fit into a classroom if the guidance was followed.
Another portion of the op-ed highlighted by Fauci asserted the guidelines did not promote President Joe Biden’s goal of getting schools reopened as soon as possible. Instead, the authors said, the guidelines “will work to provide political cover for interest groups and districts that want to delay in-person school.”
Just one day after Fauci wrote to Walensky, he appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” and advised schools to follow the CDC guidance.
“If you do the four or five things that the CDC recommends, the bottom-line goal that I think people need to remember is that—and I have said this way before the CDC guidelines came out—that the default position is to do whatever you can, as best as you can, to get the children back to school, with safety concerns for the children and for the teachers and the educational personnel,” he said.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) shared the Fox article containing the message and others from the FOIA request and said it was “unacceptable for the CDC to be this careless.”
“I’m entirely committed to investigating Fauci because of the panic and harm he’s inflicted on our children, citizens, and economy during this ‘pandemic,’” Paul wrote on Twitter.
A number of Republican members of Congress have vowed to launch investigations into Fauci and other top U.S. health officials over the federal government’s pandemic response, provided the GOP gains control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in the upcoming midterm elections.
Walensky and Fauci did not respond to requests for comment.