Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis are releasing a report that goes into great detail regarding the Center for Disease Control’s “extraordinary” coordination with teachers’ unions that resulted in schools closing for far longer than many experts said they should have.
Americans for Public Trust obtained a trove of emails in May 2021, which were published in the New York Post. Those emails — along with subsequent statements by CDC officials — show an “uncommon” relationship between the CDC and the two largest U.S. teachers’ unions.
At the time, I wrote “Anyone in the United States, any group, has a perfect right to lobby any federal agency they wish. But don’t you think it would have been nice to know that the CDC was being influenced by teachers in coming to the conclusion that schools should remain closed to in-person learning?”
In the interim report, exclusively reviewed by Fox News Digital, Republicans wrote that emails between the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the White House, and the CDC showed that the AFT’s “cozy relationship with the Biden administration’s political leadership at the CDC positioned the union to impose line-by-line edits” to the reopening guidance, despite the CDC’s “past practice to keep draft guidance confidential.”
Fox News previously reported in October on emails obtained by Americans for Public Trust that showed the AFT and the National Education Association, the two largest teachers’ unions in the U.S., received a copy of the guidance before the CDC released it to the public.
On Feb. 11, 2021 one day before the CDC publicly posted the guidance, AFT’s senior director of health issues, Kelly Trautner, emailed CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky asking her to insert the line: “In the event high-community transmission results from a new variant of SARS-CoV-2, a new update of these guidelines may be necessary.”
To make the impropriety worse, the CDC forwarded the guidance on schools to the AFT before releasing it to the public.
“Documents and testimony show, however, that Director Walensky downplayed the degree to which CDC departed from past practice to allow AFT to affect the policymaking process. In fact, CDC allowed AFT to insert language into the Operational Guidance that made it more likely schools across the country would remain closed after February 2021,” says the report.
The report features new testimony from Walke in a Feb. 18, 2022 interview, saying the level with which the CDC coordinated with the teachers unions was “uncommon,” and that the CDC does not typically share draft guidance outside the agency.
Dr. Henry Walke, director of the CDC’s Center for Preparedness and Response, was the union’s mouthpiece in the CDC. It was he who did the unions’ bidding and changed the language in the guidance that assured kids wouldn’t go back to school anytime soon.
Also, the administration put a muzzle on Walke to prevent him from talking about the extraordinary level of cooperation between the CDC and the unions.
“When Republican staff asked Dr. Walke questions to that effect, a Biden Administration lawyer instructed him not to answer,” says the report. “Because lawyers for the Biden Administration prevented a key witness from explaining why the CDC allowed AFT to write key portions of its guidance for re-opening schools, there are still several unanswered questions. This matter should be investigated further.”
The AFT’s edits were intended to make it more likely that schools would close to in-person learning, according to the Republicans’ findings.
Republican Reps. Steve Scalise (R-La.) and James Comer (R-Ky.) issued a statement claiming that “Biden’s CDC overrode routine practice to allow a radical teachers union that donated millions of dollars to Democrat campaigns to bypass scientific norms and rewrite official agency guidance.”
“Follow the science” — except when a major Democratic donor tells us not to.
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