NY Times says school COVID closures may be ‘most damaging … – Fox News

The New York Times  

The editorial concluded, “The learning loss crisis is more consequential than many elected officials have yet acknowledged. A collective sense of urgency by all Americans will be required to avert its most devastating effects on the nation’s children.”

Despite its current concern over the closures’ harm to American students, New York Times reporting in 2020 advocated for school closures despite the risks. 

In a March 2020 piece, the Times wrote, “More and more schools have chosen to close in the past few days, reflecting a growing consensus that the benefits of closings outweigh the harms, especially since many of the harms can be mitigated.”

It added, “The immediate goal is to flatten the curve so that the peak infection rate stays manageable. With better testing and screening, it’s possible to imagine keeping schools open and still protecting families. Failing that, and we in the U.S. have been failing so far, school closures and significant physical distancing are starting to look like the best bet.”

In an analysis piece from August that same year, the Times laid out which parts of the country should safely reopen schools, and which should not. At the time, it advised most of the country to keep schools closed.

However, the Times also made the opposite point. In a November 17, 2020 op-ed, contributing opinion writer Aaron E. Carroll lobbied against closing schools. In a piece entitled, “Are We Seriously Talking About Closing Schools Again?” he cautioned, “Cases have definitely been more common in school-age children this fall. But when schools do the right things, those infections are not transmitted in the classroom. They’re occurring, for the most part, when children go to parties, when they have sleepovers and when they’re playing sports inside and unmasked. Those cases will not be reduced by closing schools.”

Other mainstream media figures, like MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan, are still arguing that school closures were necessary and have claimed the same learning loss that the Times is currently lamenting is a “myth.”

As recently as this August, Hasan claimed on his MSNBC show, “Because the myths about children and COVID, that kids aren’t really harmed by it, that school closures were a massive and avoidable mistake, that they caused learning loss and mental health issues, those myths, and they are myths, dangerous myths have endured for so long, become so ingrained, so pervasive.”

Hasan has frequently attacked critics of masking and shutting down schools due to the pandemic. In 2022, he mocked concerns about the ongoing learning loss seen in schools.

“And it kills me to hear so many people pretending to claim they care about school closures or ‘learning loss’ from the pandemic, and weaponizing children for political purposes, while ignoring the 200,000+ *orphaned kids* the pandemic created in America *alone*. Sickening tbh,” Hasan tweeted.

The Times did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment. 

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Fox News Digital’s Lindsay Kornick contributed to this report.