The Biggest Scandal in U.S. Public Policy History — Revisited

When historians look back on the 2020s and wonder how so many institutions lost the people’s trust, Exhibit A may well be a documentary I saw the other night in New York City.

The film, “15 DAYS: The Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures,” is one woman’s effort to expose a scandal that has grown only more shameful with time.

This subject strikes a special chord with me, because at the time, I took a lot of heat for publishing in May 2020 a piece by Dennis Prager titled, “The Worldwide Lockdown May Be the Greatest Mistake in History.” We don’t usually publish pieces that are so strident, but I went along with Prager who felt strongly that the tone was justified.

A few months later, in September, he doubled down and wrote a follow-up piece titled, “The Lockdown Has Gone from a Mistake to a Crime.”

I couldn’t get those two Prager missiles out of my head as I saw “15 DAYS,” which is an agonizing anatomy of a public policy scandal that violated all the norms of good governance.

There are so many villains in this story — from the teachers’ unions to health authorities to feckless politicians to corrupt interest groups to an enabling media — it’s hard to know where to start.

One easy place to start, however, is with those who suffered the most from the interminable lockdowns: millions of schoolchildren, many of whom have still not recovered.

Filmmaker Natalya Murakhver

The filmmaker, Natalya Murakhver, who was at the screening, is a self-described lifelong Democrat and typical school mom who smelled something was wrong in the spring of 2020 when the entire country shut down for the COVID-19 virus. At first, when authorities called for a 15-day lockdown to “flatten the curve,” no one complained.

But as the lockdown kept being extended based on the word of government “experts,” something extraordinary began to happen that the media pretty much hid from us: a group of credible scientists was challenging the need for such draconian measures, especially in schools.

The film delves into this challenge, led primarily by two Stanford scientists, Dr. Scott Atlas and epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

More importantly, as it lays out the evidence against the school lockdown, the film chronicles the widespread effort to discredit any voice who would dare challenge the official narrative.

This is the heart and guts of the film —   the concerted effort to shut down dissent when the welfare and mental health of millions of schoolchildren was at stake. It’s hard to watch the film and not conclude that the silencing of the scandal is still with us and that a congressional commission is a national imperative.

It would make for riveting viewing.

“The idea that the worldwide lockdown of virtually every country other than Sweden may have been an enormous mistake strikes many — including world leaders, most scientists (especially health officials, doctors and epidemiologists), those who work in major news media, opinion writers in those media and the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people who put their faith in these people — as so preposterous as to be immoral,” is how Prager led his first piece. 

I quote that opening because it captures the immense obstacles faced by dissenters in the film, dissenters who cared only about the welfare of schoolchildren.

For all the virtue signaling about equity and justice shown by lockdown supporters, it turns out that low-income children were most hurt because they were less likely to have the technology at home for remote schooling.

“The head of New York’s public schools says some 300,000 kids don’t have electronic devices or internet access at home,” blares a TV news report in the film.

“This is unprecedented in the history of infectious disease to have prolonged school closures for a pandemic, especially one in this case that affected children so much less,” says Dr. Monica Gandhi, professor of medicine and infectious diseases at UCSF.

The most sinister aspect of the story is how other agendas came to dominate the prolonged school lockdowns. Union leaders are militant in pushing to not re-open schools, so are teachers who claim to fear a return but then are caught going on vacation. Everyone’s agenda comes before the kids. 

“Some of those folks said, Okay, this is our chance now to really monetize Zoom schooling and remote learning. And what we saw was horrific outcomes,” says psychologist Dr. Nicholas Kardaras.

Perhaps the most disheartening section of the film is something we already know: the sheer hypocrisy of imposing social distancing rules for everyone except those who marched during the George Floyd protests.

“I guess the piece that I didn’t understand was how public health says you can protest, but you can’t go to church or you can’t play soccer outside,” a parent says innocently. “Whatever you think, pro or con, about rioting for social justice, it had been made really clear to us for months and months that groups of people being close together was a life or death health risk, yet it was okay and encouraged by public health commissioners to protest and chant and march from New York to Minneapolis, Atlanta to Seattle.”

Another parent adds her own outrage: “Oh, if I go out and carry the right sign and say the right words, I can hang out with 1,000 people, but 28 kids can’t sit in a classroom together? And then when two weeks went by after those riots, and there were no significant spikes in cases in the areas and cities that they happened, it just started to kind of tumble.”

And yet, as the narrator says, “The double standard was glaring. COVID-19 appeared to be on the decline, yet schools remained closed.”

As the months go by and the hopes of returning to school in Fall 2020 fade away, parents realize that even a return in the Fall of 2021 is no sure thing. 

The longer the lockdowns continue, the more the dissenters fight. But they’re up against an army, including a Biden administration that worked with social media companies to censor any critique of government Covid policies.

Because the great majority of teachers unions vote Democrat and are big donors to the party, they were able to keep those feckless politicians in line, so that no one dares challenge dubious opportunists like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who should be happy Biden gave him a pre-emptive pardon before leaving office.

The legacy media played its part. “We’re just watching the news, and there wasn’t a lot of good information,” a parent says. “There was a lot of panic and anxiety and fear, propaganda. It was all about ‘Be afraid.’”

There’s a montage in the film where “out of an abundance of caution” is repeated over and over again by different newscasters across the country.  This is “a very powerful didactic argument,” says LA doctor Houman Hemmati, “because the moment you begin to challenge them, you’re the one who looks like a fool.I never bought into it because I am a scientist, and so my I I I never bought into it because I am a scientist, and so my way of working is that I always ask questions, not because I think people are lying, but because I always am skeptical, because I’m taught to be,” he says.

“And so when I hear about mandates, when I hear about lockdowns, the first thing out of my mind is, do we have any justification for this, any proof? And if not, why are we doing it?”way of working is that I always ask questions, not because I think people are lying, but because I always am skeptical, because I’m taught to be,” he says. “And so when I hear about mandates, when I hear about lockdowns, the first thing out of my mind is, do we have any justification for this, any proof? And if not, why are we doing it?”

Bhattacharya wrote early on that the infection fatality rate was much lower in reality than what the media was saying, and certainly not worth the human costs. “You can’t expect people who don’t have the resources to stay home and stay safe to stay home and stay safe,” he says. “It’s inhumane.”

At the same time, he adds, “I started getting death threats. I started getting friends of mine, at least former friends of mine, writing to me, saying, ‘How dare you question any of this?’”

For me, the smoking gun in the film shows up near the end, when on March 26, 2020, during the original 15 days, a meeting took place that exposed the hidden agendas of environmental activists and labor union leaders. The pandemic became their ticket to their personal wish list, schoolchildren be damned.

“You know, like all of you I’m sure, I want to shut down the Capitol right now with our bodies on the line, but we can’t do that. What’s the equivalent?” Jane Fonda asks.

Randi Weingarten, who represented the American Federation of Teachers, adds: “I agree with everybody else who said, let’s also try to envision how to use this for the society that we want to see.”

Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace, chimes in: “What is the normal we want at the end of this? And it’s not the normal we had before. We have to stop the bleeding now, but we have to decide what kind of society we want to have post-Covid-19. We really have to create the future that we want to see.”

That future, though, would take a lot of money.

So even though schools were still closed, these schools became a pawn for teachers’ unions to get an enormous amount of funding.

“We need the money for PPE. We need the money for extra teachers. We need the money for extra cleaning and extra buses. We need the trillion dollars from the HEROES Act and on top of that, about another 100 billion because of the cost of reopening schools.” Weingarten says.

“We want to be with our students,” adds Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, “but to make in-person instruction a reality for all, we need the resources to keep everyone safe.”

The appeal worked. Starting in March 2020, Congress unleashed a torrent of funds into America’s K-12 schools. On March 27, the CARES Act provided $13.2 billion. On December 27, they received another $54.3 billion. Then on March 11, 2021, President Biden’s American Rescue Plan offered a windfall: another $122 billion for America’s schools. In total, $189.5 billion was dispensed — more than triple the Federal Department of Education’s annual budget.

“I call it the smash and grab,” an education analyst says. “This was the biggest smash and grab in ed money history, I believe ever. This is the biggest scandal of funds that were taken and not used for students.”

As the picture becomes clearer, it emerged that these unions were orchestrating at the highest levels. “Nancy Pelosi and Randi Weingarten were in lockstep, pushing a cautious plan slowing school reopenings for millions of kids,” the narrator says. “The teachers’ unions demanded the strictest reopening rules, and Pelosi echoed their talking points.”

In short, while millions of kids were suffering, isolated, depressed, confused and feeling abandoned, the grown-ups were worrying about money and talking points. It turns out that Prager’s alarming pieces in The Journal were not that alarmist after all.

At the screening in New York, the film was introduced by John Tierney, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributor to City Journal. He called it “the biggest scandal in public policy history,” which is where I got the headline.

We need not wait for history to give its verdict. This film must be shown in Congress and a commission of inquiry with subpoena power must be established. And if those who fought for the interminable lockdowns have good answers, we want to hear them.

It’s too late to undo the damage done to kids who had no choice but to trust the adults. But it’s not too late to hold accountable those who contributed to that damage.