every time Kamala Harris opens her mouth she is either lying or
swallowing.

'The Atlantic | Kamala is lying about Covid.'

<https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/08/kamala-harris-democrats-covid-amnesia/679578/>

'The Democrats’ COVID Amnesia
Keeping schools closed for so long was a mistake, and the Democrats
shouldn’t pretend Harris is responsible for opening them.'

'If it weren’t for Americans’ collective amnesia, politicians would have
to spend considerably more time taking pains to tell the truth. But,
unburdened by what has been, President Joe Biden claimed on Monday night
with a straight face that his vice president and designated successor
accomplished a task that surely escaped your notice.

“Well, during the pandemic, Kamala helped states and cities get their
schools back open,” the president said.

In fact, America’s public schools were kept closed in Democratic-run
cities and states well into the Biden administration, as a direct result
of Biden-administration policies. Democrats might count on Americans to
be forgiving, but they are not stupid, and they would do well to not let
the pageantry of televised politics obfuscate the fact that they are
being lied to.

Republicans, too, are guilty of mass forgetting. Donald Trump was in
charge when schools closed in March 2020, and it was under his watch
that the CDC came up with the six-foot social-distancing and
mask-wearing rules, strictures he conveniently forgets when he foists
disastrous COVID policies on Biden. More generally, he’s tried to erase
2020 from the record books, such as when his campaign asks voters, “Are
you better off than you were four years ago?”

Read: When experts fail

Well, yes, we are. Four years ago, we were terrified that the human race
was about to be decimated, sitting ducks for remedies good and bad,
which makes it especially important that we don’t fall for the same
stories, regardless of which party is telling them.

During the 2020 election, many of us were reeling from Trump’s handling
of the pandemic; he was the one who told the whoppers, who suggested
that people inject bleach. We needed to be rescued, and the only ship in
sight flew a blue flag. All aboard!

But then we couldn’t get off. We were captive to decisions sold in the
name of science but created more crudely by teachers’ unions and
political appointees. Children were among the worst off as America—blue
America, really, like the host city to the Democratic National
Convention—kept its schools closed longer than any peer country.

Does the Biden administration expect voters to not remember this? In our
supposed exuberance over Kamala Harris, are we somehow supposed to
invent a memory of her heroic effort to pry open schools? Although
gaslighting is a term we should probably retire for overuse, it’s worth
keeping in mind as we look at the 2020–21 school-reopening timeline we
are being asked to magically revise in 2024, with an eye toward what, if
anything, Harris had to do with it.

Biden promised during the 2020 campaign to get schools open once it was
safe. That December, after he’d won the election but before taking
office, Biden further vowed to reopen schools within the first 100 days.
That pledge raised concerns with teachers, who did not want to go back
to the classroom unless they received certain assurances.

In February, their campaign got an assist from CDC Director Rochelle
Walensky, who, after back-channel meetings with a variety of influential
players—including Randi Weingarten, the president of the American
Federation of Teachers, and Becky Pringle, the president of the National
Education Association—came out with long-awaited reopening guidelines.
These included a recommendation that schools in designated COVID hot
spots maintain six-foot distancing. Sound reasonable? It wasn’t.
Distancing makes in-school learning extremely difficult, and at the
time, the great majority of students lived in what the CDC considered
high-transmission areas. Although many red states had the good sense to
ignore the CDC’s advice, many blue states did not, and Democratic cities
dominated by teachers’ unions condemned their students to remote
schooling indefinitely. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki provided
cold comfort when she told the media that Biden’s goal was to have “more
than 50 percent [of schools] open by day 100 … at least one day a week.”

Walensky later told CNN’s Jake Tapper she could not guarantee that all
kids would be back in school by the end of the academic year. When he
asked her to “point to any scientific reason for students in the United
States not to return to in-person classes tomorrow,” Walensky suggested
that kids just weren’t good enough at masking.

I can hardly lay blame for Walensky’s fecklessness at Harris’s feet—but
as far as I’m aware, Harris also didn’t do anything to change the
administration’s policies. Instead of facing down the teachers’ unions
and urging local jurisdictions to reopen their schools immediately, the
Biden administration decided to try buying their cooperation. On March
5, Harris made what might be seen as her debut on the school-reopening
stage, when she cast the tiebreaking vote that allowed the Senate to
keep discussing the proposed American Rescue Plan. A week later, Biden
signed it into law, allowing $200 billion to flow to K–12 schools—much
of it for staffing, but also for improved HVAC and other upgrades that
teachers had requested.

The Biden administration brags that, in the year after the bill’s
passage, the percentage of schools open for full-time, in-person
instruction increased from 46 percent to 99 percent. But for far too
many students, the pace of those reopenings was catastrophically slow.
Not until the fall of 2022 could parents in much of the country count on
finding school doors open—and even then, spot closures persisted.

So what did Biden mean when he said Harris “helped states and cities get
their schools back open”? That one vote? I asked the Harris campaign for
comment but did not hear back.

America still hasn’t reckoned with its pandemic failures, and that’s
true well beyond school closures. Many questions about pandemic policy
have not been answered. Instead, decision makers ask voters to
understand that if mistakes were made, everyone was doing their best
during a hard and confusing time. This past January, Anthony Fauci, the
former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases, admitted to Congress that there was no science behind the
six-feet rule, that during the Trump administration it “sort of just
appeared.”

Read: It’s not the economy. It’s the pandemic

Are we all still trying to digest the pandemic era? Yes. Like the python
that swallowed the pig, it’s just too big. But the American people don’t
need to hear that things were hard and confusing; we need honesty about
the past. In hindsight, we see the many mistakes, how fear and panic had
us putting faith in bad ideas (masking toddlers! disinfecting
groceries!), only to find ourselves facing altered life
trajectories—kids who lost years, adults who lost community tethers,
loved ones we could not be with when they grew sick and died.

Keeping schools closed for so long was a mistake, and the Democrats
shouldn’t pretend Harris is responsible for opening them. Nor should
voters allow Democrats to pretend that she did.'