A powerful teachers’ union was influencing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and their recommendations for school reopening since right after Joe Biden took office. Based on bombshell emails released through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, it seems clear that this “influence” went far beyond recommendations. They were calling the shots.
All the while, we’ve continuously heard that science is guiding these recommendations. Questions being asked about the efficacy of closing down schools and keeping children at home for a disease that is far less deadly to them than the flu have been quashed. Now, it appears we know why.
🚨 This is an absolute bombshell 🚨
We all knew teachers unions were influencing CDC guidance on school openings, now we know CDC literally gave teachers unions approval authority over school reporting guidance.
Huge from @LevineJonathan https://t.co/pGHBUPs2oU
— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) May 2, 2021
The NY Post story has been getting far less traction on Big Tech “platforms” than it deserves. No hashtags related to the story have trended. Meanwhile, mainstream media has largely ignored it with the NY Post and Fox News being the only major outlets giving it much attention.
According to The Post Millennial:
A Freedom of Information Act request has revealed what was apparent in February: that the CDC took guidance from a powerful teachers union to determine the appropriate guidance for school reopenings.
The American Federation of Teachers told the CDC what guidance they thought would be best, suggesting both language and practices that the CDC should offer as schools began the fraught process of reopening after months of closures. This information was obtained through a FOIA request by Americans for Public Trust.
The AFT demanded that the CDC not recommend full reopening of in-person classrooms, the New York Post reports. This was per emails between the CDC, the AFT, and the White House. “The documents show a flurry of activity between CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, her top advisors and union officials — with Biden brass being looped in at the White House—in the days before the highly-anticipated Feb. 12 announcement on school-reopening guidelines.”
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky had said that “schools should be the last thing to close and the first thing to reopen,” but in February, in a move that was a surprise to many, she walked that back. The Post Millennial reported that Walensky had seemingly sided with the teacher’s union’s over science, and now this FOIA request shows plainly that that’s what happened.
There’s a reason Walensky was so easily targeted by the teachers’ union for pressuring. She has been embroiled in controversies since being tapped by the administration for the position. From the right, her radical emotion-based decision-making process was a point of contention as she was vying for the top leadership role in what’s supposed to be a science-based group. From the left, she simply wasn’t woke enough at times.
But more importantly, authoritarians were not pleased that she expressed a willingness to recommend schools reopening. The push by Covid extremists in academia to keep in perpetual lockdown mode ran contrary to Walensky’s stated perspectives, so they exerted pressure the best way they knew how. According to American Thinker:
The Post described a “flurry” of emails between not just Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Biden’s newly appointed CDC director and union bigs, with plenty of gushy praises in the lovey-dovey exchanges, but also the White House, which then very much played a part in the weird CDC behavior in the month of February following the exchanges.
Walensky, recall, had been in trouble with this bunch, because when she first came on the job, she did say schools could safely re-open and teachers did not have to be vaccinated.
Then the unions got involved, and she took a U-turn. Remember this?
Following weeks of standoff in some cities and states where teachers unions are demanding vaccines as a condition of reopening, the issue came to a head Wednesday when Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said vaccination of teachers “is not a prerequisite for safe reopening of schools.”
But in a juggling of positions, the White House declined to back Walensky, saying she was speaking “in her personal capacity.” Asked Friday about her earlier comments, Walensky punted.
Nope, she was speaking science at the time and certainly in an official capacity, and now the emails indicate that the union set her to rights.
Dr. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco who has written extensively on coronavirus, called the CDC-AFT emails “very, very troubling,”
“What seems strange to me here is there would be this very intimate back and forth including phone calls where this political group gets to help formulate scientific guidance for our major public health organization in the United State,” Gandhi told The Post. “This is not how science-based guidelines should work or be put together.”
This should, of course, be absolutely bombshell news considering it runs contrary to the prescribed narrative that science, not politics, is guiding decisions and recommendations by the CDC. That’s what the government has been saying. It’s what mainstream media has been saying. Now, in the face of clear contradictions to that narrative, the Sunday show said nothing about it. According to PJ Media:
This should be a major scandal. Outside of The Post and Fox News, however, no other major news outlet has bothered to report that government policy that should have been based on science, was in fact, based on recommendations from a bunch of political hacks.
There are two truths here. The first is that this story exposes a piece of corruption within the newly formed Covid Industrial Complex that is systemic. The second is most people will never hear about it because mainstream media is in on it.
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