Watchdog complains, says government has no scientific data to support school Covid policy

Although policies resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic have rolled back student achievement levels in the US two decadesAccording to the federal government’s findings, parents were misled by the same government into thinking that school closures and quarantine rules were based on scientific facts.

Protect the Public’s Trust, a watchdog group, submitted the application complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services on guidance provided to the Department of Education by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy on August 26, 2021, which outlines “physical distancing” recommendations to stop the spread of Covid-19 in schools. Dr. Murthy specifically stated that if “students maintain a social distance of 3 to 6 feet and are not within 3 feet of someone who has tested positive for more than 15 minutes, they do not need to quarantine.”

Protect the Public Trust filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the evidence on which Murthy based his guidance.

“We have only received a 33-page report titled ‘Elementary 12 Operations Strategy through Phased Prevention,’ and none of the evidence in the report supports the Surgeon General’s claims about social distancing. The five studies cited in the report did not analyze the effectiveness of social distancing in isolation and did not attempt to examine the appropriate distance to maintain to avoid spreading the virus. One tested SARS-COV-1, not Covid-19.”in hospital conditions“and not at school,” the watchdog group said.

Another claim in this study was based on a non-peer-reviewed opinion piece from the Journal of the American Medical Association, while another claimed multiple studies used different social distances and had inconsistent results. Other studies cited as well did not address complete social or physical distancing, they were silent at the optimal distance or actually seemed to undermine these claims made by the surgeon general, the group said.

“Often an educational institution steering to academic research showing that school suspensions, even those for inappropriate behavior, can have a detrimental impact on student performance, attendance and behavior. Quarantining students who were exposed to the virus is the functional equivalent of out-of-school suspension and was imposed on students who simply had contact with someone who appeared to be infected, even though most of them never showed symptoms or tested positive test for Covid-19. “The use of arbitrary, unconfirmed social distancing to determine who has been exposed shows how frivolous this policy was,” the group wrote.

Within days of taking office, President Biden issued an executive order Memorandum on restoring trust in government through scientific integrity and evidence-based policymaking stating that “scientific discoveries should never be distorted or influenced by political considerations” and vowing that his administration “will make evidence-based decisions guided by the best available science and data.”

Of rules set out in the HHS Scientific Integrity Policy provide that “HHS agencies shall ensure that scientific information used to inform and support policy decisions represents the best available science” and “HHS communicates scientific and technological information to the public in such a way that the presentation is accurate, transparent, and instructive.”

“This episode is just the latest revelation in an ongoing string of episodes in which, despite the Biden administration’s professed allegiance to scientific integrity, these principles appear to have been discarded or ignored. PPT has documented many of them in ours Science questioned series “Protect society