Earlier this fall, reports broke accusing the Biden regime of negating “science” when it came to recommendations regarding school reopenings and instead deferred to teachers’ unions, all of which are long-time Democratic constituents, instead.
The heads of the major teacher’s unions were all pushing to keep children in remote learning environments, ostensibly to ‘keep everyone safe from COVID-19.’
Fox News reported in September:
The Biden administration tightened its masking guidance after a prominent teachers union threatened White House officials with publicly releasing harsh criticism, internal emails show.
The National Education Association sent a draft statement to White House officials that included harsh criticism of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s masking guidance, the emails show. But the teachers union ultimately published a version with a much softer tone, and the CDC clarified its guidance to indicate that everyone should be masked in schools, regardless of vaccination status.
The new emails show further coordination between the White House and teachers unions just months after reports highlighted the extent the unions had influenced the administration’s messaging on school reopenings. The watchdog group Americans for Public Trust obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request and provided them to Fox News.
“The CDC announced on May 13 that fully vaccinated Americans could stop wearing masks indoors and outside, which sparked confusion about how this policy would apply to schools,” the network added. But that would soon change.
A draft statement from the NEA said:
“We appreciate the developing nature of the science and its implications for guidance, but releasing the guidance without accompanying school-related updates creates confusion and fuels the internal politicization of this basic health and safety issue. CDC has consistently said, and studies support, that mitigation measures, including to protect the most vulnerable, remain necessary in schools and institutions of higher education – particularly because no elementary or middle school students, and few high school students, have been vaccinated.”
It added: “This will also make it hard for school boards and leaders of institutions of higher education to do the right thing by maintaining mitigation measures,” it continued. “We need CDC clarification right away.”
After coordinating with the White House and the CDC, the NEA issued a statement that was far less harsh.
Naturally, the administration denied everything, but the New York Post Editorial Board revealed last week that the collusion went further than previously disclosed.
“Emails between the White House, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — provided to the watchdog group Americans for Public Trust via a Freedom of Information Act request — reveal that the Biden administration not only consulted national teachers unions before releasing school reopening guidance to the public, it put a heavy thumb on the scales in favor of the unions’ agenda,” the editors wrote.
“The messages show that White House staff arranged a meeting between CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and the head of the nation’s largest teachers union, National Education Association president Becky Pringle,” the editorial continued.
“Heck, one NEA official used her access to score a job inside the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC. Having an ‘inside man’ ensured that the unions were always seated at the policy table,” said the board, adding: “In one damning email to others in the department, HHS official Michael Baker wrote: ‘We need to think about this in the broader context of teacher contract negotiations.'”
After first announcing a relaxed mask mandate on May 13 — and following the NEA’s ‘input’ — the CDC did an about-face on May 15 and re-recommended masking kids.
“This batch of emails came just weeks after we already exposed the teachers unions influenced the CDC on school openings,” Americans for Public Trust Executive Director Caitlin Sutherland told Fox News. “Lo and behold, less than two weeks later, they’re at it again, but this time in relation to mask guidance.”
