House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Sunday wasted no time in criticizing Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ push to reopen schools amid surging cases of the coronavirus nationwide.
Earlier Sunday, DeVos repeatedly dodged questions on whether schools should follow CDC guidance as they reopen amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Last week, President Trump said that the White House is “very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools, to get them open, and it’s very important.”
When asked to respond to DeVos’ remarks on CNN that bolstered Trump’s demand for schools to reopen, Pelosi responded that the education secretary’s interview was a “malfeasance dereliction of duty.”
“This is appalling,” Pelosi said. “The President and his administration are messing with the health of our children. We all want our children to go back to school. Teachers do. Parents do. And children do. But they must go back safely.”
Pelosi then took aim at the Trump administration for having “no appreciation for the failure” of their response to the coronavirus crisis.
“Going back to school presents the biggest risk for the spread of the coronavirus,” Pelosi said. “They ignore science and they ignore governance to make this happen.”
Pelosi added that she thinks that CDC guidelines “should be requirements.” On Thursday, CDC Director Robert Redfield denied that the agency’s guidelines regarding schools reopening in the fall would not change despite the President saying that they are “very tough, expensive and impractical.”
Watch Pelosi’s remarks below:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticizes Education Secretary Betsy DeVos' call to reopen schools pic.twitter.com/BvxSmsp8c8
— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) July 12, 2020
This is kind of appalling too:
DeVoid is not interested in seeing public schools re-open, she wants their funding taken away and grifted to Private dominionist indoctrination pods.
It is and directly on point as well IMO. This bug is truly novel, no one is immune and no one at any age knows what their prognosis will be if they get it: maybe no symptoms at all, maybe death, or just about anything in between including long term disability.
As the epidemiologist, Larry Brilliant recently pointed out: “We have learned a tremendous amount about this virus, about how it infects people, how it kills, how it spreads, but the big surprise to me is the kind of pan-organ nature of its attack. It gives the lie to anybody who thought that a comparison with influenza was in the ballpark.”
The fact that it kills the young less often (even if this were an acceptable rationale) does not mean it is incapable of crippling them in other ways. Sending children and their teachers back to school without strict and mandatory guidelines designed to protect them is criminal negligence. Full stop.
If anything, the opposite.
I would bet that that young patient got most of his/her news from Fox. Fox is almost as complicit in this national catastrophe as is Donald Trump.