Fauci Took The Fifth. America’s Kids Never Got That Option.

Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on July 29 and declined to answer more than 100 questions. He invoked the Fifth Amendment. On Thursday, the committee voted 8-5 to hold him in contempt of Congress, setting up a referral to the Justice Department.

Millions of American schoolchildren got no hearing, no appeal, and no protection of any kind when the public health establishment he personified locked them out of their classrooms.

The people responsible are counting on you to move on. I refuse.

Fauci was the face of that establishment. The paper trail on school closures runs through two other addresses: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

In December 2024, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its final report after a two-year investigation. Its findings on schools should have ended careers. The Biden administration’s CDC broke precedent by giving a political labor organization privileged access to its supposedly scientific reopening guidance. The agency solicited edits from the AFT and accepted them.

Read that again. A federal health agency let Randi Weingarten’s operation help write the document that decided whether your child sat in a classroom or stared at a laptop in a bedroom.

The subcommittee found that the AFT opposed reopening and conditioned its cooperation on demands with no scientific footing, including an automatic closure “trigger” that could shutter buildings on command. Investigators concluded schools remained closed longer than necessary because of union interference. They also confirmed what millions of parents had already worked out on their own: children faced little risk of severe illness, and the evidence never justified keeping doors locked for a year or more.

The guidance was corrupted. The closures dragged on. The wreckage is measurable.

The 2024 Nation’s Report Card delivered the verdict. Reading scores for fourth- and eighth-graders are five points below where they stood in 2019. A third of eighth graders perform beneath the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Basic level, the largest share ever recorded. High school seniors posted an average reading score 10 points below the first assessment in 1992, and 45% of them landed below Basic in math weeks before walking across the graduation stage. Congress spent $189.5 billion on school relief. Achievement fell anyway.

The human cost runs past any test. During a four-week stretch of early 2021, emergency room visits for suspected suicide attempts among girls ages 12 to 17 ran 50.6% above the same weeks in 2019. Stanford economist Eric Hanushek estimates pandemic-era learning loss will drain roughly $31 trillion in lifetime earnings across this century, with individual students forfeiting between 2 and 9% of their income depending on how long their state kept buildings dark.

Kids who learned to read over Zoom will still be paying in 2070. The adults who made that happen will be comfortably retired.

Not one of them has faced a consequence.

Weingarten certainly hasn’t. Last month delegates at the AFT’s 89th convention in Washington re-elected her to another two-year term atop a union of 1.875 million members. She spends her days promoting a book called “Why Fascists Fear Teachers.” The leader whose organization helped shape the guidance that emptied American classrooms now casts herself as democracy’s last defender. The audacity is remarkable. The impunity is worse.

Here is the lesson we cannot let fade. Health guidance was handed down as decree. A union with a direct stake shaped that decree behind closed doors. Parents who objected were branded enemies of science. School board meetings filled with mothers and fathers pleading for their children, and officials waved them off. The National School Boards Association wrote the White House, suggesting confrontations with parents might qualify as domestic terrorism. The group apologized weeks later. Attorney General Merrick Garland had already ordered the FBI to get involved.

That is how power gets used against children. Quietly, through email chains and edited drafts, by officials who never face a ballot.

Accountability has to mean more than one contempt vote. Congress should subpoena all communications between federal health agencies and teachers unions from 2020 through 2022 and publish them all. State legislatures should bar any agency from handing unions a seat at the table on closure policy. Governors should pull that authority from bureaucrats and give it to officials who answer to voters.

Families should keep the exits open too. Every state that expanded education savings accounts, charter access, or open enrollment after 2021 gave parents something no committee can hand down: the power to walk away from a system that failed them.

Fauci has lawyers, a presidential pardon, and the right to say nothing. The class of 2033 has none of it. Those students carry gaps in reading and arithmetic that grown men and women chose to inflict on them, and they are owed the truth about who made the call.

We are not going to forget. We will keep saying their names.

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Ryan Walters is the CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance and former State Superintendent of Public Instruction in Oklahoma.