MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan spent a segment of his show on Friday defending school shutdowns during the pandemic and attacked conservatives for spreading "dangerous myths" of learning loss.
Calling it "one of the most important deep dives" he’s ever done, Hasan tackled the "thorny and very emotive issue of kids, schools and COVID" as well as what he considered "a blatant and bad faith rewriting of history on this issue, from a lot of people who should know better."
"Because the myths about children and COVID, that kids aren’t really harmed by it, that school closures were a massive and avoidable mistake, that they caused learning loss and mental health issues, those myths, and they are myths, dangerous myths have endured for so long, become so ingrained, so pervasive," Hasan said.
He added, "I’m sure many of you watching at home have, sadly, come to accept many of these myths as true. So we need to reassert what the actual truth of the matter is, especially if we are to be prepared for the next pandemic when it inevitably comes, and especially if we are to protect and not abandon our kids right now as they return to school."
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Hasan continued by insisting that the suggestion kids had "immunity" to COVID-19 "wasn’t true then" and is "not true now." However, a study published by the JAMA Network of medical journals in February found that kids were 100 times less likely to die from COVID-19 than adults.
However, Hasan continued to claim "anti-school closure keyboard warriors" and conservatives were dismissive of children’s deaths.
"Oh, and when you hear conservatives in particular saying, ‘Well, the kids who died from COVID they all had comorbidities, they were all unhealthy. A, that’s not true, and B, we’re supposed to be OK now with kids dying from COVID because they have asthma? And C, I guess we found those death panels that conservatives used to fearmonger about. But the thing is that the precautions we took to protect kids and close schools wasn’t just about the kids, it was about protecting everyone," Hasan said.
Hasan has frequently attacked critics of masking and shutting down schools due to the pandemic. In 2022, he mocked concerns about the ongoing learning loss seen in schools.
"And it kills me to hear so many people pretending to claim they care about school closures or ‘learning loss’ from the pandemic, and weaponizing children for political purposes, while ignoring the 200,000+ *orphaned kids* the pandemic created in America *alone*. Sickening tbh," Hasan tweeted.
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"So if you’re someone who inexplicably is not moved by the preventable deaths of thousands of kids, well, just think about how much worse it could have been for everyone in America. How many more kids and adults would have died if we hadn’t closed any schools at all," Hasan concluded on his Friday show.
The Department of Education found that average reading scores saw the largest decline in 30 years following the pandemic.
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