Former CDC Director Says Schools Are the Safest Place for Children During the Pandemic

On Saturday, former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Robert Redfield said in an interview that the safest place for kids to be during the pandemic is in schools.

Redfield made the remarks in an interview with Fox News, where he discussed how Chicago Public Schools are currently learning remotely after the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) staged a “walkout” last week due to the Omicron variant surge.

“I’ve said this before, I think that schools are really the safest place for our K through 12s to be. It’s imperative to keep them open. There’s no equivalency to virtual learning. The public health interest of these kids is to be in face-to-face learning. I’ve mentioned before, many kids get their nutritional support in school. Over seven million kids get mental health services, and obviously an important vehicle for understanding child abuse. Not to mention, just the loneliness factor and the potential depression, suicide, drug abuse.

Probably the most important to me is keeping these kids on the education curve. Some of these kids now  have fallen off their curve, special needs kids in particular, and some of them may not even get back in their lifetime. So, I think the decision not to have public schools open is not based on public health. It’s not based on science. As I said, the safest place for K through 12s to be is in school.”

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As Landon covered, on Sunday, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot slammed the CTU "illegal walkout" and accused the union of abandoning students when it voted against returning to classrooms for in-person learning.

"To be clear, what the Chicago Teachers Union did was an illegal walkout," Lightfoot said to NBC’s “Meet the Press.” "They abandoned their posts and they abandoned kids and their families.”

"But fundamentally what we cannot do is abandon the science. We know that the safest place for kids to be is in-person learning in schools," the mayor continued. "And we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars to make our schools safe. They are safe. We’ve got the data to demonstrate that. We’ve gotta get the teacher’s union to get real and get serious about getting back into in-person learning."