Teachers’ unions run interference at the CDC – Whittier Daily News

When the Centers for Disease Control released guidance for school reopenings in mid-February, the president of the powerful American Federation of Teachers praised the document as “a rigorous road map based on science.”

Turns out it was also based on union clout.

The New York Post obtained emails from a conservative watchdog group that documented correspondence and conversations between AFT leaders and CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, including an email that was forwarded to Walensky by a White House official.

The union’s influence led to a CDC recommendation that teachers and staff members must be allowed to continue to work at home if they or a family member have pre-existing health conditions that put them at higher risk from COVID. And the government scientists agreed to the union’s demand to “update” the guidance if new variants emerge and there is high community spread, setting the stage for schools to close again and again.

While it’s appropriate for teachers’ unions to have input into decisions affecting their members, those discussions should happen between teachers’ unions and school boards, not between unions and the CDC, especially when other groups, in this case parents, are frozen out.

Just days after President Biden’s inauguration, the CDC released a report based on a study of 17 rural Wisconsin schools that found low transmission risk in schools even during times of high community spread. The CDC concluded that with appropriate safety measures, “K-12 schools can have in-person learning with limited in-school COVID-19 spread.”