Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we guard against revisionism from the worst pandemic-era actors, marvel at an atrocious Father’s Day headline, and hit more media misses.

School-Closure Revisionism

It was inevitable that those who advocated a course as disastrous as keeping schools closed years into the pandemic would seek to rewrite their role in history.

The data are unambiguous and damning: School closures took an enormous and devastating toll on American children and parents alike. As Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has acknowledged, “the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically altered young peoples’ experiences at home, at school, and in the community,” in no small part because “they missed first days of school, months or even years of in-person schooling, graduation ceremonies, sports competitions, playdates,

and time with relatives.” 

Emergency Room visits for suicide attempts by adolescent females were up by 51 percent in 2021 as compared with 2019. Adolescent males saw a much more modest increase of 4 percent.

The consequences appear to be as enduring as they are injurious: One UCLA study released last month “found that the declines in [emergency department] and hospital discharges for primary psychiatric diagnoses after statewide school closure orders were two to three times less than those for general medical conditions.” And all of that is to say nothing about learning loss. 

Of course, all kinds of policy decisions have unforeseen adverse effects, and at the time, the initial shutdown of schools and other services seemed to be almost unanimously accepted as a reasonable response to the arrival of a deadly and novel disease. The outlier scientists and other experts — and there were a notable handful from Yale, Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford — who presciently voiced skepticism of the lockdowns and warned of the negative long-term consequences were booted from social-media platforms and otherwise sidelined. And now, the stubborn refusal of many lockdown advocates to reflect on what followed from their keeping kids out of their schools and routines over the long term is too frustrating — and potentially destructive — to abide.