by Eric Lendrum
A handful of Senate Republicans sent a letter to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on Wednesday demanding more information about the newly-announced school reopening guidelines, as reported by the Daily Caller.
The letter, signed by five Senate Republicans including Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.,) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.), is addressed to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, as well as Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra. The letter asks both officials to provide explanations for why the CDC has ultimately decided to reopen all American schools by June 2nd.
In the letter, the senators point to recently-unearthed emails, first uncovered by Americans for Public Trust, which reveal that the CDC communicated directly with the nation’s top teachers’ unions, including the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), to discuss drafting the reopening guidelines.
“Recently released emails show close coordination between the CDC and teachers’ unions on the language of school reopening guidance,” the letter states. “Political interference from administration-friendly special interest groups that is divorced from science harms children who have been lacking in-person instruction for prolonged periods of time.”
Among other demands, the letter asked for the CDC and HHS to provide them with any drafts of school reopening guidelines that were shared with the AFT, a list of all non-governmental organizations that the CDC and HHS communicated with on this subject, and all documents and communications from the AFT and NEA related to the new guidelines.
The controversy comes less than a week after the CDC announced last Thursday that it would be partially lifting the nationwide mask mandate, declaring that anyone who has received the vaccine no longer needs to wear a mask or socially distance, either indoors or outdoors. Some have claimed that the decision, which comes after no significant shift in the science or trends of the coronavirus itself, was a purely political decision by the Biden Administration meant to distract from numerous other political crises, including a stagnant economy, rising gas prices and an alarming gas shortage, a flood of illegal aliens pouring over the southern border, and worsening tensions in the Middle East.
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Eric Lendrum reports for American Greatness.
