Rep. Wenstrup to Newsmax: CDC, Teachers Union Closed Schools

House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chair Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, told Newsmax on Wednesday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reached out to the American Federation of Teachers union asking for its recommendations about whether to keep schools open during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“[The CDC was not] reaching out to parents directly, PTAs or anything like that,” Wenstrup said during “The Record With Greta Van Susteren” on Wednesday. “The whole idea was to try and understand today what the AFT’s role was, the American Federation of Teachers. What was their role in all of this, and why did they have so much influence on the CDC?”

Wenstrup said that the union should have been more interested in the “essential” function of keeping schools open during the pandemic after scientific studies showed the children were not at a high risk of getting the virus.

“[The AFT] should be an organization that’s a service organization,” he said. “It should be about providing for the education of our children, just like doctors provide for the health of the American people. Teachers should be out there providing for our children and their future, and that requires schools to be open.”

He said that instead of keeping schools closed, the focus of the AFT should have been to get the CDC to reopen them.

“Everyone agrees that kids being in school was essential, and the narrative should have been ‘how do we get kids back in school and teach them?’ They should have been the last to close and the first back in, but that’s not what we saw happen.”

He said the CDC should not be making political decisions. He hopes that when their people testify in front of his committee, they can get answers about why the union wanted to incorporate its recommendations with the CDC’s.

“You have every right to state what you think should be the guidelines or have some kind of input on behalf of the teachers,” he said. “But the CDC should not be political. They should be completely apolitical. And we see that they’re not because they took some of the guidelines from the American Federation of Teachers, a nonmedical entity, and put it right into the guidelines.”

He said the union was interested only in keeping the schools closed, based on the documents he and the committee have reviewed.

“We did learn a lot,” he said. “We saw that the American Federation of Teachers were only interested in how they could close the schools.”

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