This COVID-stricken year has been a disaster for many American students and parents, particularly those in minority communities. Children still learning to read have had to adjust to learning by Zoom. Those applying to colleges have had carefully laid plans upended. Without the guarantee of school breakfast and lunch, hunger has soared among America’s 51 million school-age children. Without watchful teachers, child abuse reporting has fallen, while deaths from abuse have risen. Not to mention whole communities of students who may have fallen irreparably behind in mathematics and other key subjects. Many have fallen out of their teachers’ reach entirely.
And while the pandemic has been global, such effects have by no means been universal. Many countries that have prioritized testing have succeeded in keeping schools open safely. Data has shown that in-person schooling has had a negligible impact on community spread. “If you can test every adult” at school “twice a week, test every student once a week, you can reopen America’s schools,” said Dr. Rajiv J. Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, the influential charitable organization that has spent much of the year working to expand U.S. COVID-19 testing, in order to help mitigate the pandemic’s fallout.
Today the foundation released its third report since the onset of the pandemic, laying out a plan to reopen the nation’s public K-12 schools with a system that would test every teacher twice a week and every student once a week, eyeing a timeline of February to do so. The report estimates the cost would be $8.5 billion a month. It is, said Shah, a “very small price to pay to protect a generation of kids.” The plan also calls for teachers to be included among the next wave of frontline workers who would be prioritized for a COVID-19 vaccine, just behind health care personnel.
The testing plan has for months been a key issue for the Rockefeller team, as it has been throughout the medical world. On April 13, one week before the foundation released its first report urging the Trump administration to massively ramp up the production of COVID-19 tests, Eileen O’Connor, the foundation’s senior vice president for communications, policy, and advocacy, previewed the plan with a government official serving on a White House task force led by Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and special adviser.
It had been less than three months since the first COVID-19 case was identified in the U.S., and it was clear to Rockefeller officials—as it was to many in the scientific and public health communities—that ubiquitous, low-cost testing of both sick and symptom-free Americans would be the only way to keep students in school and the economy running. It was also clear that one of the most effective ways to turbocharge America’s COVID testing, and ramp up to a recommended 30 million tests a week, would be for President Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era law that allows the federal government to commandeer private-market capacity.
But O’Connor got a big bucket of cold water from the official, who’d been detailed to the White House from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, where he worked under Kushner’s former school roommate Adam Boehler. “We think the markets will sort it out,” O’Connor recalled being told by the official in an interview this week. It was a spin on the mantra that Kushner had invoked in a meeting on March 21 with a group of Silicon Valley executives, who came to the White House to urge the administration to scale up the manufacturing of masks and other personal protective equipment by using the Defense Production Act.
“Free markets will solve this,” Kushner had said at the March meeting, as one attendee recalled to Vanity Fair in September. “That is not the role of government.”
A source who has worked closely with state officials on their school-reopening plans said that the administration’s testing response was driven by a “Kushnerian view of the world. They like telling people what to do…and taking credit.” This person continued, “Reopening America’s schools requires a lot of listening…. It’s not an Oval Office signing.”
The Trump administration’s false and misguided claims about the pandemic are at this point legion: Anybody that wants a test can get a test; one day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear; by July, the country’s really rocking again. But the belief that the markets would sort it out may very well be in a class of its own. Already, the idea that in a global pandemic—with the entire world fighting for limited supplies of pipettes and reagents—the invisible hand would somehow ensure that an efficient, well-stocked testing industry would emerge without government intervention, has not aged particularly well.
Yet when it came to developing vaccines, the Trump administration took the opposite tack. It poured money and government resources into a partnership with numerous drugmakers to develop and purchase COVID-19 vaccines, the first of which reached patients on Monday.
Doing the same for testing could have changed the pandemic’s trajectory in the U.S. dramatically.
Shah said he thought a government intervention in testing could have headed off “the really bad choice of shutting everything down or keeping things open and having hundreds of thousands of deaths.” Throughout the spring and summer, Rockefeller Foundation officials petitioned the Trump administration to dramatically increase testing. “We were told, ‘It’s not something we can do,’” said O’Connor. “Our impression was this was a political issue…. We’ve been asking them to use the [Defense Production Act] ever since this began, and they just refused.”
White House spokesperson Sarah Matthews told Vanity Fair, “President Trump has used the Defense Production Act and related authorities over 100 times to ensure an adequate supply of PPE, testing supplies, and ventilators, as well as prohibit the hoarding of vital medical supplies.”
With its third report now public and the sun setting on Trump’s term in office, the Rockefeller Foundation is now in contact with the transition team of President-elect Biden, who has identified reopening schools as a central part of his pandemic response.
“We are not commenting on any discussions we might have,” said O’Connor. But momentum seems to be growing to try and rescue the remainder of the school year.
“We are interacting with individuals on both sides who are clearly putting the country first, and they understand that we have to do a lot better,” said Dr. Mike Pellini, managing partner of Section 32, a technology and health care venture capital fund that is advising the Rockefeller Foundation, adding, “Genuine hope is the right phrase.”
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