President Donald Trump is making dangerously false medical claims once again, this time to advance his agenda of forcing the nation’s schools to re-open despite the coronavirus pandemic, which is growing worse in many parts of the country.
On “Fox & Friends” Wednesday morning Trump said that children are “virtually immune” from contracting the coronavirus, which is false.
“It doesn’t have an impact on them,” Trump told the Fox News morning team. “And I’ve watched some doctors say they’re ‘totally immune,’ I don’t know I hate to use the word ‘totally,’ the news will say, ‘Oh, he made the word totally and he shouldn’t have used that word.’ But the fact is they are virtually immune from this problem, and we have to open our schools.”
While children may contract the virus at lower rates, there has not been sufficient testing to prove that.
In fact, a devastating CDC analysis reported by The Washington Post just last week found “260 children and staffers — more than three-quarters of the 344 tested — contracted the virus less than a week after spending time together in close quarters. The children had a median age of 12. The camp had required all 597 campers and staff members to provide documentation that they had tested negative for the virus before coming. Staff were required to wear masks, but children were not.”
That “report suggests that children of all ages are susceptible to coronavirus infection and may also spread it to others — a finding likely to intensify an already fraught discussion about the risks of sending children back to school this fall.”
But President Trump says “the schools should open. This thing’s going way. it will go away like things go away, and my view is schools should reopen.”
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