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I’ll never forget the fateful week in late June of 2020, when America went from being on track for a mostly normal 2020-21 school year to an unjustifiable second year of profoundly disrupted education for tens of millions of children.

The initial American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) school guidance called for all schools to open that fall and said having kids in the classroom was the most important thing: “Desks should be placed 3 to 6 feet apart when feasible,” they said. “If this reduces the amount of time children are present in school, harm may outweigh potential benefits.”

Masking was recommended only for “older students (middle or high school)” who “may be able to wear cloth face coverings safely and consistently.”

Then President Donald Trump invited the AAP president to the White House as part of an all-day conference on schools and touted AAP support for his pro-school policy. Just 11 days after the AAP issued its pro-school guidance, they reversed in a joint statement with the teachers unions.

What could explain that other than political corruption?

Why hasn’t that corruption been more widely exposed and condemned?

One reason is that unlike the Centers for Disease Control, which Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) investigations have shown was completely captive to the teachers unions once the Biden-Harris administration took over, AAP is not a government agency and thus does not have to release information under FOIA.

The chair of the AAP’s Executive Committee for the Council on School Health, Cheryl De Pinto, however, was a Maryland state employee: the medical director for school health at the Maryland Department of Health. (In 2021 she moved to a full-time position at the AAP.) Her emails are from that fateful time are subject to the Maryland Public Information Act (MPIA), the state FOIA-equivalent.

American Commitment Foundation filed an MPIA request last year for De Pinto’s emails in June and July of 2020 with keywords “AAP” and “schools.” We were quoted a hefty price of $1,667.60 for producing 798 responsive records. We paid it and heard nothing for months. After involving the state’s MPIA ombudsman, we received a partial response: just 162 emails, and with the attachments missing. It included an email showing an emergency call to discuss the problem of Trump touting the original, pro-schools guidance right before the reversal:

For months, the Maryland Department of Health refused to even disclose their basis for withholding 80 percent of the public records we paid for. Eventually they told the ombudsman they withheld:

2,920 pages of documentation that are not public records – Documents that were not related to Departmental work or business and therefore do not fall under the definition of public record under GP § 4-101(k). 

392 pages of deliberative documents – Documents that fall under the exemption under GP § 4-344. 

5 pages of trade secrets documents

It is hard to believe that the bulk of emails discussing school policy around the period of this critical reversal are not public records. This was the basis upon which children across the state and the country were denied an education. Was this somehow not work-related for the medical director for school health at the Maryland Department of Health? If so, why was she conducting this business in her state email account?

Massive Loss

School closures may ultimately prove to be the largest policy error of the pandemic era in both economic and mortality terms. One study found that school closures in the U.S. at the end of the 2019-2020 school year are associated with 13.8 million years of life lost — but many parts of the country proceeded to impose even longer closures in the 2020-21 school year. The result was massive learning loss with potentially significant lifetime economic harms for an entire generation of kids.

Unlike some other aspects of the pandemic, closing public schools was entirely under the control of policymakers.

It was clear from the beginning that risks to children were minimal and comparable to other respiratory viruses. It was clear by April 2020 that schools were operating in Europe with no meaningful adverse consequences for children or broader communities.

School interventions were not just enormously disruptive and harmful but also futile. The CDC estimates that by November/December 2022, over 93 percent of all children age 5 to 17 had infection-induced antibodies to SARS-CoV2. Because not everybody infected develops antibodies, especially vaccinated individuals according to an NIH study, the true ever-infected percentage is likely very close to 100 percent. Everything the AAP-endorsed public health interventions did to kids was for nothing.

We are suing the Maryland Department of Public Health to try to obtain the secret 3,000+ pages of documents that may show the sordid details of that fateful week in summer 2020, the week when apparent political corruption of the AAP needlessly disrupted the education of tens of millions of American children.

Whether or not we ever receive those documents, we hope that shining a spotlight on what happened will prevent it from ever happening again.

Phil Kerpen is president of American Commitment Foundation.