The official apology followed a year-long investigation and production of a 4,500-page report. On Friday, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen apologized to Danish farmers for the November 2020 culling of the country’s entire mink population “over fears that a mutated version of the coronavirus that had infected mink could diminish the effectiveness of vaccines.” “I know you lost your life’s work, and I…

The disease control agency‘s March 2020 guidance was an exercise in equivocation. In March 2020, as governments around the world were essentially panicking in response to the rapidly escalating pandemic, the United States CDC issued a brief document entitled “Considerations for School Closure.” Many individuals might be surprised to learn that the document did not explicitly encourage school districts to shutter their…

Agreement between unions and government still necessary. The Dutch press is reporting that teachers’ unions and government ministers are hashing out a plan for Covid-19 measures during the next school year, which emphasizes keeping child care centers and schools open regardless of virus transmission, but pivots to problematic hybrid instruction in the worst-case scenario. “The previous Cabinet…

We need a national ventilation toolkit for public schools. Masks are a problematic intervention in schools. They are difficult for children to properly wear, interfere with reading instruction, and hinder the social and emotional development of children by hiding facial expressions. For these and other reasons, European countries masked less in their schools than the United States and never…

In March 2020, the Swedish Public Health Agency said healthy children should remain in school. A Twitter follower recently shared a Swedish Public Health Agency Web page with me about children and schools from March 1, 2020: It’s a fascinating artifact from the only high-income country to not close primary and lower secondary schools in spring 2020. The Web page provides a window into…

Findings highlight importance of “normalcy” for children A recently published journal article concluding Swedish primary school children suffered no learning loss drew international attention, but foreign observers of Sweden’s responsible decision to keep most schools open may have missed a journal article published in December 2021 with good news about the emotional well-being of the country’s middle…

Head Start programs need to stop mandating masks. While mask mandates have been lifted for most Americans — from toddlers at New York City child care centers to Americans flying the friendly skies — there is one population that is still required to mask up for hours every single day: toddlers at the nation’s Head Start programs, which…

Parents have struggled to assess risk during the pandemic. I wrote last year that so-called remote options — offered by Atlanta, Los Angeles, and other U.S. cities, but uncommon in Europe — are a potential child rights issue, because children may be forced into remote instruction by scared parents when the ideal learning environment for the vast majority of…

Incredible news about learning loss was ignored last fall — and is being ignored again. Yesterday, Sweden’s education minister expressed confidence that she made the right decision to keep primary and lower secondary schools open throughout the pandemic. She was responding to a tweet from a World Bank education economist who was sharing a journal article that concluded “there is no evidence of a…