Newsom Rewrites Pandemic History
This week California Governor Gavin Newsom blatantly lied about his record on Covid-19. I m not consumed by what we did wrong, Newsom said to Fox Los Angeles Elex Michaelson. I m consumed a little bit more by what we did right& There s no large state that outperformed California, one of the top performing states, in terms of health, wealth, and education.
Newsom went on to say that California s per capita Covid mortality was substantially lower than places like Texas and Florida, that the state s economy fared better than that of other states, and that we saw less learning loss than Florida. All these statements are misleading at best. Newsom s claims about California s economy have already been debunked, and in age-adjusted Covid mortality, as many have pointed out, California and Florida fared about the same. What s more, cumulative age-adjusted all-cause excess deaths have been higher in California than Florida since early 2020.
As for why schools were closed for so long, Newsom said it was because he gave school districts local control. Evidently, Newsom wants to claim both that he is not responsible for his own school policies, and that these policies were effective. Yet both of these claims are completely untrue, and Newsom s failure on schools is a scandal of colossal proportions.
In 2020, Newsom s Department of Health created color coded tiers that effectively prevented California schools from reopening. In 2021, statewide guidelines continued to shape restrictions. These guidelines were based on pseudoscience like a six foot rule that created a major barrier to reopening and was not proven to prevent Covid transmission.
While allowing private and charter schools to open and sending his own kids to in-person private school, Newsom never challenged the California teacher s union to push for full public reopening. Only in March 2021, when the state was facing a lawsuit, and after basically every other state had reopened, did Newsom call for public schools to resume limited in-person classes.
To this day, Newsom insists that school closures and the state s catastrophic learning loss were no big deal. Florida, he told Michaelson, had more learning loss in every single category& These are facts. But are they really?
Part of the reason politics is so annoying is that you can lie a lot and get away with it. Why do people lie so much in politics. One reason is that the costs and benefits are so widely spread out that it makes economic sense to pay little attention to it. Because there are so few real monitors of politics, you can be pretty sure that no one authoritative will catch you in your lie. That means that people like me, who for whatever reason follow this stuff fairly closely, will catch numerous lies, such as Newsome’s, but not be able to do anything about it, except feel more honest than him, which is a pretty low bar.