NBC Nightly News ran a moronic and dangerous segment last evening. It was titled: Will Pediatricians Send Their Children Back To School? and it featured five pediatricians yukking it up about how they were going to do just that. I was so incensed, I wrote them the following:
The question you should have been asking is “Will pediatricians send their children back to school in a low income or underfunded district?”
Last evening on Nightly News you ran a segment featuring five pediatricians, clearly upper or upper middle class, who pronounced positively on the safety of sending children back to school. This feckless piece of reporting doesn’t begin to address the dangers in doing that. Many schools, except those in the high income, often notably white, districts, do not have proper ventilation, have windows that do not function, have classroom sizes of 35 students or more, do not have the funds to put in place the safeguards, such as regular thorough sanitizing, needed to protect occupants of the school building from the virus. Nowhere was the health of teachers mentioned. Nowhere was it noted that the appearance of only ONE case of COVID19 would require the quarantining of all who contacted the person, e.g., teachers, administrators, students alike, and would result in classes being cancelled and probably school closure. All the while endangering, not just the occupants of the school, but the community connected with it and returning the situation to square one after inflicting god knows how much damage.
It is not high income earners [for instance your Stanford Doctor—Palo Alto, $201,062 average salary of a pediatrician; nationwide average pediatrician salary $150-280,000] who should be the final arbiters of this issue but rather those who recognize the conditions and limitations of our schools, especially in low income but also in some middle class districts. This white privileged reporting, makes the most minimal nod to the context in which the decision to send one’s children back to school is made. For COVID19 context is everything, in case you haven’t noticed, and whether children easily pass the disease to others is one tiny element in the context of operating safely in a school environment. The across the board thumbs up by those physicians is absolutely brain dead and sends a dangerously irresponsible message.
I look forward to seeing you undo the disinformation you presented last evening.
Email Contact: NBC Nightly News
UPDATE: They repeated the segment on MSNBC about 30 minutes ago so you might want to contact them too.
PS, I didn’t want to wait to publish this since they seem intent on repeating the segment but I must run into town now and won’t be able to properly shepherd the diary until late afternoon. So I apologize in advance.
Also I have no idea how to embed a video so it is linked.