Dr. Anthony Fauci has a new rallying cry—open the schools, but close the bars and restaurants.

Well, I am scratching my head: why would opening schools mean closing bars and restaurants? What is the link? What am I missing?

Welcome news of course on the school front, but what if your livelihood depends on a bar? Why on earth is this an either/or?

What possible connection is there between re-opening schools and bars? Why should opening one mean closing the other? Do we just have some odd need to keep things shut down?

Still, Fauci’s remarks about schools should be taken to heart. Here is a snippet of what he said:

Anthony Fauci, an infectious diseases expert and top advisor to the White House on the COVID-19 pandemic, said that he was for closing bars and restaurants but reopening schools in an interview on Sunday. . . .

“The default position should be to try as best as possible, within reason, to keep the children in school, to get them back to school,” Fauci told ABC News reporter Martha Raddatz, who noted that New York City public schools had recently closed down again due to rising coronavirus rates in the community.

“If you look at the data, the spread among children and from children is not very big at all, not like one would have suspected,” said Fauci. “So let’s try to get the kids back and try to mitigate the things that maintain and push the kind of community spread we are trying to avoid.”

If the data indicates spread among children is not very big, how will their going to school significantly affect bars and restaurants? Is Dr. Fauci simply advocating another shutdown of bars and restaurants, regardless of school openings? Unclear, but it looks like some kind of weird tradeoff.

Dr. Fauci doesn’t address the main reason schools remain closed, despite the very limited risks associated with attending school: the teacher unions. As Reason magazine notes:

Public officials giving in to the increasingly unreasonable demands of teachers union leaders—many of whom expect schools to remain closed for at least another year—are not following the science. They are ignoring what’s best for the kids. And they certainly aren’t listening to Fauci.

We should not make bars and restaurants the fall guys for school re-openings.