“The View’ co-hosts tried to push back at Dr. Phil McGraw Monday for saying children were more harmed by COVID-19 lockdowns than by the virus itself.
McGraw answered questions about his new book, “We’ve Got Issues: How You Stand Strong For American’s Soul And Sanity,” in which he criticized agencies for supporting COVID-19 school lockdowns despite having knowledge of increased suicide and depression in minors.
“In like 08, 09, smartphones came on. And kids stopped living their lives and started watching people live their lives. And so we saw the biggest spike and the highest levels of depression, anxiety, loneliness and suicidality since records have ever been kept,” McGraw said. “And it’s just continued on and on and on. And then COVID hits ten years later, and the same agencies that knew that are the agencies that shut down the schools for two years. Who does that? Who takes away the support system for these children? Who takes them away and shuts it down? And by the way, when they shut it down, they stopped the mandated reporters from being able to see children being abused and sexually molested and in fact sent them home and abandoned them to their abusers with no way to watch and referrals dropped 50 to 60 percent.”
“There was also a pandemic going on and they were trying to save kids’ lives,” co-host Sunny Hostin said.
“They were trying to save kids lives,” co-host Whoopi Goldberg added. “Remember, we know a lot of folks who died during this so it wasn’t —people weren’t laying around —”
“Not school children,” McGraw interjected.
“Well, you know what, we’re lucky,” Goldberg said. “Maybe we’re lucky we didn’t, because we kept them out of the places that they could be sick, because no one wanted to believe we had an issue.” (RELATED: ‘I Hear No Remorse’: CNN Contributor Goes Off On Randi Weingarten To Her Face)
“Are you saying no schoolchildren died of COVID?” co-host Ana Navarro asked.
McGraw accurately explained that schoolchildren were among the least likely group to die from COVID. He said they suffered more from the “mismanagement” of the pandemic than contracting the virus.
An estimated 0.4% of those who died from COVID were children as of March 2023, according to UNICEF. Of the estimated 17,400 kids who died, over half of them were between the ages of 10 and 19, while 47% were within the ages of 0-9.
School lockdowns caused child literacy rates to plummet to record lows, according to several studies. A large number of elementary school students across all grade levels had literacy rates that were “far behind” and needing “intensive intervention” since the pandemic, an Amplify Education study found.
A study published by the Curriculum Associates in November 2021 found a spike in children exhibiting below grade level reading and mathematics skills across all grades since the lockdowns ended. Not a single student across 55 public schools in Chicago met grade level expectations in reading or math throughout the 2021-2022 school year, a Wirepoints report stated.