While most doctors have moved on from Covid being a major concern, Jerome Adams, the former US Surgeon General, has not. He often tweets about Covid advocacy, frequently promoting his pandemic book, Crisis and Chaos. Recently, he re-shared an excerpt from his book about school reopening during Covid, in which he claims that reopening advocacy was about “deliberately infecting the kids” to achieve herd immunity. In his retweet, he added the excuse that “many wanted schools open not for the kids- but so they could get the parents back to work.”

There were many different arguments made in favor of school reopening — schools are important to children, families, and society at large for many reasons. We knew that children were being harmed by long-term school closures, that kids were among the least at risk from Covid, and that schools could reopen safely without driving spread in the community. As a vocal school reopening advocate myself, I could write a whole article on this, but it hardly seems necessary now that most experts readily acknowledge that long-term school closures were a failed policy that should never be repeated.

But debate over his tweets about school reopening led Dr. Adams to make a fairly outrageous claim about children and Long Covid that I think needs to be addressed, given his position as former Surgeon General, and the complete lack of evidence supporting his assertion. He claimed that most US pediatricians “are increasingly concerned about the long-term neuro cognitive impacts of repeated Covid infections.” And he bullied and maligned doctors who dared disagree with him, much like he bullied me in the past when I debunked a pre-print and CDC presentation that falsely claimed that Covid was a top five cause of death for children.