They Know Even Less Than What They Say

I don't personally have all that much to say about the "should schools open" debate other than "we are a fucked up society that should have priortized ensuring that was possible by putting modest resources at least behind it and of course we didn't so let's blame teachers unions and lol everything is bad" but there have been people with very strong opinions using their academic credentials to push them to be open and, welp...

(CNN)A Brown University economics professor said she is surprised to hear the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is relying on a website she started to promote in-person learning for schoolchildren.

...

The website incorporates data that schools and school districts voluntarily publish, along with data that some report directly to the site, but it's far from complete, Oster said. She said she was surprised that Redfield referenced it when he said that a growing body of research showed kids were not getting infected in school.

"It is totally bananas," she said. "I think we are doing as good a job as we can. This is not my field. It's crazy."

Let me try to distill it down to one sentence:

A Brown University economics professor who started a website to promote in-person learning for schoolchildren says it's "bananas" that the CDC director cited that website in order to promote in-person learning for schoolchildren, saying it was a crazy thing to do because it is not her field.

She hasn't been shy about promoting herself and this view!!!

You fucked up! You trusted us!!!

Oster knows she’ll get blamed if the reopening experiment ends in disaster. In that case, “the best I can do is say that I did something I felt was productive and helpful,” she told me. “If the result of having done that is that the policy direction I pushed was not right, at least I got the data to show that.” It would be ironic, I responded, if her own dataset proved her wrong. “It’s true!” she said. “I think this data will be useful no matter what we show. But, yes, it would be ironic if I once again show myself to be wrong. That could be my thing! But I’m hoping not.”

I guess this is an anticapatory oopsie, your bad for listening to me?