Fox News Tonight guest host Harris Faulkner gave her primetime audience Tuesday some revisionist history regarding the 1918-19 influenza pandemic when trying to make a point about school closures due to COVID-19.
In her monologue, Faulkner first marked the 79th anniversary of D-Day, saying, “We proved America is exceptional, and our exceptionalism belongs to each of us. It’s inside of us. It’s our shared history. We sacrifice and then we move through our bravery toward freedom, over and over.”
She then segued into an acknowledgment that “sometimes we make dangerously bad decisions.” To Faulkner, these are “pandemic lockdowns and keeping our own children home from schools when a virus was hurting them far less often than adults”–a clear reference to the curtailed aspects of public life brought on by COVID-19.
In an apparent attempt to contrast the wise decisions of government officials in 1918 with the ones made a century later, Faulkner then wrongly claimed that schools did not close back then.
“You know,” she told viewers who could not possibly know such a thing because it wasn’t true, “we didn’t actually close schools in 1918 during the Spanish flu pandemic. We didn’t even have penicillin back then. We did sacrifice. We suffered, but then we pressed on. Our enemies hate us for surviving, but they would love to be like us.”
In fact, a simple internet search reveals Faulkner’s error. A July 2020 PBS NewsHour column, for instance, notes that during the 1918-19 pandemic, “the majority of public schools were closed for weeks to months on end.”
Additionally, a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in December 2020 titled “School Closures During the 1918 Flu Pandemic” found that “schools closed in 1918 for many fewer days on average” compared to closures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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