Opinion
Dr. Phil McGraw triggered Whoopi Goldberg and her fellow liberal co-hosts on “The View” on Monday when he dared to blast COVID-19 pandemic school closures, exposing just how damaging they really were to children.
McGraw Sounds Off
When “The View” co-host Sara Haines asked McGraw about a statement he made in his new book “We’ve Got Issues: How You Can Stand Strong for America’s Soul and Sanity” regarding the pressures of social media on children, he took the opportunity to use this question to attack the pandemic school closures.
“In, like, ’08, ’09, smartphones came on, and kids started, they stopped living their lives and starting 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, and it’s just continued on and on and on,” McGraw began.
“And then COVID hits 10 years later, and the same agencies that knew that, are the agencies that shut down the schools for two years,” he added. “Who does that? Who takes away the support system for these children? Who takes it 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 that were 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%,” McGraw continued.
Goldberg Loses It
This was enough to trigger the super liberal Goldberg.
“They were trying to save kids’ lives,” she responded. “Remember, we know a lot of folks who died during this. So people weren’t laying around eating bon bons.”
“Not school children,” McGraw interjected, not having any of this nonsense.
“Maybe we’re lucky they didn’t (go to school) because we kept them out of the places where they could be sick because no one wanted to believe we had an issue,” Goldberg stammered.
When co-host Ana Navarro asked McGraw if he was saying that no children died of COVID, he fired back, “I’m saying it was the safest group, they were the less vulnerable group, and they suffered and will suffer more from the mismanagement of COVID than they will from the exposure to COVID, and that’s not an opinion. That’s a fact.”
Goldberg and her fellow co-hosts were humiliated when their own audience applauded this last statement from McGraw. A visibly frustrated Goldberg was then left with no choice but to end the segment and throw the show to commercial, saying, “well, Phil, we don’t even have time to talk it out now.”
Check out this full segment below, with the relevant portion starting at around the 6:48 mark.
Experts Weigh In
USA Today reported that in January of last year, the academic journal Nature Human Behaviour published a report that found that students in 15 countries were set back by about a third of a year due to pandemic-related school closures, the shift to virtual learning, and the mental health toll of it all.
In March of 2023, the University of Oxford found that the COVID-19 school closures may indeed have harmed “children’s education and wellbeing.”
“Our comprehensive review, which systematically included over 132 unique studies, highlights some of the global impacts of COVID-19 related school closures,” said Oxford Professor Kamal R Mahtani. “While there may be some association with reduced community transmission, there is also notable associations of harm, including worsening physical and mental health, loss of learning and increased domestic violence.”
“Healthcare leaders must deeply consider the balance of benefits and harms when implementing future policies on behalf of such a vulnerable part of our society,” Maharani added.
Liberals like Goldberg took no time to consider how children might be impacted when they pushed for school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. We applaud McGraw for taking them to task for this now, and for taking a stand for children everywhere.
In the end, we need to ensure that for the sake of children everywhere, we never let anything like the COVID-19 school closures happen ever again.
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