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| - Oz did say during an April 2020 interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that "schools are a very appetizing opportunity" for returning a critical aspect of daily life to normality because it "would only cost us 2 to 3% in terms of total mortality," suggesting the risk of an increased mortality rate would be an acceptable "tradeoff."
However, he wasn't talking about 2 to 3% more deaths of children specifically, but in terms of "total mortality" — that is, the number of COVID-related deaths across all demographics. He explained his words on April 16, 2020, saying that he "misspoke" before.
After U.S. President-elect Donald Trump nominated television's Dr. Mehmet Oz to oversee the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in November 2024, an old video clip of Oz began to circulate in which, some people claimed, he said the benefits of reopening locked-down schools during the COVID-19 pandemic would be worth a 2% to 3% increase in the number of children who died (archived):
Here is a transcript of Oz's remarks:
First, we need our mojo back. Let's start with things that are really critical to the nation, where we think we might be able to open without getting into a lot of trouble, I tell you, schools are a very appetizing opportunity. I just saw a nice piece in The Lancet arguing that the opening of schools may only cost us 2 to 3% in terms of total mortality.
And you know that's... any life is a life lost, but to get every child back into a school where they're safely being educated, being fed and making the most of their lives with a theoretical risk in the backside... It might be a tradeoff some folks would consider. We need the industries back, supply lines, I mean things we can do without putting our nation at risk...
This post had gained 1.4 million views and 18,000 likes, as of this writing. "Remember during COVID when Dr. Oz said he's ok with 2-3% of children dying so they can open schools," the post read. The same claim appeared several times on X as well as on Instagram. The magazine Vanity Fair reported the same thing at the time.
The reality is that Oz did have this interview, and he did appear to suggest that a 2% to 3% increase in total mortality would be an acceptable cost for reopening schools. However, as he later explained, he wasn't focusing on the mortality rate for children alone, but on the quantity of overall deaths related to COVID-19 (which would have still represented thousands of people).
Faced with the uproar, Oz responded with a post on Twitter (now known as X) on April 16, 2020, saying he "misspoke" (archived):
I've realized my comments on risks around opening schools have confused and upset people, which was never my intention. I misspoke.
As a heart surgeon, I spent my career fighting to save lives in the operating room by minimizing risks. At the same time, I'm being asked constantly, "How will we be able to get people back to their normal lives?" To do that, one of the important steps will be figuring out how do we get our children safely back to school. We know, for many kids, school is a place of security, nutrition and learning that is missing right now. These are issues we are all wrestling with. And I will continue looking for solutions to beat this virus.
The basis of his comments on school openings and mortality rates appears to have been a misinterpretation of an article published on April 6, 2020, in the medical journal The Lancet, which itself cited another modeling study by a team from The Imperial College London that had then not been peer-reviewed. Using available information on how the virus was transmitted in Wuhan, China, as well as data on previous influenza outbreaks, the researchers made a calculation for the population of the U.K., assuming that all schools and a quarter of universities would close. They predicted the school closures would contribute to reducing overall deaths (not just children's) by 2% to 4%, but that the most effective way to blunt transmission would be to combine school closures with isolation in case of exposure.
Oz turned the statistical prediction on its head, so to speak, to suggest that opening schools would increase overall deaths by the same amount.
Months later, the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology published a commentary on the Imperial College study. While the authors recognized that the paper had influenced public policy and praised its "reasonable assumptions," they also warned that the model relied on "a simplified picture of social interactions," a factor that created limits to how well it could be applied.
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