Nate Silver, a statistician and founder of the website FiveThirtyEight, is facing mockery on Twitter after comparing school closures as a result of Covid to the war in Iraq - and it’s already considered the worst take in 2022.
Silver commented on the policy some school districts have adopted to have students go back to remote learning due to the high rates of Omicron cases and short staff.
The backlash Silver received arose following a Twitter thread in which Mother Jones editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery said, in part, “lot of liberal pundit handwringing to the effect of ‘we can close schools now that we know of the great harms to kid’s mental health.’”
She also sent out a follow-up message, saying, “Pundits seem to be fighting the last war ... they’ve been mostly back for a year.”
Silver then responded to Jeffrey’s tweet, wondering if she thought that “school closures were a disastrous, invasion-of-Iraq magnitude (or perhaps greater) policy decision.”
When pressed, he doubled down on it.
Yeah, I think depriving tens of millions of school children of an in-person education for a year or longer is absolutely on that magnitude. No question.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) January 6, 2022
The comparison was immediately mocked on Twitter, and it’s been branded the worst take so far in 2022.
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“Data Guy Nate Silver doubles down on his insane comparison of school closures to protect kids and teachers from a deadly virus, to a war of choice that killed 100s of 1000s of innocent men, women, & children. Ladies and gents, we may have the worst take of 2022 already, tweeted MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan.
“Imagine how little value you have to place on the lives of Iraqi people to compare American kids having to learn on zoom to Iraqi kids LITERALLY DYING. Nate Silver should never EVER be taken seriously again. That tweet is sociopathic,” wrote Senior Editor Law & Policy at RewireNewsGroup.
A third noted that they were happy to have unfollowed Silver in 2020 and said, “Unfollowing Nate Silver in 2020 was one of the best things ever. That guy’s takes are getting worse with each passing day.”
Check out some other responses below:
woke up this morning still thinking about this world historically bad tweet https://t.co/hujNCRWFjy
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) January 6, 2022
Nate Silver is the king of terrible takes https://t.co/AKauJTdBl6
— C. Nicole (@thejewtheran) January 3, 2022
Nate Silver's trajectory from respected political prognosticator to circus clown cannonballing himself into a brick wall every other tweet has been a riches to rags arc that screenwriters and novelists should study. https://t.co/hHSMdHaXXq
— Alisha Grauso (@AlishaGrauso) January 6, 2022
I say this as a parent.
— Daniel “dietary course correction” Summers, MD (@WFKARS) January 6, 2022
And I say this as a pediatrician.
Nate Silver should absolutely shut the fuck up.
Nate Silver says schools temporarily closing because of a raging pandemic is as bad (perhaps worse!) as the invasion of Iraq. Words fail. pic.twitter.com/hj0ti03w0D
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 6, 2022
Man, Nate Silver benefited a lot from conducting statistical analysis in fields where people had already done a tremendous amount of work defining the questions and the data that would be meaningful in answering them. Every time he shares an intuition, it's breathtakingly bad.
— Rob Zacny (@RobZacny) January 6, 2022
I'm watching Nate Silver get absolutely hammered for saying keeping kids out of school for a year is worse than the invasion of Iraq (which is such a horrible thing to think, let alone say, holy shit) & it's amazingly gratifying. 😂💀
— Steph, Buttmunch Cracker Magnate (@RantsByDesign) January 6, 2022
Despite some of the bigger school districts in the US reopening this week, the classroom for children grades K-12 has been halted by the Omicron strain of the virus.
School districts Atlanta Public Schools are holding virtual classes for the first week of January but is planning to go back to regular classes on January 10.
And in New York City, where Omicron cases were rampant, New York City Mayor Eric Adams still vowed to keep the school system open. He also reassured parents that their children would be safe.
President Joe Biden also said that schools should remain physically open despite the Omicron variant cases.
On Tuesday, after a meeting with the White house Covid-19 response team, he said: “We know that our kids can be safe when in school. That’s why I believe that schools should remain open.”
