Abdul el Sayed supported strict COVID-19 lockdowns and school closures
Washington Examiner · RC · trust 54/100
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Dr. Abdul el Sayed took a very strict approach to public health restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic six years ago, supporting intense statewide lockdowns and keeping schools shut down.
El Sayed, the left-wing candidate who won his state’s Democratic primary on Aug. 4, was not a state or local official during the pandemic, but he made frequent media appearances and wrote a plethora of opinion pieces offering his advice on how to respond to the disease outbreak.
After earning his medical degree from Columbia University and teaching there as an epidemiology professor, el Sayed became the youngest-ever health director of the Detroit Health Department at the age of 30, serving from 2015 to 2017.
Between his time in public office and the start of the pandemic in 2020, el Sayed started his own podcast, America Dissected , and became a go-to infectious disease pundit.
Some of el Sayed’s strictest advice came in an opinion piece in The Guardian one week after Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer implemented state-wide lockdowns in March 2020.
El Sayed argued curbing the spread of COVID-19 would “require bold action,” including “eliminating congregation in restaurants, bars and clubs, as well as potentially locking down communities with major outbreaks.
“It means mandating work from home for non-essential personnel,” el Sayed wrote. “It means contemplating a parallel Covid-19-specific health system under the control of the national guard to vastly increase our health system’s capacity.”
The Democrat acknowledged that sweeping measures would have ripple effects throughout the economy. Instead of moderating his public health approach for economic stability, el Sayed advised using the public health emergency to advance liberal causes, including as a bridge to Medicare for All, nationalized health insurance.
El Sayed argued that Congress ought to “guarantee healthcare coverage for confirmed or suspected COVID-19 cases,” institute “a universal paid sick leave policy that covers all workers” and provide “a guaranteed basic income” during the economic downturn.
Despite arguing for strict lockdowns at the start of the pandemic, el Sayed also supported the wave of Black Lives Matter protests starting in the summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd in Minnesota.
During an October 2020 interview with Brian Tyler Cohen , el Sayed defended the Black Lives Matter protests as their own form of “a public health intervention,” citing systemic racism as the cause of 83,000 deaths annually in the United States.
“Unless you devalue the lives that we’re fighting for, which are Black lives, by saying that they’re somehow less important to focus on than the lives that are lost to COVID-19, which, by the way, are disproportionately Black lives as well, then there is no coherent approach to pitting these protests against public health,” he said.
El Sayed, who is now a father of two, also supported keeping schools closed down as late as January 2022.
In a 2022 op-ed in The New Republic , el Sayed acknowledged that children suffered significant learning loss from missing in-person schooling, as well as the strain on parents trying to work to support their families.
But el Sayed said only “rigorous masking and testing” could keep schools safe during the surge of the omicron variant of COVID-19, and blamed then-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky for ramping up personal protective equipment for schools.
Documents made public since then have revealed that the specific guidance put out by the federal government on mask mandates and social distancing was not based in scientific evidence.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of the federal response to COVID-19, testified before Congress in 2024 that mask mandates and six-foot social distancing recommendations “just sort of appeared,” without definitive scientific evidence supporting their efficacy.
El Sayed’s record on COVID policy was not a main feature of his primary race against his more centrist challenger, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI). Stevens herself also simultaneously supported the BLM protests as well as strict lockdown measures.
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