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April 25, 2025 - Epoch Times
04:43
‘They Were Sacrificed for Nothing’: David Zweig
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This was a world-altering event.
This was something in America where our culture, our society, favored older people and other groups to the detriment of children.
And there was no benefit for this.
And we knew this very early.
And yet, throughout America, schools continued to remain closed month after month.
Something that comes to mind is, again, something Dr. Scott Atlas has said numerous times, which is, "We sacrificed our children for the adults."
Paraphrasing.
What do you make of that?
With all due respect, we didn't sacrifice them for the benefit of the adults.
They were sacrificed for nothing.
Because that sort of frames it as if, well, we did this to benefit others.
I'm sure Scott Atlas would agree with my assessment here that there wasn't a benefit of it.
But I think it's important for people to recognize that this wasn't sort of like a trade-off.
There were no trade-offs.
There were only negatives.
And very early, I think it was reasonable for a couple weeks.
Particularly this sort of aligned with some of the directives within some of the CDC playbooks.
Government officials were following some of the directives.
But after that, we sort of went off track.
We no longer were following with the guidebooks that were laid out over years prior to the pandemic.
This was just kind of flying by the seat of their pants, the way this was put together.
And there was no benefit.
For elderly people, there are a number of studies that have come out.
It's irrefutable at this point, particularly if we look not only at COVID deaths or COVID illness, but if we look at the broader health, when you look at what are known as excess death rates and you look at other metrics, there was no benefit.
The areas that were more restrictive than areas that were less restrictive.
I think what he means by that, I think he would...
I agree with what you said, but I think what he means by that is for the perceived benefit, because we knew very early...
That's the key word for the perception.
Okay, well, explain.
There was a false notion that schools were, quote, potential super spreader locations, and that...
Once it was somewhat acknowledged, though not entirely, but somewhat acknowledged that children were at incredibly low risk of harm.
Not zero, but life doesn't have zero risk.
I'll just plant a flag in that for a moment and just say that more children died drowning in a given year than they did from COVID in multiple years combined.
More children die in car accidents.
More children died of the flu.
In a number of seasons in the decade leading up to the pandemic than they did of COVID in a given year.
So it's not to say that there's zero risk to children from COVID.
That's a red herring.
And I don't think any serious person would make the case that it's a zero risk illness.
But I'm trying to position the risk from COVID relative to these other risks.
Risks that we allow for all the time.
That's right.
That's right.
This is just part of being alive.
When you step out the door of your home, there's some degree of risk, but that's part of living.
But positioning the risk of COVID well to these other things, it's actually quite low.
What I talk about in the book is this idea that we in America had a culture, a scientific culture during the pandemic that favored theory over evidence.
But at the same time, while they're dealing with theory and hope, we actually had empirical evidence from millions of children who went back to school in Europe, and then later, millions of kids in America who were in school.
And yet, there was an insistence, month after month after month, on and on for more than a year, that we were supposed to ignore the actual things that we could see with our own eyes, the actual evidence that was occurring in real life,
and instead...
We were told to value ideas and theory over what we could actually see.
And this is something I think we really need to reckon with when we think about what is science and how do we connect science to policy.
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