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May 10, 2025 - Epoch Times
22:58
How America Betrayed Its Children: David Zweig
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How do we track what happened to that kid who could have gotten into college and instead is doing something else now?
We don't know exactly the kids who were lost, who just stopped going to school entirely.
David Zweig is a journalist and author of An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, The Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.
This was a world-altering event where our society favored older people and other groups.
To the detriment of children.
And there was no benefit for this.
They were sacrificed for nothing.
We in America had a scientific culture during the pandemic that favored theory over evidence.
It's quite an extraordinary moment.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
David Zweig, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thanks for having me.
I'm going to start by reading you a quote from the head of NIH during the COVID pandemic, Dr. Francis Collins.
It's a part of a quote.
He said, "We wanted to be sure people motivated themselves by what we said because we wanted change to happen in case it was right.
But we did not admit our ignorance.
That was a profound mistake." Your book, in a sense, is a charting, a sort of accounting of that mistake.
Now, what do we actually know about the costs of what happened, the impact of what happened today?
One of the important things, probably the most important thing, that I tried to achieve with this book was to show what we knew at the moment during that time.
The state of evidence was very clear for a lot of these interventions, and the state was very poor.
But the way that this...
Evidence was conveyed to the American people was quite different with an extraordinary amount of arrogance and confidence that was unearned.
And I walk people through what actually was known at any given time and how that information was ignored or waved away in one manner or another.
Let's quickly look at Sort of the impact of these school closures, which of course are the, you know, you go through this in intricate detail, right?
I'm remembering Dr. Scott Atlas telling me very early on in the pandemic, the impact, you know, was dramatic increase in suicidal ideations among children.
What was the impact that we know right now?
I mean, there's probably, there's going to be people measuring this impact for years to come.
There are a lot of data that show that the Amount that a child was out of school is directly correlated with lower education achievement, with lower scores from the pandemic.
There was some data that came out at the state level where a few journalists and others incorrectly interpreted that as saying, oh, look, there's not really a big difference between California or some other state.
But there's a scholar named Vladimir Kogan, and he and some others, they went down to the county and the district level.
And once you do that, you can see the difference is stark, and it's obvious.
Emily Oster also has some good data on this as well.
There's no ambiguity.
The children who were kept out of school longer, whether either through full closures or through the so-called hybrid schedules, directly related to a lower achievement in scores and tests and other measures.
But I would say...
Rightfully so, a lot of attention is being paid to the sort of learning and education harms that occurred.
But there are many other things that happened that can't quite be quantified in the same way, but they're no less important.
And when you think about...
The amount of high school kids who rely on athletics, both just for their own well-being, and for some kids, help keep them out of trouble, but there's also kids, there's this area within the New York City metro area, there are a number of students who this was their ticket out of a really bad situation, and their senior year football season was terminated.
So that, you think about...
Things with less drastic consequences, but the canceled proms, no more field trips, no more arm around a friend for a little kid.
None of those things can be quantified.
How do we track what happened to that kid who could have gotten into college and instead is doing something else now?
We don't know exactly the kids who were lost, who just stopped going to school entirely.
And one last point on this.
Now that we're looking back and, you know, in the years to come, presumably many scholars will continue to look back and try to track, you know, various sort of reverberations over the years.
One of the things that I think is really important and that mattered a lot to me at the time was, we all know this as human beings, you can experience harm in the moment, even if you don't see or have a scar from that later.
And kids unnecessarily...
Tens of millions of children in America, without benefit, experienced harm to varying degrees, and some of them were fine.
And just because we can't quantify it later doesn't mean it wasn't real about what happened in the moment.
You said something very important.
Without benefit.
How so?
In the moment, we knew that as early...
As May, we had guinea pigs actually testing the waters for us.
In America, we were a little too nervous in the spring, and we had guinea pigs.
There were millions of these guinea pigs, and those were children in Europe.
Inadvertently, they acted as our testers, and they went back to school.
Millions of kids in 22 countries began reopening their schools toward the end of April, beginning of May.
And in May, and then again, a second time in June, the ministers of education and the EU got together, met.
And during this meeting, they said, at the end of May, they said, schools have been open now, something like a month at that point for many of them.
22 different countries said, we have observed no negative consequence to community rates by having the schools open.
Same announcement.
It was the same reaction.
So far, what we learned from the minister, there haven't been any significant increase or negative impact of reopening schools in the countries that reopened schools in the last month.
This was completely ignored in America, in the media.
I wrote about it.
Once in June, I mentioned the meeting.
But as far as I'm aware, no one, no one else had covered this in the American media.
So from the very beginning, Jan, the evidence was there that schools were not driving transmission in the pandemic.
And I remember at the time thinking, how can this be?
How can it be that millions of children have gone back to school in countries that are...
Different from America in many regards, but also very much the same in many regards.
And I recognize many people are probably, rightfully so, sick of thinking about or hearing about the pandemic.
But we talk about events in history, whether it's 9-11, different wars, famines.
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.
Now, one can make a different argument whether that's even worth it even if there was a benefit.
Someone could say, even if there is a benefit, I still don't think this is appropriate doing this to kids.
But that's not even an argument one needs to make because there was no benefit.
They were sacrificed for nothing.
This wasn't sort of like a trade-off.
There were no trade-offs.
There were only negatives.
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 die 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...
A 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.
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.
Again, we don't have kids not swim anymore, even though far more children die from drowning in a given year.
We're talking about multiples more.
It's not even close.
So when we think about the various harms that happen to children, and when we think about the various risks that were put upon them, From these interventions, we saw pretty early that there wasn't going to be a real benefit from doing this stuff.
We saw pretty early that the community rates weren't any different.
As I mentioned, in Europe, they already had announced this.
So there became this kind of bizarre sort of divergence between a theoretical idea.
An empirical reality.
It's this sort of strange epistemological type of question when it's like, how do we know what is true?
And 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.
It's quite an extraordinary moment if you think about that, that they would say, well...
We think this might be happening.
We believe this is happening.
Let's do this Swiss cheese model that they talked about where you had the different slices of cheese with different holes.
Let's try a whole bunch of different things, each thing being a different slice of cheese, and hopefully the virus won't get through.
The baseline of this whole concept is that...
They didn't know what worked.
This was admitted right from the beginning.
We don't know what works.
Let's do everything and hopefully the holes won't line up.
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 what...
And how do we connect science to policy?
And in the States, the policy followed theory and ignored empirical evidence.
Is it theory or is it ideology?
Well, that's another question.
I think a lot of these people genuinely believed what they were saying.
But when you talk about ideology, there was a tremendous amount of tribalism within the United States.
Most of the public health community tend to be on the left politically.
Most of the medical establishment does as well.
Most of the education community, K-12 teachers, most of the elite media, most of the sort of influencers in our culture, when you think about Hollywood and other aspects in a lot of tech, all these...
Elite institutions within our country tend to be on the left.
And the idea that any of them could possibly be aligned with Trump was anathema.
This was not acceptable for most of these people.
So, and I recount this, when Trump tweeted in all capital letters, open the schools now with like 20 exclamation points, in effect, Trump guaranteed.
That schools in Blue State America were going to remain closed.
David, just one quick sec.
We're going to take a break, and folks, we're going to be right back.
And we're back with David Zweig, author of An Abundance of Caution.
Once in a conversation with now FBI Director Kash Patel, he told me this.
He said that they will do the opposite of what Trump will do.
And I said, that is a...
That's an insane way to decide what policy is going to be.
I just don't...
I can't accept what you're telling me.
Right?
But the evidence...
Well, I mean, some months later, I went back to him.
I said, you know, as crazy as it is, I think you're right.
Right?
It's very clear that happened.
And this isn't conjecture or opinion.
We saw this.
One example is the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Put out its school guidance.
They were very clear that children should be in school.
This is the most important thing.
They said, don't worry about the six feet of distancing.
If you can't do it, fine.
Do three feet or something.
Just get the kids in school.
This was the basic message of their guidance.
Trump did that tweet about opening the schools.
Within a few days...
The AAP puts out revised guidance.
Gone is the mention about ignoring distancing.
And instead, what do they focus on?
Schools need money.
This is the most important thing to make them safe.
We need a lot of resources and money.
And the other important thing about this revision with the guidance is who authored the guidance.
Now, the new guidance was co-authored with the Superintendent's Association and with the two largest teachers unions in the country.
So this is one example of this sort of reactive policy, reactive positioning to Trump, that it couldn't have been more stark, that once Trump said this, it was radioactive, so much so that the American Academy of Pediatrics reversed its guidance.
And this was so obvious that even NPR...
wrote about this, put a piece out talking about it after they changed the guidance.
Once I became sort of a fairly prominent journalist who tended to write pieces that challenged some of the orthodoxy, once that happened, people started reaching out to me from all over the country.
And this included a lot of regular Americans and regular moms and dads, but also a lot of people within the medical field.
And it included even people, former CDC officials, people saying, look, I can't talk about this stuff.
I'm so thankful for you for writing this article about whatever, you know, that schools should open or challenging the science behind mask mandates on kids, a variety of other things.
And they would say, I can't talk about this publicly because I can't be seen being aligned with Trump.
I mean, this is...
Scores of emails like this from people point blank saying, I can't say this publicly because of the political nature of this.
So no one can dispute that a large part of the American public health policy was done as a reaction against Trump rather than as being aligned with...
Some sort of evidentiary basis that the policies were put together on.
As we finish, this is an example of a real failure of the "experts" deciding what we should do, it would seem.
And what does that mean more broadly for our society?
I think my book is a case study of the failure of the expert class.
The public health experts failed.
And they failed because there was a conflation of science and policy and science and values.
And they're not the same.
There's no such thing as following the science.
That literally means nothing.
Science doesn't tell you what to do.
Science is a process.
Science can bring about information, but that does not tell you when to open or close schools.
Every area had its own metrics and its own criteria for what was safe or not safe.
New York City was 3%.
They had a thing for a while for when schools could open.
If you passed this threshold of positivity rates, you had 5% elsewhere.
You had 12% in other places.
It was all over the map.
Why?
Because there is no such thing as safe.
There's no such thing as a specific benchmark that means something is or isn't appropriate.
These are decisions based on values.
But the way it was framed to the American people by politicians and by health officials was that, oh, this is the line.
This is the metric.
I want to be clear.
It's not wrong to have some sort of benchmark.
People need parameters to operate within.
So it's not that they should say, do your best and leave it at that.
I don't think they should be faulted for that necessarily.
The problem was the degree of certainty within which these pronouncements were made.
And if you disagreed with them, you were a piece of garbage.
You were an idiot.
Or worse, you were dangerous.
So the idea that six feet of distancing, there's nothing, I wanted to name a chapter in the book, there's nothing magical about between five and seven.
Like, this was an arbitrary number.
And we knew it at the time, but we pretended otherwise by saying, this is the royal we, that this was made up.
It's okay to have a metric to aim for, but be honest and say, we're not exactly sure what's going on here.
For these reasons, we think six feet might be effective.
We're not sure, but we'd like you to aim for that.
You had teachers and janitorial staff walking around with rulers, spacing each desk with the precision of a master carpenter.
This was complete madness.
Complete madness.
Human beings like, to some extent, people might not want to hear me say this, people like being told what to do.
Let the paternal state, let big mommy and daddy tell me what I should do so I don't have to worry and I don't have to think.
Six feet of distancing?
Okay, we're going to take out the rulers and just do it at that.
It's much harder when you're given information that says, we're not exactly sure what to do.
We don't know what evidence exactly points in what direction.
So here's a more general idea.
Do the best you can, but we think it's important for kids to be in school.
Whoa, that's a lot of responsibility for people to take on emotionally, cognitively.
That's a lot.
It's much easier when you're told, follow these metrics and just do as you're told.
Then you relinquish your own sense of responsibility.
Then you're following rules.
Human beings oftentimes seem to prefer that.
Wasn't it Kierkegaard who said, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom?
It's hard work.
When you're not just told what to do.
A final thought as we finish?
I think it's really important to think about history.
And everyone knows history is written by the winners.
And one of the things that I feel like is important with the book is that this offers...
It offers a counter-narrative to what a lot of what we were told and are still being told now about what happened.
And again, this is not about the pandemic.
This is about a lens through which to see how our society works and to see how politicians and individuals make decisions and think about information.
Ultimately, that's what this really is about, and that's what interests me.
Is information.
How do we know what is true?
Well, David Zweig, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
This is fantastic.
Thanks for talking with me.
Thank you all for joining David Zweig and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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