Transcript: David Zweig
My interview with the American journalist and author
One of the most polarizing policies of the pandemic era was the extended school closures. Critics have now been validated, with The New York Times reporting that “a growing body of research shows that pandemic school closures came at a steep cost to students” — while doing little to stop the spread of the virus. My guest on the program today is a journalist who’s just published a deep dive investigation into the flawed decision-making behind these controversial closures.
David Zweig is an American journalist and author. His latest book is An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.
This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.
TH: It's great to have you on the show today. Your new book, An Abundance of Caution, is one that I have been eagerly waiting to read — not just because I care about school closures, but also because I've been wanting to see the claims that kept children out of school put to the test. We didn't see that a lot at the time. Just to give listeners a bit of an overview here, your essential thesis is that the closures were based on subjective values as opposed to objective evidence. Through the course of the book, you painstakingly go through these claims. This is less a book about COVID than it is about a country that was not well-equipped to act reasonably under duress, as you write in the book, and the failures of its expert class in particular. Before we go through some of these claims, I want to start with the personal. Take me back to March of 2020. You are living in a suburban town in New York state. You're already working on a book that you are under contract for when your kids' schools close. Walk us through the events that caused you to start questioning these closures.
DZ: I think, for me, the initial catalyst that launched me on my investigative journey was, toward the end of April, it was already clear in the data that cases were dropping dramatically. It was more than 50% that they had fallen in New York City. I think the peak of new case average or hospitalizations was on April 10th. By the end of the month, you can look at the data — there are graphs on this — and you can see that that it had dropped massively. We were told that we need 15 days to slow the spread. That was the phrase. We had to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. I looked at this and I said, "Okay, we did it. We did it, everybody. Yay. We've flattened the curve. The hospitals are not overwhelmed anymore."
This was only in some very specific areas, anyway, that hospitals were even at risk of that happening. But let's set that aside. For New York City, they dropped dramatically. Okay, let's open the schools. It was obvious and made clear to everybody that that wasn't happening. To me, it felt like a bit of a — I don't know what term to use, but it felt like a bit of a sleight of hand. It later was known in Deborah Birx's book about the pandemic that she actually had no intention of only having things shut down for 15 days. That was merely a ruse just to get people to buy in.
Had they told them it would last much longer, people maybe would have behaved differently, but she never intended that. That was just to get things started. Then, sure enough, they tacked another 30 days on top of that. Something seemed very wrong to me when how this public health intervention was pitched to the American public — that pitch was almost immediately extended, and it became untrue what they told us. It wasn't merely about preventing the hospitals from getting overwhelmed. That was a lie. The hospitals were no longer overwhelmed, yet my kids and 50 million others were still kept out of school regardless.
TH: A big turning point for you was noticing that in the EU — this is some 22 countries — they reopened in late April, early May 2020, without any catastrophic impacts. This information was known, but it had very little influence on the North American conversation about schools at all. Talk to me about your thinking through that piece of information.
DZ: That's right. This is one of the key points in my book that I really get into in detail and try to express my rage on the page. As you noted, there was a meeting of the education ministers in the European Union in May, and it was toward the end of May. Schools had already been open there. 22 countries began reopening their schools. They announced in this meeting that there was — you said, “not a catastrophic effect,” we can raise the bar from there — it wasn't just that there wasn't a catastrophic effect, there was no effect at all that was noticeable. Zero. On community case rates by opening whatever schools that were being opened. No one in America covered this in the major American media.
I ultimately wrote about it myself. Then there was a second meeting in June by the EU ministers where they gave the same determination. Opening schools did not have an impact. It wasn't once, but twice, they said there was no noticeable impact of opening schools. This picture that I paint in the book is a tick-tock chronology. You have this thing going on. This isn't just some one small country in Western Africa or something, with 10 kids in a school room, that they reopened. We're talking about millions of kids. Millions. Throughout Europe in countries that had many, many similarities to what was going on in America, when you look at it at a city and municipal level. Because what many people falsely claimed was, "Europe is different. We can't look at that. That doesn't count." Then they gave a list of these contrived reasons. "Oh, they have controlled the virus in Europe." That was completely untrue. If you look at a national level, you may have seen dramatic differences between different countries. But America is a vast land. There's no reason to take case rates in New York City and apply them to something that was happening in Baton Rouge or in Oklahoma.
The idea that case rates, when you look at it on this more precise level, there was no difference in scores and scores of cities and towns throughout America and counterparts within Europe. The population densities were the same in these places. There was not this vast test and trace program throughout Europe. It happened in some places, but not universally. Many of the children there were not wearing masks. This wasn't even recommended there. They weren't doing six feet of distancing in many places there, either. Some, it was three feet or one metre. Some, it was no distancing required at all. There was no HEPA filters and fancy HVAC systems, in nearly all cases. So, all of these excuses that were listed, and not just by teachers' unions … My book focuses on the public health "experts." They were saying this too, that we are supposed to disregard millions of kids in Europe in school for one of these reasons or another that I just ticked off to you.
But as you check each one of these reasons off, they were completely fallacious. This made no sense, what they were saying. There were plenty of counterparts throughout the United States that matched with the various benchmarks over there. You had all of this happening in Europe, and it was completely ignored or falsely dismissed by health experts in the United States. It was an astonishing moment to have the EU mention this, and no one in the American media cared.
TH: Yes, I had a niece and nephew in school in Ireland at that time, so I was aware of all of this. It was astonishing to see that this was not getting talked about. One of the things I love about your book is that you do have this unique background, for journalists, in that you started as a fact checker. As you write in the book, you were taught news articles, websites, conventional wisdom quotes from interviewees — it's not sufficient evidence for a claim. You have to go to the primary source, and dig and dig. You do that over and over again in the book. The results, I really can't say it enough, it's astonishing how many errors and assumptions went into all of this. Let's just talk for a moment about the modeling and the assumptions behind those models that wound up leading officials astray.
