David Zweig is a novelist and journalist who lives near New York City and was a early skeptic of Covid lockdowns and school closings. (In other words, he’s me, but nicer.)

Somehow, Zweig didn’t get canceled. In 2020 he became one of only a few legacy media writers to push for school reopenings. Now he has a new book out: An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions. It demolishes the false narrative that public health bureaucrats and teachers’ unions were just doing their best at the time with the information they had.

I talked to Zweig Wednesday about why he wrote the book, why you should read it, why the bureaucrats should be so ashamed of themselves, and what the closures cost kids. I hope you find his answers as interesting as I did.

If you like it and want more from him, let me know - we can follow up with a live chat with questions from you next week!

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(Edited for length)

Q: You were a Covid skeptic for a number of years. You have a new book about Covid school closures, and the disaster that they were, and how the United States got caught in this cycle that it couldn’t get out of long after other countries had done so. You talk about this in the book a little bit, but what led you to write this?

A: It was immediately obvious that this was not going to work for my kids for any prolonged period of time, it was just ridiculous… This could work for a few days or a week or two, but this is not going to work long term… I remember having a vague notion in my mind of when is this going to end, how is this going to play out…

By the end of April (2020), cases had fallen something like 50 percent in New York City… I remember talking with a friend of mine, saying, all right, “Kids are going to go back to school… we flattened the curve… this is amazing, cases are falling precipitously,” and he was like, “Dave, they’re are not going back to school.”

And I remember not understanding, it’s fascinating to me how naïve I was at the time.

Once they refused to reopen schools at this point, that sort of set me off permanently on my path, where I’m like, something’s very, very wrong here, because they’re like moving the goalposts – none of this made sense at that point.

Q: You’re in a very, very blue part of a blue state, is anybody raising questions in that spring, do you feel completely alone as you’re raising these questions… were you afraid you might be canceled?

A: I never really care about that so much. I certainly would prefer for people to like me, I don’t enjoy being a contrarian… I tend to feel alienated or as an independent person anyway, I have a high tolerance for being in the out group…. Professionally I was worried about how is this going to play out for me.

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Q: You say early in the book, the left says, we didn’t know in 2020 or 2021, that’s really not true. The right says teachers’ unions are mostly to blame, that’s not entirely true either. What is the truth – why, in four sentences or less, why did the US, once it closed schools, not reopen them, particularly in blue states, for far longer than almost anyone else in the world?

A: America has an incredibly tribalist and acrimonious political environment, and when Donald Trump came out for opening things up, and in particular schools, that made that position unacceptable on the left, and the left includes most of the public health establishment and most of the legacy media… it was completely radioactive to agree with Trump…

I think that’s the core problem about what happened in the US, and then the offshoot of that problem is that the public health establishment that basically completely divorced itself from evidence-based science and instead just made shit up along the way…

Q: I certainly agree with all of that, but to me, it sounds like you’re basically making the right-wing case, but saying I’m not making the right-wing case, I’m making the centrist case, but then you’re really actually just saying, the left is to blame for this.

A: That’s interesting. I haven’t thought of it - I don’t tend to think of it in those terms… I talk a lot of the left-leaning majority, vast majority in these institutions and the media. There’s the political tribalism.

I guess I am making the case for the right here. I guess I’m more interested in showing where one side went wrong, because I think that’s instructive, ultimately, trying to dissect how the smartest people in the room, ostensibly, were so wrong… I don’t think the right is immune from these same types of risk. It’s just so happened with the pandemic that’s what happened on the left, and it’s particularly important because the left occupies such an influential place in these institutions and our culture…

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(Available here)

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Q: Are there any heroes in the book? Do any of those people deserve that title? Are there any true heroes of the last couple of years when it comes to schools?

A: I think so… Emily Oster [an economist at Brown University] did incredibly important work during the pandemic, she gathered evidence about kids and schools and also camps that no one else I’m doing…She went out and acquired data and put it out there, had her name on it… the evidence all pointed toward showing that these school closures weren’t beneficial, that these mask mandates weren’t doing anything…

[Oster and her fellow researchers] did the study, and when it came out, eventually the CDC basically had to cry uncle, and they rescinded the six-feet guidance, and that’s what ultimately got kids back in school… Instead of just arguing about shit on Twitter, or just being a pundit on TV or whatever, they actually conducted experiments, they actually conducted studies that brought about the irrefutable evidence that was required by these health authorities and politicians…

They should not have had to do these studies, because we already had evidence… but nevertheless, that’s what was required, and they went ahead and actually did it.

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Q: In 2022, I was expecting more of a red wave, more anger… the Democratic governors who had pushed hard for school closures all won pretty easily… But two years later, Donald Trump won, won with more votes than he’d had in 2020 or 2016…

Do you think Covid mattered? And if it mattered, how come it didn’t matter in 2022, when people could have punished the local officials more directly?

A: I think, and this almost the entire reason why I wrote this book, is that the reason why Covid didn’t have more of an impact is that the public has largely been very misled and misinformed. They believe the narrative that’s sort of convenient and exculpatory, this idea, well they did the best they could with limited information…

People believe that. The purpose of my book is to show that that’s not true what happened, because it’s really important to me that the history book, so to speak, at least that mine is there, that there’s some record and that it’s written in an extremely detailed fashion showing that this is just a lie, that they didn’t just do they best they could…

No, we knew that the evidence that pointed against this from the very beginning, and we had evidence even before the pandemic about these various things that didn’t work, and I go into a lot of detail about the models that were used to design basically the entire pandemic response based on incredibly faulty models… I think it’s fascinating to see how medical dogma gets established, and in many instances it’s not because of evidence. It’s built on this bizarre house of cards. Russian dolls. It just never stops… you just never get to actual evidence.

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Q: So the science was a disaster from day one, and even before. Let me go to the teachers’ unions… I do think there were a lot of teachers (who wanted to teach in-person), and yet at the organizational level, the leadership level, the teachers’ unions didn’t seem to feel that way… the word “safety” always being included in when they’d be ready to go back was always the tell.

Without assuming the worst about individual teachers, how come, in your view, the teachers’ unions became such obstacles here?

A: The main problem where I point the finger is really at the public health establishment, because without the claims that they made - teachers’ unions could then, therefore, refuse to go back to school. But they had cover created by public health and the media… When it’s safe, which was this completely ambiguous term that could mean anything to anyone. And when specific metrics were given for what actually safe meant, they were unreachable, ridiculous benchmarks…

In the end, I place the blame more on the health officials because without them, the teachers’ unions couldn’t have done what they did… (and) the administrators went along, they were basically in agreement with the teachers’ unions. An environment was created where it would be very, very challenging for a regular teacher to push back against that, because the whole apparatus was geared in one direction…

That’s how these people (school administrators) think. They don’t care about evidence, they don’t care – I’m a little bit sympathetic toward them, because someone doesn’t become a school chancellor because they understand epidemiology… they’re bureaucrats, they’re administrators, and most of these people unfortunately were just simply not up to the task which required real leadership, real courage.

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Q: Do you think kids are still suffering from the effects of the closures and the lockdowns?

A: There’s copious evidence of this… The more a kid was kept out of school, the worse their education outcomes were, the worse their test scores and things like that… (But it’s not just test scores)… This is a way for a lot of kids to stay out of trouble, whether it’s involved in athletics or the arts or theater or other things, clubs of some sort… It’s all of the other things that happened in the wake of the school closures like athletics that make childhood meaningful and rich and those things were canceled as well, and for many kids they have permanent consequences… that stuff does not easily show up in test scores…

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(Covid is over. The hunt for the truth and accountability never ends. Help me hunt.)

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Q: People would email me and say, it’s been a year, my neighbor doesn’t go out, and worse, she doesn’t let her kids go out? Did you come across those stories, and is there any way to make sense of what those parents were doing?

A: There are kids who still were wearing a mask as of like six months ago, or a year ago, years after the pandemic ended, because they just felt better with it on… the emotional damage to so many children, having the public health establishment making them believe that they were dirty viral vectors, that type of moral burden should never be placed on a child. This is literally the opposite of what should happen from a good moral society. But that’s exactly what was happening from public health officials and the broader narrative in our country, that you’re going to kill somebody if you go to school, and if you just put your arm around a friend.

Childhood is achingly brief, and they stole time from these kids, and they stole experiences… There are many kids who have permanent scarring… There are many other kids where there is not necessarily a scar and more of an absence of what might have been. You don’t get fifth grade again, you don’t get your senior year of high school again…

They spent an entire year alone in their bedrooms, many of these kids, staring at a screen, trying to do remote learning. That’s something that is basically ineffable, it’s incalculable, it’s very real what was taken…

The book is really not about the pandemic… What I try to make it about it is how do the gears of society turn behind the scenes… How do we know what is true, and why and how do we make decisions that we make when we have limited evidence, because I find that fascinating…What I want people to come away with is to be prepared, to understand how things work… I get into the weeds on a lot of data in the book, but the broader thing I think is useful is looking at the psychology and sociology of how we as individuals and as a society behave.

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Q: Could this happen again?

A: No, but something equally stupid could.