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:
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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her fellow researchers] did the study, and when it came out, eventually the CDC basically had to cry uncle, and they rescinded the six-feet guidance, and that’s what ultimately got kids back in school… Instead of just arguing about shit on Twitter, or just being a pundit on TV or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.
