American Thought Leaders - How America Betrayed Its Children During the Pandemic: David Zweig

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

David Zweig is a journalist and author of “An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.” His book is a searing criticism of the policy to close schools across America during the COVID-19 pandemic. The result: Major lags in education achievement, a mental health disaster, and so much more that simply cannot be easily 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 what was it all for?“They were sacrificed for nothing,” Zweig says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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 counting of that mistake. Now, what do we actually know about the costs of what happened, the impact of what happened today? How much time do you have? I mean, we know a lot.

And 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. Initially, there were many, many people within public health and otherwise who said that school closures were a good idea, that this is necessary, we need to do this. Over time, it became so manifest, it was so obvious that this was not beneficial and that

it was harmful, that the narrative shifted. And as the pandemic wound down, this sort of establishment narrative then became, well, we kept schools closed too long, we admit this now, but this was a regrettable but reasonable decision at the time. This was a sort of fog of war, sort of chaos moment. And the most important thing I can do with my book and what I aim to do with it was to show that that is untrue. 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 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 was a dramatic increase in suicidal ideations among children. What was the impact that we know right now? I mean, there's probably going to be people measuring this impact for years to come. Well, we've known for quite some time, and there are a number of studies and data on this that the thing that gets talked about most are the harm toward education and the sort of falling behind, so to speak, with learning.

And we can see 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 county and the district level. And once you do that, you can see that 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 in the years to come, presumably, many scholars will continue to look back and try to track various reverber, 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 in 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.

And they met again in June, and it was the same announcement, it was the same reaction. So far, what we learned from the minister, they 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. And to

me, this is something that really requires a pause for people to think about. This was not one country. This was not a random comment somewhere on a blog. This is a meeting of the education ministers at the EU in an official meeting, and they made this announcement about schools have been open in nearly two dozen countries, and we've observed no negative consequences of this. So from the very beginning, Jan, it was 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.

There were a list of excuses or reasons that were given, including by many public health experts, about why we were to ignore Europe. And I walked them through one by one why these were very specious, these types of arguments that were being made. There were even examples of journalists, specious, these types of arguments that were being made. There were even examples of journalists, if I recall correctly, that while basically promoting

school closures were themselves sending their children to school. That tracks with politicians as well. You might remember that Gavin Newsom's children were in school, I believe in Sacramento County, where the governor is based, while millions of kids in California were not allowed to go to school. It's almost impossible to recount these events,

to my mind, at least for anyone who has kind of like any sort of grounding to talk about that and not recognize how crazy this was, what was going on. 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, other — 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. And we knew this very early. And then the evidence just continued to accrue over time that there was

no benefit. And yet, throughout America, schools continued to remain closed month after 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. But there, and I don't mean to, I'm sure Scott, Alice, you know, 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. So we can get into whether that, how those were constructed and whether those were reasonable either. But at least we can say government officials were following some of the directives early on

for a week or a couple of weeks. 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 to areas that were more restrictive than areas that were less restrictive. I think what he means by that,

I think he would 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 keyword 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 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 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 that we allow for all the time. That's right. That's right.

This is just part of being alive is 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 relative 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 happened to children, and when we think about the various harms that happened 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 and 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 line, the holes won't line up. But at the same time, while they're dealing with theory and hope, 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, people, K to 12 teachers. Most of the elite media. Most of the sort of influencers in our culture. We 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, opened the schools now with like 20 exclamation points.

In effect, Trump guaranteed that schools in blue state America were going to remain closed. 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 an insane way to decide what policy is going to be. I just don't, I can't accept what you're telling me. But the evidence is clear. Some months later, I went back to him and 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 Superintendents 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 is, 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 was, 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—I have scores of emails like this from people point blank saying, I can't say this publicly because 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. One of my observations, at Epoch Times, we first encountered a phenomenon of wall-to-wall, what you call elite media, I call legacy media coverage around the issue of what's now usually called Russia Gate. There's this whole several years of reporting on Trump's, with absolute certainty or by implication, absolute certainty that first the candidate, then the president-elect, then the president was actually a Russian asset. And this was repeated, regurgitated, rehashed, and didn't matter what evidence came out in the other direction. It was all the same. That's when we got in trouble. We also got a lot

more readers because people were, I guess, finding it as ridiculous as we were when we did our investigations. And there's this sort of, you can kind of, if you keep doing that again and again and again, and people are credulous to you, and it's wall to wall, it's not just one media, but many media, you can, I don't know, like brainwash people into hating someone. This is a very disturbing idea to me, that we live in a society where that sort of thing can be done. I think to a large degree, there is some element of human nature. People tend to be in tribes.

Most people don't very much want to feel like they're in an outgroup amongst their peers. For whatever reason, personality flaw or something else. I have a high tolerance for being an outcast, I guess, because this was my tribe. I'm from a medical family. I work in media. I've written for a lot of these legacy media outlets. But for me, I just was following the evidence. And it didn't matter what anyone else was saying. I'd prefer for people to like me. I'd prefer to be in the in group. That's fun.

But that certainly wasn't my motivation. But you have to understand, Jan, the way that most people can become part of that establishment. How do you get there? How do you get to the New York Times? How do you get to be an anchor or something on a network newscast?

Not all of them, but by and large, most of these people went to Brown or Yale or something like that. Maybe they went to Columbia Journalism School. Well, how did they get in there? Well, they got straight A's growing up in high school. Then they got straight A's in college perhaps. The way they got there was by knowing how to succeed within a system.

That is their recipe for becoming successful for achievement, for navigating your way through the world. So when you have institutions that are composed of people who see the world through a lens of being an insider, and that's how things work, it makes sense for them that when there's inconvenient evidence or a politician who they don't like, but who perhaps, whether through wisdom

or just through luck, was correct on something else, it is not acceptable to then veer outside of the group because that's, their whole worldview, their whole experience was, that's how you get there by and large. You're not gonna be an iconoclast and getting into one of these institutions typically. There are exceptions, but that's,

and by the way, that's the same thing within medicine by and large. These fields self-select for a certain type of person, and many of them are very bright people. They work really hard. These are good traits for a doctor. Smart, working hard. It's important to follow rules oftentimes.

You can't ever... But the downside to self-selecting for those types of people is that you often don't have someone who has the courage or the vision to go outside of the lane. And that's how we ended up in a circumstance where you had this sort of blob

of the medical establishment and the legacy media moving together in a certain way where there was almost no public dissent, at least not public dissent from those from within the ranks. And that's why, and I recount a ton of examples of this in the book, where I had these people, and these are prominent people. Like I said, there were former CDC officials, people who are pediatric immunologists at

top university hospitals. These are people who were serious scholars and clinicians who are reaching out to me saying, I know what you're writing is correct and it's true, but I can't talk about it. And therefore, we'll go along with destroying the future of our society, which is our children. Is that the corollary, I think, right? I think it's a very powerful motivator for people to stay within their group. There's only a certain type or small segment of people who are willing to tolerate that. And by the way, I still think it's a minority.

I'm not saying the majority of people who are against this didn't want to talk about it. It's a minority, but it's a minority. I'm not saying the majority of people were against this didn't want to talk about it It's a minority But it's a larger than what we observed because whether it's 10% or 15% or 20% We observed 1% but there were so many of them who reached out to me most people within that in group I think as I tried to articulate with you know The sort of straight-a student who then goes to Brown and then goes to the New York Times. Most of them weren't even capable of seeing this other evidence or observed.

It could have been in front of them, but it didn't matter because you're so within your group, you're so within this kind of power structure that you lack the ability to even see information that may be embarrassing to you or your group, or that may be, when you identify so deeply with being on the left or identify so deeply with being part of a type of prestigious institution,

it's very hard to then accept something that may make you or the group that you identify with look bad. And there's a huge power to the perception of consensus. That's a perception that everyone agrees like this is just common knowledge. And there was a lot of, I don't know, maybe a bombastic way to describe it would be industrial grade propaganda that was created on one side alongside industrial grade censorship on the other side creating that. This is to be fair to people who were mistaken, right? Propaganda, I think, to many people, probably has a connotation of a very purposeful manipulation. You don't think it was?

I think it was from some people. But what I've observed, and I know plenty of journalists within these institutions, and I know plenty of physicians. What we observed, I think, were people who, we have, motivated reasoning is very powerful. And I think a lot of them, for a long time, simply had the motivation to believe certain things. And I'll give you one example.

There was, this was shortly after the vaccines were coming out. leave certain things. And I'll give you one example. This was shortly after the vaccines were coming out. I don't think they had fully rolled out yet with kids, but maybe they had just begun. And there was some evidence coming out of Israel with myocarditis as a signal, which I had written about. I was, I think, the first mainstream journalist to interview the physician in Israel who first saw the signal for myocarditis, particularly in young men and adolescent boys. And I talked with a pediatrician who I knew at home in my town.

I said, oh, you're not going to believe what I found out. I spoke with this scientist in Israel. And she said, oh, you're not gonna believe what I found out. I spoke with this scientist in Israel. And she said, stop telling me this. Come on, come on, I don't wanna hear about this. I'm like, what do you mean? This is really important. What do you find? She said, this is just gonna give ammunition

to the anti-vaxxers, it's gonna give ammunition to the Trumpers, we can't do this. I'm like, but it's true. This is a person who's a trusted member of the community who could not tolerate hearing something that put a little bit of a crack in the armor that she had created around her worldview, at least in regards to the pandemic. So, and there are other examples of people not wanting to believe something. And this is a big part of human nature.

And I give all sorts of examples of this through time, where we tend to believe things that are convenient. And it's challenging to accept information that's inconvenient. And this is ultimately, I think, what happened during the pandemic. So I'm perhaps you might think I'm being overly charitable that there was a lot more purposeful manipulation

of information and certainly I think that did happen but I think a lot of it is just this kind of belief system and you just kind of keep keep the horse blinders on and you don't want to see what's right off to the side. No, and I and I think everything you're describing makes tracks well makes makes a ton of sense. I mean, the one example you do cite, I think, in your book off the top of my head is, you know, what Dr. Deborah Birx wrote in her own book about her, you know, basically desire to

manipulate the public. It's a strange, unexpected admission. Remarkable candor. She knew from the beginning this was not going to be 15 days. There was never an intention. The American public was told 15 days to slow the spread and then we'll re-evaluate. That was never the intention. And she admits this. And that's when we knew things, for me, began to go off the rails. I guess what I'm trying to say is, I mean, she clearly wrote this because she believed she was doing the right thing.

And I imagine there were many people in the legacy media and other places, and this doctor maybe even believed that they're doing the right thing. It would be wrong to accept this information, this true information. We need to lie or frame things in such a manner that excludes information. It's like taking a photograph and there's the person with the knife, but you want them to just crop it here and keep them just out of frame.

Because there was some other larger purpose, some other larger reason that they believed was correct. And this is, you know, the expression is the noble lie. This is a noble lie that we're going to write this story in this way. And I have, and much of my book is, is really a work of media criticism. It's a case study. As in I walk you through, the reader through a lot of oftentimes New York Times articles.

And it's not that there are errors all the time, although there were. And look, I'm sure my book has errors in it, the article, everyone makes mistakes. That's not interesting to me to like have a gotcha of someone had a wrong statistic. What is interesting to me is how things are framed. That's far more powerful

when the facts may be correct, but you're leaving out other facts or you're positioning things in a certain way. And that's really how the media tends to operate. There are errors and mistakes as well on plenty of times, but it's much more about how things are framed. And I talk in the book about what some others at the time and I used to call the missing denominator. Time and again, and I'm sure people remember this, there were stories about there's an outbreak at a school in Georgia or a summer camp.

There's the outbreak in Israel. And they would talk about these outbreaks. But if you think about it, you're talking about one school in a state with millions of kids or in a country like Israel with millions of children. But yet this is what made the news. This is the nature of news. If it bleeds, it leads. That the anomaly, that's what's interesting. That's what news is. There's not a front page news article If it bleeds, it leads. That the anomaly, that's what's interesting. That's what news is. There's not a front page news article about it's 72 degrees today with a few clouds. That's not news. That's not interesting. So what happened was you have these articles

coming out with screaming headlines with people in there who are just apoplectic in their quotes that they're giving in the article and it's about there was an outbreak at a Georgia school. They weren't wearing masks. But what they left out was the case rates within the district there were no different than the case rates in other parts of the county where schools were closed. They left out the denominator, which is millions, and they focused on the numerator, which were a few hundred.

That is media manipulation. I don't know if it was on purpose. And then you have regular people, who I'm very sympathetic toward. People have jobs, they have their lives, but they see an article in the media, or everyone, it's generally not one article you have, they kind of function as a pack.

And they're all talking about this Georgia school and you think, oh my God, there was an outbreak at a school and you're not thinking clearly, but what about the 50 or hundreds of other schools in Georgia where nothing happened at all? Well, of course there could be an outbreak at a school. There's a highly contagious respiratory virus circulating in the culture. schools in Georgia where nothing happened at all. Well of course there could be an outbreak at a school. There's a highly contagious respiratory virus circulating in the culture.

That doesn't mean that schools are driving transmission. It doesn't mean that there's not going to be outbreaks regardless. And all of the evidence indicated that, that the virus was not spreading with any greater speed with schools open than it was with schools closed. So this is how I try to make it so someone comes away when they're done reading through these case studies in the book that you come away with a different understanding of how media operates and you're going to then see this in any number of topics. It's not about the pandemic. That's merely the backdrop for having a lens upon how does our culture present information and how do we as individuals make

decisions based on that information. I hadn't thought about it this way before, but I was thinking about activist journalism recently, because this was normalized during the first Trump administration, that this was the good and right way to do journalism. And it's kind of activist journalism, kind of like what you described, right? You don't lie, but it's all about the framing. It's all about what you leave out. And indeed, that's actually how they teach the newest crop of journalists, as we discovered as we were hiring. I was kind of shocked to learn this myself, because I think you and I would imagine that there's some kind of truth or reality

out there. And you do your darndest kind of truth or reality out there and you do your darndest. You never quite get there, but you do your darndest to try to figure out what that is. And that's kind of what journalism is, right? You try to figure out what the reality of a situation is and explain that to people. Some of these are amazing things, right? But if you already have, in the activist version, you have an idea of what kind of conclusion someone's supposed to come to and you fit the pieces to make sure that they at the very least make sure they don't aren, like salivating, waiting for something bad to happen.

Anything they could find. It's like, yes, we got it. Here's something else to confirm the narrative that I believe and the narrative that I've already been projecting to the public. And it's not just the media, it's regular citizens who are in largely on the left, who are part of this group mindset that this is part of a confirmation bias. Any piece of information that helps confirm your narrative, you're going to absorb that, you're going to believe it, you will project it to others. Any information that disagrees, that refutes that narrative, you will ignore.

It's really hard to not do that. I think that's just a big part of human nature. And it takes a certain type of training in a way within how you think about information and how you think about a media ecosystem. It takes some amount of training yourself to try to go against that confirmation bias. And that's true for scientists as well. And I'm sure I'm still always pushing myself at that too. I'm sure I'm guilty of it as well.

But I try to actually follow my nose and see what is actually happening out there. And so this missing denominator idea, I think is so incredibly important. This is what, why do so many people go into journalism? Well, some of them, I think, like me, I find I'm trying to get to the truth, I'm trying to find things out. What's actually happening?

What's real? But I think a lot of people go into it because it's exciting to write about something that's sensational. And you know, when we think of sensation, you might think of the National Enquirer or something like that. But make no mistake, the prestigious media outlets are completely hooked on sensation as well.

That is news. When you think about what makes something newsworthy? Well, it's something that's causing a sensation in the viewers or the readers. And there is a study done out of some people out of Dartmouth where they reviewed American media coverage of the pandemic versus English language media outlets outside the United States. And the coverage in the US, and in particular on schools and on children, was dramatically more negative than coverage outside the US. There's something special, something particular about the United States, at least on this particular topic,

where there was this tremendous obsession with fear and negativity. And I give examples of it. There's this kind of like A-B example, even on the same day, there was a New York Times article with basically hair on fire about what happens if schools open. And there was an article the very same day in the BMJ,

it's the formerly known as the British Medical Journal. And the title was something like, kids are not super spreaders, open the schools. And you had these two things, it was emblematic of the broader divide in how American citizens were positioned within our media environment versus those outside the US.

David, what strikes me is, as we're talking about all this, is that the combination of activist journalism, once you accept that this is the right way to do journalism, and the noble lie, once you accept that the noble lie is a good and just thing to do for the greater good, the intersection of those two can create a really terrible reality, which perhaps is what we live through. Ultimately, we see this over and over. And as you noted, you were discussing things related to Russia and otherwise any topic under the Sun. You're going to see a type of movement how often do you see

The New York Times and the Washington Post ABC NBC CBS NPR How often do you see them diverge from each other on any given topic? NPR, how often do you see them diverge from each other on any given topic? Basically never. But yet, it's not because they're all correct, because we know we could list a hundred different times where the media has been wrong about something and then there's, you know, a slow sort of reconciliation or it gets memory-holed or maybe they still refute it. But there are innumerable examples. So it's not like, well, the reason they're all doing the same thing is because that's the truth. No. The reason they're doing it is because they're

part of a tribe. And I still push back and think that a lot of this is not so premeditated. It is not so intentional. I think it is just baked into the type of psyche of the people in these institutions. I've been thinking about this general realm of thought of what you just described a lot, because having a free and independent media is absolutely essential to any sort of democratic functioning, I think, because you can't figure everything out for yourself, especially in an increasingly complicated world. But in a situation where, you know, there's kind of a block of media, especially the ones which people have traditionally come to believe are, you know,

honest and good arbiters of truth and reality, that all taking a similar position and very often a wrong position, that is incredibly destructive to the functioning of a free society. And I don't know what the outcome is, especially since—and this is the second piece I've come to believe—Andre Mir over at the Manhattan Institute has convinced me that essentially the business of media today is basically validating people's preconceived notions, which augments this tribalism that you've been describing. So that seems to be a very big problem that we have to deal with in order to preserve

a free society. Yeah, I mean, one of the bright spots is there has been a bit of a blossoming of alternative media sources for citizens, whereas obviously a generation ago that wasn't the case. But from sub stacks to podcasts, to your publication, to a whole variety, to even just social media itself, there are other ways for people to gain access to information. Is some of this information wrong? Absolutely. But so is information in the legacy media as well

is wrong sometimes. So the argument that you will hear is, well, that's, you know, tons of misinformation and garbage. Well, sure, but what degree of arrogance does it require to think that citizens shouldn't be given access to information, that they don't have the ability to make up their mind on their own, instead to have this sort of noble lie, to have this idea that they don't need to know about that. That's something they shouldn't hear about.

Again, 22 countries in Europe reopened their schools. To my knowledge, and maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong, not one American media outlet wrote about that until I wrote about it. That's quite remarkable. And it's important and it matters. And it's not about the pandemic. This is about something larger that we need to think about as a society.

The next time we're in some other crisis and it doesn't have to be a pandemic, it can be something else. As we finish, this is an example of a real failure of the experts, I say that in quotes, 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. Andrew Cuomo, who was the governor of New York at the time during the first part of the pandemic, repeatedly mentioned that you have to follow the science. You follow the data. It's very simple. You just follow the data. Follow the science. I'm not the best impersonator, but that's how his voice sounds in my head. 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. And the fact that a prominent governor of a very prominent state repeatedly talked about

following the science and to my knowledge was never really called out ever by the legacy media or by health officials who are saying, hey, wait a minute, that doesn't actually mean anything what you're saying. Instead he was championed. This is a man of reason. This is a man who cares about people and the virus. We're going to follow the science. The data will tell us.

No, that's not how this works at all. There were, every area had its own metrics and its own criteria for what was safe or not safe. New York City was 3%, I think, for a while for when schools could open. If there was, if you pass 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. And 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 this way, we'd like you to aim for that. Remember back to this first American Academy of Pediatrics guidance, they said,

you can try for six feet, but if you can't reach it, don't worry. It's better to be in school. That's the benefits of that far outweigh any theoretical advantage of six feet versus five versus four or three. That's reasonable to my mind. Now we can discuss why, and I have a whole section on why six feet, and I sort of drill down into the insanity

of how six feet came about but setting that aside the idea that this is a thing that came down you know on stone tablets to Moses and he was saying we we shall follow with the six feet of distancing was completely insane you had teachers and you know 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 wanna hear me say this, people like being told what to do. They wanna 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 gonna 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 sort of your own sense of responsibility. Then you just you're following rules. Human beings oftentimes seem to prefer that. It was 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. Well, so it's, but it's kind of both sides. There's, there's, there's, yes, maybe people looking to be told what to do. And there's also people who believe it's perfectly fine to manipulate people. Well, in fact, don't we live in a society, I mean, we manipulate

people into buying cereal, we manipulate people into doing all sorts of things. It seems, is that itself, I question, is that a reason, is that a moral society where we've decided that manipulating people is just cool for consumer benefit? Like, is this the evolution? Have we evolved out of that into now this happening? Like.

I mean, one could argue, I think, that humans have always had some degree of manipulation of each other because everyone's trying to achieve something, even if that thing is good and positive. And so I sometimes worry about words like manipulation, although I don't think you're incorrect for using it. But to me, it feels something more in the ether and more in the way of these kind of larger kind of systems within which we operate.

I'm very interested in the sort of like the gears and how the gears are turning kind of like behind the door of the box is closed. What are the different gears spinning back there that are creating the music that's playing outside that you're hearing? What are the inner workings of your fancy watch you're wearing? What's happening in there? And I think a lot of the people who are then doing a lot of this manipulation that you're speaking of, they are simply, to push the metaphor, they're just simply riding along the gears in some ways. I don't even think there's a conscious push

toward this all the time. And that's what I tried to illuminate in the book, is this idea of what are the gears within society? Within, and I talk about media, we talk about the medical establishment and science, I talk about philosophy, with empiricism and epistemology. And we go back to John Locke and David Hume and all sorts of examples of what is evidence

with randomized evidence. And you can look way back with sailors and with scurvy. And that was sort of the first randomized trial where there was a guy, James Lind, who tested out. He had a dozen different sailors, I think. Let's give two of them lemons and limes. Let's give two of them some other concoction. And he tried it out. This in a way was an early randomized trial. So you have all these large systems within which we operate. And that to me is what's interesting.

It's to understand these kind of larger gears that are spinning within society and how you look back through the past to today to understand these different gears that move. And I mean, you raise, frankly, a very important point as well, which is that if people aren't seeking agency, are looking very quickly when they have fear to give that away to someone else who will take care of everything, there's going to be someone who takes up that slack. It creates a scenario rife for it, to use my term, manipulation. I mean, it's a fascinating book. I really enjoyed reading it. And I mean, it made me think back

to a lot of what we experienced over the last years, but kind of with a bit of a fresh perspective of thoughtful, as you said, philosophical perspective. I appreciate that immensely. 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

a refutation. It offers a counter-narrative to what a lot of what we were told and are still being told now about what happened. And it's 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 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. I'm your host, Jan J. Kelleck.