Culture & Christianity: The Allen Jackson Podcast - COVID'S Lasting Impact on Children [Featuring David Zweig]

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

We've been repeatedly told to "follow the science," but in this episode, journalist David Zweig reveals a system fueled by fear, control, and manipulation. In the early days of COVID-19, confusion reigned. While adults debated science, mandates, and politics, children were pushed into isolation. They said closing schools would save lives, stop the spread, and protect our children. But that wasn’t true. This isn’t just an episode about a virus. It’s about the battle for truth and how God's people can protect themselves—and the children—against manipulation and deception. More Information:An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions: https://a.co/d/2J4c9HP __ It’s up to us to bring God’s truth back into our culture. It may feel like an impossible assignment, but there’s much we can do. Join Pastor Allen Jackson as he discusses today’s issues from a biblical perspective. Find thought-provoking insight from Pastor Allen and his guests, equipping you to lead with your faith in your home, your school, your community, and wherever God takes you. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3JsyO6ysUVGOIV70xAjtcm?si=6805fe488cf64a6d Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/culture-christianity-the-allen-jackson-podcast/id1729435597

You had a healthy children who didn't step foot in a classroom for more than a year. Some of them more than a year and a half. While at the same time, adults could go to a restaurant, they could have a glass of wine at a bar, casinos were open. What kind of country does that to their kids? And that's the question that I try to answer in the book, is I try to, it's not about placing blame, but I try to show how do the gears of society turn? behind the scenes, it's sort of, to use a medical term,

it's like an anatomy of decision making. How is it that a decision so absurd, so radical, happened? Because I feel like we haven't, and you can tell me if you disagree, I feel like we as a country haven't reckoned with this, that we did this to so many kids. And we can discuss some of the harms

that came to a lot of these kids. But this is an extraordinary thing we went to. And I feel like to a large degree, it's just been dropped down a memory hole. Welcome to Culture and Christianity. We've got a guest today. You're going to enjoy this discussion. It has rekindled a lot of things in me, a lot of memories.

He wrote a book called An Abundance of Caution, David Zweig. He is an investigative journalist. But he took a deep dive into a lot of data around the pandemic in 2020. And what caught my attention was the title of his book, An Abundance of Caution, because it was the line that we were all using and trying to make decisions. You know, and in real time, what it revealed to me is we don't lead our lives, typically, with an abundance of caution.

If we did, we'd never get in a boat again. Most of us wouldn't get on a plane again. We certainly would never go hunting again. Or a lot of the things, we probably wouldn't put our kids to take our kids to the carnival or to the state. I mean, a lot of things we wouldn't do. But it was a line that was heavily leveraged through the pandemic. You know, hindsight has always has,

much more clarity. And in my mind, I think the events of 2020, while they caused horrible suffering, and there was a great loss of life, in the midst of that, God was moving. I think we had arrived at a point where places that we need to be trustworthy were not, and we didn't know it. It's like when you need a good diagnosis from the doctor, you just know you have some symptoms, and you may even be afraid to hear the truth, but you can't get to a better place without a good diagnosis. And I think God in His Grace and Mercy through 2020 and the pandemic and all that came with that, we were given a sense of greater clarity and truth about our condition. And that gives us an opportunity to make changes and get to a healthier place. And this conversation

was going to remind you of some phrases we hadn't talked about in a long time, you know, go home for two weeks and flatten the curve. But really what David does is it was reminded me of how we didn't put our children first. And we followed models and we didn't follow data. And perhaps we can learn from that to be in a better place with the challenges that our future holds and how we can honor the children. It's not a muck-racking exercise. It's really a learning exercise.

I think you will enjoy it. The book is an abundance of caution. My guest is David Zweig. It changed, it refocused me with a new commitment to the future. And I hope it'll do the same for you. Welcome back to culture and Christianity. I'm excited about this conversation today. My guest is David Zweig. He's an investigative journalist. He has written a new book called An Abundance of Caution. That's a phrase I came to loathe. So welcome to Middle Tennessee. It's honor to have you, David. I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, I know the book really is about COVID and some of the side effects of that, some of the unintended consequences or maybe intended consequences. But let me give you a little of our back.

story because I think it kind of feeds the narrative of what you've written about. And we started hearing about that virus. Pretty scary initially what they were talking about. And when they ask us all to shelter in place, you know, go home for two weeks, we started a little habit of we mobilized, we used video to mobilize everybody under our umbrella to pray every hour on the hour. And really the result of the goal of that prayer was that the truth would be told because we didn't know what COVID was.

we didn't know. And we held that place for quite a while. And out of that, we called it the battle plan. Because we couldn't argue with science and we couldn't, we didn't have technology to fight with. So we'd use the tools that we had under our umbrella. And when I saw your book and I heard some of your interviews, I thought this is an answer to what we prayed five years ago.

A little delayed, but finally your prayers were answered. One of my lessons with God is he doesn't pay much attention to my timing. But oftentimes it seems that he does respond to our interest, you know, our prayers. So tell us about the book, what caused you to write it. It's a fascinating, just a fascinating narrative. Yeah, I began like many Americans and particularly, I live right outside New York City. So the people in my area, we were told this is an emergency. There are people are dying.

You need to stay home. And I complied with everything readily, as did most of my neighbors. And as you mentioned, the two weeks pretty early on in March, they instituted your listeners and audience probably remember the phrase 15 days to slow the spread. This was the official, you know, White House slogan. But following those 15 days, you may remember, they immediately added another 30 days. And the 15 days initially was the idea was you may remember this flatten the curve slogan. I do remember. And there was a meme where you could see on these graphs where if everyone followed the rules and stayed home or didn't congregate and do things, there would just be a gentle slope of cases.

But if you didn't listen, there'd be this big spike of cases and it could overwhelm the hospitals. This was the whole premise behind what was happening. So I was following along doing everything. I'm a skeptical person. I have a lot of background in science, journalism, and reading studies and things. So I had some skepticism, but I had no reason to question what they were telling us. This seemed upsetting. But something strange started occurring to me.

Somewhere the end of March, beginning of April, I just started feeling like I wasn't seeing enough evidence behind what they were telling us. So, again, I wasn't immediately distrustful, but I just was, this is my nature. I used to work as a fact checker years ago before it became politicized. I was just a plain old magazine fact checker. my disposition. I like to dig in and see, well, what's actually behind that? So I started poking around and digging more and more. And then around the end of April, I was going for a walk with a friend of mine and we were wearing masks. We were on the high school track. We were separated by like three lanes each. It sounds funny now. But at the time, this is, you know, what we were told to do.

It's the protocol. And because I'd begun researching and reading some of the data, none of this professionally. I was writing a different book on a totally different. topic at the time, but I just was consumed what was happening. My kids were home. Everything was crazy. This had never been done before. And anyway, cases in New York had fallen by 50% since the peak, somewhere around April 10th or April 12th. They had fallen, like, if you look at a graph, it's just off a cliff. And I said, well, this is great news. You know, what do you think they're going to open the schools next week, I guess? You know, they told us we just had to flatten the curve. He said, Dave, they're not going to reopen. I was like, what do you? What do you think? You know, what do you think?

you mean they're not going to reopen? And looking back now, I can't believe how naive I was. But remember, we were told as citizens, as Americans, this is the problem. This is what we want you to do. And this is the goal that we're trying to achieve. And we achieve the goal. We had flatten the curve. We were told the mission was to do that to prevent, okay, well, here we are. Cases have fallen by 50%. Why are you adding another 30 days? And there wasn't a 30 days of sort of lockdowns. and why are my kids still out of school? Things very quickly started to alarm me. And that's when I no longer could just stand by and just be poking around.

And I was like, why isn't anyone in the media talking about this? This seems so strange. And I had written for the New York Times on multiple occasions for the Atlantic, a lot of other prestigious media outlets. Everywhere I was looking, I didn't seem to be getting any information. And that's what that combined with seeing my kids at home just wilting away. in the gray light of a Chromebook in their bedrooms. And my kids at the time were in third and fifth grade.

And I'm like, you know, I understand we have to do this initially, but what's the plan? Because this is not going to work for them long term. And then I thought about when my kids are in a comfortable home, but what about all the other kids in America, the kids who are in, you know, less privileged backgrounds? What are they doing? Week after week and there's no end in sight. So that sort of launched me onto where we are now years later with this book and the reporting I did. Well, you know, we had several false starts towards the pandemic. We had bird flus and,

you know, we had a number of perceived threats. And this one felt like that to me, too, initially, you know, until the response became so pervasive and the determination. I mean, the elections somehow seemed to be wrapped around that too, but you couldn't really prove it. There was science involved. I think what I enjoyed about your book is the goal of this interview and the goal of your book it didn't feel like to me was like muckraking. It's not like you're going back to point accusing fingers. But it was to acknowledge that something happened to us and particularly to our children that we don't want to happen again. So maybe some of the, you did a lot of hard work on the decisions being made towards our children really wasn't based on fact at all. It seemed to me

it was based on modeling, which was theoretical. I mean, that's really upsetting after the fact. Somebody just arbitrarily set a number and they built action plans of totally random information, not rooted in science at all. Did I read and understand? No, you are sadly, you are accurately describing what I've uncovered and what I reveal in my book, which is that we can walk back to the end of April, beginning of May, schools in Europe began reopening. And this was largely kept from the American people.

I just did an interview last week, and it was a live radio interview. And someone called in and said, I had no idea that they had begun reopening their schools there. In some countries, they never even closed their lower schools at all there. And she said, I had no idea. So they began reopening schools there. And this wasn't, you know, just one school in Denmark and the countryside. 22 countries began reopening their schools. Millions of children, millions of them. The education ministers at the EU met toward the end of May. So schools there had been open for close to a month. And they said, we've observed no negative impact of opening schools. I was, you remember like those cartoons where the characters rubbing, rubbing his eyes, it's like seeing a mirage.

And I thought, I thought I couldn't believe what I was observing because I was watching a video of this online. I watched it over and over again because it seemed unreal. Why was no one covering this? There was no coverage of this that I could find anywhere of this fact. This seemed incredibly important. And the little bit of coverage there was about schools that are open in Europe was always framed as, well, that's different. that doesn't count. That's Europe. And then a long list of reasons were given, which, and I discuss all of them at length in my book, about why these were completely specious. This was bogus. Oh, well, that's Europe. It doesn't count for, well, they controlled the virus there. They have testing and tracing or they're doing this. All of this, I have to tell you, and your listeners need to understand. And I know this may be hard for people to take in. This was made up. This was not true. And I say this. I'm not politically motivated. I'm not. When you say it was made up, what do you mean specifically?

Well, we were told that in order, many, many schools throughout our country did not open because we were told, for example, that they needed special hepa filter systems in the school. That's like a filtration system on your air conditioning. I don't know how many, if you've been to Europe or spent time there, their schools, by and large, do not have heaphylters and do not have these special air filtration systems. The kids just went back. We were told that we needed mask mandates. Our country wanted to mask two-year-olds. In Europe, the ECDC, that's their version of the CDC, they recommended against masks on kids in primary school, on young kids.

So not only were they not doing it, they said, don't do it there. So we were told you needed to have universal masking on little kids. We were told that you needed hepa filters. We were told that you needed six feet of distancing. These schools in Europe were not doing six feet or what they would have as two meters. many of them were doing one meter or three feet or nothing at all. No specified distancing after a period of time. All these things we were told, these are critical. The teachers unions were saying this. But the teachers unions, I think in this regard, were just being opportunistic. They couldn't have made these claims without the support of the expert class who told them that these were the things that needed to happen. So it sounds almost unreal to me. Even now, years later, when I say it out loud, there's these list of things we were told needed to happen, but none of these were happening across the board in Europe. Twenty-two countries, millions of children in school. This was ignored, or when it was discussed,

like I'm mentioning, it was waved away with these made-up excuses, but there was no evidence behind them. And then they would say, oh, well, cases were higher in America. This is a large country. We have 330 million people. Why should the case rate in Brooklyn have an effect on what schools are doing in Baton Rouge. And it's the same thing in Europe. You could match up, and I do this in my book, where I start matching. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of cities and small towns and medium-sized towns in Europe that have a comparable town somewhere in America, similar population density, similar demographics. The case rates there were above ours, below ours, the same as ours. It didn't matter. There was no pattern to this. One of the things that's my book, ultimately,

is really a case study of the failure of the expert class. And it's very destabilizing. I come from a family of doctors and medical experts. It's a hard lesson to accept, but the experts let us down during the pandemic. And because of that, we have 50 million children in this country, more than 50 million,

who go to school K through 12. And these were healthy kids. And in some places, like California and parts of Virginia and elsewhere. You had a healthy children who didn't step foot in a classroom for more than a year. Some of them more than a year and a half. While at the same time, adults could go to a restaurant, they could have a glass of wine at a bar, casinos were open. What kind of country does that to their kids? And that's the question that I try to answer in the book is I try to, it's not about placing blame, but I try to show how did the gears of society turn behind the scenes? It's sort of,

to use a medical term, it's like an anatomy of decision making. How is it that a decision so absurd, so radical, happened? Because I feel like we haven't, and you can tell me if you disagree, I feel like we as a country, haven't reckoned with this, that we did this to so many kids. And we can discuss some of the harms that came to a lot of these kids. But this is an extraordinary thing we went to. And I feel like to a large degree, it's just been dropped down a memory hole. I would agree with you. If I use the language that from my side of the table, when you make a mistake, the biblical prescription is repentance. You say, you know, hey, I had the wrong thought and I had a corresponding wrong behavior. But now I realize I need a better thought and a better

behavior. And I think something like that would clean up a lot of this and would give us a little more confidence in one another and some institutions. But we haven't been willing to do that. We just keep, there's nothing to see here. Let's move along. Or the phrase I hear in the media lately when they've been talking about some recent oversights is, I'm not looking back. I'm just looking forward. That's very convenient. It's a wonderful line. We should have thought of that when I was a teenager. Exactly. It's really what we did to our kids, the masks and the whole bit. So what was the genesis? Because how do you coordinate the media, the social media, the, as you refer to in the expert class?

I mean, there was a sense of cooperation, unlike anything I'd ever seen. And it wasn't clear who the puppet masters were behind all of that. So one of the things that I show in the book is that, you know, I'm not much of a conspiracy-minded person. and I think it's very easy for people to see sort of like a direct collusion between different people and different institutions. I believe, I think what I try to lay out in the book is that really what happened was was not that these people were getting on the phone with each other and like, you know, connivingly and wickedly, you know, laughing with each other about how can we,

how can we lie to the public? Rather, the way bad things happen like this is, through a lot of bad incentives and through what I call group think and tribalism. And one of the things I shall, I'll give you just a brief story, is that early on the American Academy of Pediatrics had put out a statement, this is in the summer, early summer of 2020 after the pandemic had begun, and they said, we want kids in school. This is really important. They said, don't worry about six feet of distancing. If you can do it, great, but if you can't, there's no real good evidence that three feet is any, you know, it's not worth trying to stick to this so militantly.

Don't worry about that. Just let's get the kids in. This is the most important thing. Shortly thereafter, Donald Trump tweeted, in all caps, as is his way, open the schools in the fall with, you know, a whole bunch of exclamation points. Almost immediately after the American Academy of Pediatrics reversed its guidance. Gone was the idea of get kids into school no matter what. Gone was this idea of don't worry about six feet of distancing. Instead, they said, you need to listen to the experts. And they said, we need an enormous amount of money. And there's something else that was interesting with this revised statement, which was who else co-authored it,

which were the two largest teachers unions in the country. So I want people to kind of just meditate on that for a moment. There was nothing that happened epidemiologically between their first guidance and the second guidance. The only thing that happened was this tweet by Donald Trump. And similarly, and I recount a lot of this in the book, I began writing articles. My first one was the beginning of May saying we need to open the schools. And this wasn't just an opinion. I took a compendium of evidence. I had been speaking with experts throughout Europe. There was a lot of data in this. So once that article came out and then subsequent pieces that I was writing others about,

you know, the mask mandates and the distancing and all this stuff, people began reaching out to me from around the country. And some of those people included, or a lot of them, were doctors, including people at really prestigious institutions, some of our top university hospitals. And the emails would always start off with, look, I thank you so much for what you're writing. I think this is wrong what's happening with kids.

I think this is harmful. I don't think there's good evidence for this. And on and on, they said, but all of this is off the record. We can't go public with any of this. So I want your audience to understand that we were in an environment and I'm sympathetic. You were saying, hey, I'm listening to the experts. This is scary.

Things are happening. And by the way, I should say, none of this is to say that COVID is fake. I'm not, you know, none of this is to say that COVID wasn't harmful to great many people and not to be taken seriously. What this is to say is that whether 10,000 people were going to die or 10 million people, that still has no effect on whether or not these interventions, particularly on kids were going to be effective. There's zero connection between the school closures

and these other interventions they did on the population at large and in particular on kids. There's no connection because one of the things I've been told a lot is someone, well, you would think differently if you knew someone who died or do you know how many people died? I'm like, that's a non-sequitur. That's not relevant to the question at hand. And one of the reasons why it's interesting for me to speak with you

is that I noticed that a fair amount of religious people in the country. This included some Christians, there were also Orthodox Jews who were thinking this way. Had a bit of, and you can speak to this, I can't, but the idea of there are some things, there's a certain amount of humility,

I feel like, with people in religion and saying, this is out of my hands. Sometimes this is God's will. This is something I can't control. And America has a particularly aggressive medical culture. And in some ways, that's great. And we can have wonderful treatments for people.

but in many ways that's also harmful. And there's a certain amount of humility that's necessary to understand we can't control everything, but instead we were met with an enormous amount of hubris, of arrogance. And I think it comes from a good place. But the people in charge, Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and the sort of whole general medical establishment, they were trying to control something that they couldn't control, a highly contagious respiratory virus in a free society was never going to be controlled, particularly by closing schools while everything else was open.

This was a farce. This was known in the medical literature for a long time prior to the pandemic, but all of that, and I detail this extensively in the book, all of that was thrown out the window. So I don't know if I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on that, but to me that's something that I found really fascinating, the sort of split between hubris and humility and how the hubris in this case was incredibly harmful. No, I think that's a very good observation.

I think religion, excuse me, in general, tends to make us rule followers. Whether that's good or bad, we could argue, but I think that tends to happen. And I think we saw it in the church. I know we saw it in the church. The church has complied with things that made no sense whatsoever. If you would, I was completely shocked. If you had told me someone would say to the churches, close your doors, shutter the building. I did say it.

I said it's impossible. It'll never happen. We won't do it. I said that on a Thursday. And on that Friday, they were, what I said was they were playing the Southeastern Conference basketball tournament in Nashville. And I said, if they're playing basketball in Nashville, we're having church on Saturday. and Friday morning my friend that worked for the Metro Police Department called me

and he said they've closed the arena and they're sending the basketball players home. Now you're standing in this space where there is no facts to look at. And so for a few weeks, six weeks, we closed. But across the country, the church is just capitulated. And I wasn't prepared for that. I would have sworn to you on, I would have bet any amount of money that would never happen. So when I look at COVID, I don't start with CDC. I start with the Christians.

It wasn't very long. I said, if this is a real pandemic, we can't shelter in place. We have to go care for the people. That's the history of our faith. This isn't just about self-preservation. This is about making our culture better. But this turned, there was a pivot very quickly that if you didn't embrace the message that was being delivered, then you got ostracized very quickly, no matter what arena.

I think it would have been true in the media. It was true in science. I think it was true in academia. How they maintain that unity of message was something I'd never seen before. So many of you send us messages, letters, emails, notes in a variety of formats saying thank you for the ministry, for willing to speak the truth into culture in this rather tumultuous season. Well, I hear your feedback, and it's very valuable. Well, the question I'm so often asked is I feel like we should do more. What can we do? How do we do something?

Clearly, God is moving in the earth. He's raising up voices of truth. We're certainly not unique or alone in that, but there is something you could do that would help us. Join us as a monthly ministry partner. Our baseline for how we build our plans for next comes from those monthly partners. Your gift of $25 or more enables us to imagine a different future. So if God has blessed you through the ministry, I would ask you to make that simple investment. in what's next. And together, we will join God in helping to spread the message of a biblical worldview and its significance for our families,

our communities, our nation, and for the body of Christ throughout the earth. Join us in that partnership. We'll share some unique learning opportunities with you, and together we'll move with what God is doing in the earth right now. What happened was, as I'm sure you remember, is that this became moralized,

that you are a good person, if you, quote, stay home, and you are a piece of garbage if you want to go out and do things. But what they didn't tell us and what they didn't admit or acknowledge was that the decisions, the policy decisions that were made were not based on science. We were told over and over, I live in New York and at the time Andrew Cuomo was the governor and he repeatedly would say, you follow the science, you follow the data, it's that simple. But it's not. Science is a process. Science doesn't tell you what to do. science is about gathering information.

Science never says close a school. Science can say, if you close schools, such and such will happen. But that's different from saying we made value judgments. And we had many places where malls were open. I know in California, the malls were open, liquor stores were open, but the churches were barred from gathering more than a certain number of people. What we saw, and unfortunately, I guess what you and so many of your peers within the church has experienced and participated in.

And I think, you know, trying to do the right thing. But what we saw was that the values of the people in charge dictated, they enforced their own values on the public. We were told so there was this veneer of science ruling everything, but it wasn't science. It's heartbreaking and kind of crude when you think about it. but the people who fared the best during the pandemic were in the same class of people who made the rules. And what I talk a lot about in the book is when you build models,

a model is a prediction. A model is not a study. A model is, here's what we think will happen based on these inputs. Well, who makes the models? Those are people who work in public health, who by and large have six-figure salaries, they have a comfortable home. they're leading a very different type of life than a poor kid in the Bronx who's in an apartment

with eight other kids who's missing a parent and is not in a safe situation or, you know, countless other kids around the country or adults. There were people who were telling me, look, I need to go to church. This is important to me as a person. I'm 35 and physically healthy. This is valuable to me. Who is the government to tell me that I shouldn't be doing that? And so one of the things that's really important to get across is that we had a circumstance in our country.

And I hesitate to use this word, but it was a tyranny in a way. I mean, our personal liberties have never been infringed upon in this manner that they did. A master switch was flipped. Absolutely. And this was based not on science. This was based on values. But we as the public were told over and over, this is what the science says. And one of the important messages is that this wasn't science.

But the second important message, even if we were to say, sure, this is science. And what we talked about initially is the scientific part of it was completely bogus that we were being told related to what they call MPIs. That's a non-pharmaceutical intervention. All of these things, anything other than taking a vaccine or pills, but the six feet of distancing, the mask mandates, the school closures, the limits on the gathering. These things make intuitive sense, I think, to a lot of people. Oh, a bunch of snotty kids running around school, of course that's going to help. Or, oh, if I have a piece of cloth in front of my face, things are plausible. But one of the things I show in the book, and I give lots of examples of this throughout history,

there are things all the time that seem like they would make sense. But once we test them, they actually aren't true. So many things so often our intuitions are wrong. And that's why we have the scientific method. But science matters. Right. So what happened was, yes, if you close schools and everything else in society for a week or two, that can be effective.

That can help reduce the amount of transmission that's circulating around. However, once you get past a week, two weeks, three weeks, these things don't work. And the reason is because people tend to move around. Why? Not because they're jerks or bad people, but because they're humans. That's what we do. Even the most introverted among us, we're still social creatures. And I talk about this in the book.

You can see with the cellular phone data, people started moving around well before many of the restrictions were relaxed. And on top of that, I just want to touch on one other thing you mentioned, which is that even aside from people voluntarily moving around, we had a significant portion of our country who never stayed home because they had to work. These are the frontline workers in health care. These are the people who kept your lights on, who were fixing the infrastructure, who worked at the slaughterhouses, who worked as cashiers, and so on.

These people were never, you know, able to lock down. What do you think happened to their kids? Well, either A, they were left alone, or B, they went with a neighbor, a relative. They went into daycare. And what I talk about is there's a really strong argument to be made that closing schools or having them on these hybrid schedules or they could only go in one or two days a week. but then when they're mixing with kids from all over the place, it actually increased the likelihood of risk.

They would have been better off. So it's not even like, well, maybe this is helping. Maybe it's not. This is actually making it worse. So this was one of the most class-based events in recent American history that you had the wealthy were virtuous because they could stay home and work on their laptops, their children, in comfortable homes. Maybe they had tutors.

Maybe they went to private school and private school. person? While the poor, the wretched, they're the bad people. They're out taking care of you. They're out delivering food to your door. They're out in the slaughterhouses and the Amazon warehouses. What an extraordinary event this was where the being wealthy automatically meant you were virtuous because you could comply with these rules. So there are all these dynamics at play that I don't think have been sufficiently detailed. And that's, you know, one of the reasons why it was so important to me to create a document of what happened and also try to show how that happened as someone who's worked in the legacy media, as someone who's connected

with many people in the public health environment, to try to explain to people, here's how something so crazy went so wrong. No, the discussion, even reading your book and then having the discussion brings all of those memories back and the buzzwords and the bylines and the emot. of things I remember feeling in the middle of it was, you know, I live in a world where trying to understand which behavior is better or not is a part of my, that's the world I live in. And one of the hard parts of COVID was we had these messaging. It was very much about virtue. And the data wasn't really available. And people I had tremendous respect for,

you know, looking back, they were trained to follow rules and protocols. And they were doing what they'd been trained to do. They were my good friends. And I lived in Israel for a while studied there. And I mean, it was the most locked down place in the world. And there was this virtue around it. That's right. And I'm standing outside of that going, no, it doesn't feel right to be. And it was very difficult to navigate because you were going against our training and going against our orientation. And I felt that was very heavily leveraged. If you care about the children, Well, God, we all care about the children. Or if you care about your neighbor.

And so it was a, you know, removed from it, it's hard to remember the pressure everybody felt. There's an emotional blackmail. You know, I had friends working in the medical community, taking care of sick people, and you want to do everything you could to support them and be an advocate for them because they were putting their lives on the line based on the data we had. And it was a very, very, so I... I look back, I'm really agitated with the censorship and the disinformation and the polarization they brought. We were policing one another with accusing fingers and using social media to attack people's character if they saw you without a mask standing close to somebody.

There were many counties that had snitch lines that they set up. So they had people snitching on their neighbors. I saw someone, you know, have a gathering of more than, you know, seven people and they weren't wearing masks. They had neighbors snitching on neighbors. And on one level, we understand your impulse and those of other churches who wanted to comply came from a good place. We want to be good people. We don't want to harm anyone, right?

I mean, that's what you felt you were doing or at least what you told to do. What's so destabilizing is that the people who we trusted or were supposed to trust, the experts who were supposed to be apolitical, who were supposed to be just these neutral, scientists who are looking at the data were anything but that. And again, this sort of failure of the experts to follow evidence in America. We weren't alone in what we were doing, but America was somewhat unique, particularly amongst pure nations like ours. We were uniquely destructive against children in our country. And it's something that has not been reckoned with. And one of the ironies to me is that the left in America traditionally sees itself as the champions of the underprivileged.

They see themselves as, you know, we are the advocates for these kids. But the policies that the left pushed for and that it policed during the pandemic harmed the very people who they purport to care about the most. And there is a ton of evidence and data on this that I show in the book. but black kids, kids from underprivileged homes, kids who are in the inner city without good resources, they were hurt the most by these policies. Now, we were told these policies were in place to help protect them because they were the most vulnerable to the virus. But again, let me walk you back to the idea, keeping a highly contagious respiratory virus under wraps is impossible in a free society. Unless you welded people in the world.

into their homes like they did in China. What I'm saying is not radical. This is known in the literature about epidemiology for years. There are tons of studies that I cite. So none of this should have been a surprise. So then this raises the question, why is it that they thought or that they purported to believe that keeping a healthy child out of school all this time

was going to be effective, that they thought they were helping them, while millions of kids in Europe were in school, and then later in much rome. states and red areas in the country and in private schools, we then had evidence there. How is it? And by the way, one other point is very early, tens of thousands of kids were in school in YMCA's before when they had parents who were first line workers. Tens of thousands of them. And there was an interesting news report that came out. I forget the exact date, but I think it was in the summer after it had been a number of months. They were in these programs, tens of thousand.

And in New York City, also, they had a program for, for, you know, frontline workers, children. There was no evidence that there was an explosion of cases. There was no evidence. So it mirrored what we saw in Europe. So then if they were saying, that's Europe, that doesn't count. Well, now we have tens of thousands of kids in daycare programs. And they weren't all just daycare age like toddlers. They could have been teenagers, but just programs to take care of them.

They weren't. Masking was not universal, by the way, in these programs. The distancing was not universal. again, all of these things we were told had to happen, we actually had empirical evidence. It wasn't just a guess. We had actual real observable evidence that these things weren't needed and there was no observable negative effect. So how could it be that we have all of this evidence?

And that's much of what I concern myself with in the book is thinking about how do we know what is true? How do you know what to believe with evidence or not with evidence? And unfortunately, one of the conditions in our country is that because it was such a politicized environment, and I pointed out the thing that happened with Donald Trump and with all of these doctors who are contacting me and saying this is off the record, you had a tribalism within our country. And it's on the right as well as the left. But the left are the political leaning that rules most of these influential institutions.

Public health, the education institution, the legacy media, these are all dominated by the left. And so while the right also has its own form of tribalism, they are not in these influential institutions. And people's desire to be in the in-group overrides their desire for truth and for being courageous and honest. And we saw this over and over. And this is what I detail. It's a very hard read, my book in some regards, but I believe it's a necessary read because it really gives an insight into how today, in my, this isn't, you know, looking back at World War II and horrors that occurred or looking back in history. This happened now where there was this need to belong amongst a certain group of influential people and then it fanned out from there that led to disastrous consequences for many people, including. millions of children in our country.

That statement isn't ideologically. It's not about right or left. No. Republican or Democrat, red or blue. But I think your statement is true. It's unsettling to hear it said that our desire to remain in that inner circle. We'll ignore the data and damn the consequences.

People don't want to be cast out socially. They don't want to be. Imagine you're a physician at Columbia University. hospital. All of your colleagues, you know, almost everyone there, this is New York City, almost everyone there is, you know, very far left leaning. And you are wondering, you're thinking, you know, maybe this isn't right what's happening. I'm an immunologist. I have, you know, I have a degree in this. I understand what's going on. This is against a lot of the data I'm seeing. And I spoke with a physician who's about this. And he's saying, yeah, this is wrong.

I don't like what I'm seeing. And I said, what do your colleagues say about this? And he said, oh, I don't talk about this at work. This is a third rail. Can't touch it. On top of this, I should mention, this wasn't just self-censorship. There are numerous physicians at influential, you know, university hospitals who were told point blank by their administrators do not say anything against Fauci or what the CDC says. You are not allowed to do that.

So, and there was a physician at a university hospital in the NICU that's like the pediatric or pick you like the pediatric intensive care. Neonatal intensive care. Yeah, neonatal. I think it was Pick you actually now I remember right. It was Pick you. And she, after the vaccine had come out and was available for for adolescents, she had said, and this was in a small

interview with like a not very well known but just some small kind of trade outlet where she said, we saw more kids in the Pick You with Myerkarditis following the vaccination, then we saw kids with COVID

in an entire year. She was, and this is someone, by the way, who's a Democrat. This is someone who's, you know, she had no reason to win any points. After this happened, her boss told her, you are never permitted to discuss this again publicly. You have to go through our PR agents. You are not permitted to speak with the media again about this. So people need to understand. I'm very sympathetic to you and all the other people who are following along.

Not everyone's crazy like me in reading all the studies. and you have your own job to do, you're trusting people. What happens when that trust was broken, was misused? So we had a manufactured consensus. We were told over and over, well, this is what the consensus believes. This is, you know, this is what, quote, the experts say. Well, there were plenty of experts like those who were reaching out to me, which I talk about in the book, who were afraid to speak out,

and there were others who were told they couldn't speak out. This was not a real consensus. This was manufactured. And this manufactured consensus was then amplified by the media. Their job as journalists, my job, as I see it, is to be skeptical. And journalists, traditionally, they question everything. They question all the big institutions, big business, the government, the defense department, the church. They're looking at all these institutions and they're asking questions they're digging in.

Yet during the pandemic, that skepticism vanished. Instead, and I go into great detail with these big New York Times features, which were really influential because certain schools remained closed because of these New York Times articles. I had people calling me and reaching out to me saying, my school district in South Carolina won't open. Now, they said they're not opening because of this New York Times article. Well, what does the New York Times article say? Well, it says, experts say that it wasn't even attributed oftentimes. Experts say dot, dot, dot, dot, that we can't open schools for such and such a reason. Again, they never provided evidence for that.

This is what's known in philosophy as an argument from authority. And you're familiar. I see you smiling. Right. Which is that merely by someone's credentials that that means something is true. This is considered a logical fallacy. This means that that's not an acceptable argument to make. It's not, that's like, so we were in a circumstance in our country where it was almost like this maternalistic, like a mom wagging her fingers to a three-year-old saying,

because I said so. That's effectively what the public health department and our prestigious media were doing to us. They weren't providing evidence. They did the equivalent of wagging a finger at us. We were treated like children in our country. We couldn't be trusted with the truth or the journalists were too lazy

or incentivized to not anger their side. They couldn't let Trump. Trump can't possibly be correct. This person who we hate, who's odious, who's unserious. I don't know how Trump came to his choice. on schools. Maybe he came through it through wisdom. More likely he did not. But it doesn't matter. He was correct. And that was intolerable to them. If Trump had said, I love puppies and vanilla ice cream, they would be like, we hate puppies. We hate vanilla ice cream. So I'm trying to paint this

this disturbing but important picture about the unique dynamics that took place and that still take place now in America? Yeah, which really leads us. These conversations, we always want to leave our listeners with, what can we do? And I want to get your response to that so that we're not as vulnerable the next time. You know, as I'm listening to you, and it's a little beyond the scope of your book, but you were talking about the cratering of trust or the, to me, the gift of COVID. And I don't mean, I know there was deaths and horrible suffering and cost, but if there was a positive out of that. I don't think COVID created the failure of trust. I think it exposed it.

I think something had been taking place for a long season prior to that. That I could, speaking to myself, I was blind to, I trusted the CDC. I trusted the FBI. I trusted even the legacy media not to do things intentionally destructive. I even trusted the ideological divide, ultimately to care about what was better for the people.

You know, I'm old enough to remember Watergate. I was young, but I remember Watergate. And it didn't matter whether you were Republican or Democrat. The idea was that what Nixon and his merry band of warriors had done was wrong. And it couldn't be tolerated, and they couldn't be left in place, and we couldn't allow that to happen again. And COVID revealed that we don't live in that world anymore. And the good news in that is if you recognize something has been dismantled, it can be rebuilt.

And so from that day until now, I think, how do we rebuild trust in the church? How do we rebuild trust in our health care? I think we have the best health care in the world. But we have to trust one another in order for that to be true. How do we restore some sense of integrity to the media and somebody's actually doing an investigation? So it wasn't, it isn't despair to me when I look back. It's an incredibly hopeful fuse that was lit because it was like somebody turned the lights on and said, you know, the emperor really doesn't have any clothes. And there is overwhelming data to that fact.

And it's not just the health care community. You can point at every aspect of our community. We all failed. And so we can do better. But I'm curious, you did all the hard work and the digging. So how do we not get walked down that yellow brick road again? So to me, my book is not about. the pandemic ultimately. That's the backdrop, but it's really about how does society function.

And by reading the book, what I hope people come away with, my goal is that they are armed with an understanding about how to spot when, you know, you said something felt a little off to you. And you weren't sure, but you were understandably so. You were trying to do the right thing. You were told this was immoral to not follow these instructions, but something seemed a little bit off. And what I hope the book does and what I believe it does is that through what could almost be described as a series of case studies is that it helps arm people with an understanding about how to think about evidence and how to think about that, yes, of course, we can't function as a society if we don't trust people. I'm not saying, ignore all the experts. When you bring your car to the

mechanic, you kind of cross your fingers and just hope that they're telling you the truth and that it's going to go, well, we can't know, we can't be experts on every topic. But when something that's so important as taking away our liberty, something more important than your car, but something like, wow, my child is being kept home, or we had kids in, you know, throughout the country who were prevented from leaving, by the way, child abuse cases skyrocketed. Because you had kids who were left home with an abusive adult. And you know who their first line of defense normally is? It's teachers and educators, and that was taken away from them.

And they knew this, by the way, in April. The evidence started rolling in in April that this was a problem, and they kept the schools closed anyway. So what I want people to do is to be armed with an understanding about when you see certain types of arguments being made from politicians or in the media or by certain officials, you then have to step back and ask yourself, what's the evidence behind this claim?

Now, it doesn't mean you need to become an expert, but at minimum, you start through these series of stories that I show in here and how I explain how the models were put together and how it was based on really, really weak information, that you begin to develop a strong sort of a narrative in your mind to understand how to act not during the next pandemic, per se, but during any sort of crisis or just day to day. And then you start to see things differently from the media, from politicians.

You begin to ask questions in your mind. So when the next emergency happens and something seems a little bit off to you, I'm not saying to just distrust people or ignore them, but to start asking questions in a certain type of way that you will either behave different or even if you don't behave differently, that at least in your own mind, you understand what's going on in a manner that you wouldn't have otherwise. So in that regard, my book is really an important tool to help people become, have more agency as citizens and as people over their own lives and for their families. Sounds like good coaching, David.

Trying. The book is an abundance of caution, American schools, the virus, and a story of bad decisions. It is worth the, it's not a simple. simple read. And it's not, every page doesn't make you laugh, but you do feel like you're walking out of the shadows into the light. And that's a really good feeling. And I'm assuming it's available everywhere books are sold. Is that the line? So that is, that is the line. Well, I thank you for your hard work and your courage. I have a feeling that you were not applauded every place you have been. I was not. I was maligned. I was cast out. But I was, it was this is

important message. You know, one of the things I learned through this whole pandemic season was the value of people who tell the truth. And we may stand at different points on a spectrum and all of that, but the willingness to make commitments to do the truth and hold it up and tell it really causes us to stand together. So thank you for your hard work. I'm looking forward to your next book now. Thank you so much. Come back and see us when you've got it. We'll talk about that. For sure. Thank you. me. Hey, thanks for joining me today. Before you go, please like the podcast and leave a comment so more people can hear about this topic too. If you haven't yet, be sure to subscribe to

Alan Jackson Ministries YouTube channel and follow the Culture and Christianity podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Together, let's learn how to lead with our faith and change our culture. I'll see you next time.