Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 263rd episode of objectively speaking. I'm Jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. I am very excited to have with us today David Zweig. He is the author of An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, the Virus and A Story of Bad Decisions. It's getting a lot of attention and seems to have finally broken through the kind of mainstream barrier on this very important subject. So, David, thank you for joining us.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Thanks so much for having me.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: So I really enjoyed how your book integrated your own personal experience as a father of young children during the lockdowns with your analysis of how such bad decisions led us down the road of interminable lockdowns in so many places. And so thinking about that, it made me curious about your own history, your own origin story, if you will. So can you share where you grew up and whether any of your influences or interests at the time or experiences may have influenced your later professional trajectory?
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Well, I grew up in suburban New Jersey and bounced around a little bit, was in New York City for close to 20 years. Now I live a little bit north of New York City.
I would say my origin story, as far as it relates to my work during the pandemic and this book, An Abundance of Caution, is that I spent a number of years working as a fact checker. This is before fact checking became like a politicized type of, type of endeavor. But I was working at Conde Nast for a number of years and through my own disposition as someone, I just tend to be skeptical. I tend to be very meticulous. I sort of like an epistemological view of the world. I'm always looking for evidence behind things.
So that internal disposition combined with professional training to check every single statement, every single sentence, I spent years doing that. Both of those things together, I think really prepared me, made me well suited for the work that I undertook during the pandemic.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: Yes. And as I learned right before we went live, you also read the Fountainhead and Atlas shrugged in your 20s, so perhaps that might have had some small influence in terms of independent thought. And a is a, you know, the non contradiction principle, that things are what they are and not what we may like them to be. But you also had a very interesting aspect of your biography as I was doing some research for this interview.
You're an accomplished musician, a singer, guitarist, producer. Tell us about that facet of yourself.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: Yes. It feels like a long time ago.
Yeah. After college in my 20s, for about a decade, I was playing music, recorded a few Albums, toured around. They even had a couple songs on college radio back in the day.
After that, I started working on a novel and then eventually found my way into writing.
So the joke I like to tell is that after I'd been playing music for a number of years, I went to my parents and I said to them, mom, dad, I'm not gonna try to survive as a musician any longer. And they're like, oh, thank God. What are you doing now? I said, I'm gonna write a novel. They're like, no.
So I've gone from one slightly challenging endeavor to the next.
But journalism seems to have stuck more than the others.
So here I am.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: Yes, I'm just rereading of Human Bondage by Somerset Maughan, and sounds like you endured a bit of a similar meandering pat finding your place.
Now, I endured lockdowns here in California, which had the dubious honor of having some of the longest in the nation.
Tell us about your family's experience during that time.
[00:04:35] Speaker B: Yeah, as you noted at the top, my book is, I would say, 90% a work of very, very detailed, deep investigative journalism about the pandemic and specifically about what the evidence did and did not show regarding these various mitigation measures that were put in place on the public and specifically on children and schools. But I would say 10% of it, I weave in my own experience, which is what initially motivated me to even start looking this up. If I was sort of a typical laptop class, white collar professional without children, I probably would have found the pandemic annoying, even enraging and frustrating at times, but I would have dealt with it. I could have continued my work at home in the Zoom meetings and whatever else. Like much of the other privileged part of our population, as angering as it may have been, but having kids made it very, very different.
And where I am about a half hour north of midtown Manhattan, and things were really, really strict here, I live in an area that's very, very progressive, you know, politically, most of the people. And so the kind of, like, lockdown culture, and we can get into this, but the sort of, like, cultural enforcement and the shaming against anyone who dared to veer from this mindset or ask questions, it was very, very unnerving to me. It was very, very monolithic and uniform in how you had to behave and think. And, you know, I have a lot of sympathy for this in, I don't know, the second week of March, but I lost sympathy for this type of idea come April, then maybe then June, then on and on. And on. And what I talk about in the book is that I think a number of these things were both wrong in the beginning, but reasonable. Perhaps someone could make the argument that even though I believe I give a lot of evidence why this never was going to be beneficial, at least the initial school closures, I think, were. A reasonable person could have come to that conclusion based on the information available at the time.
[00:07:09] Speaker A: But.
[00:07:09] Speaker B: But as I go through the steps, I take great pains to show how that became unreasonable fairly quickly after that point. And that certainly was the case within my area where I live.
[00:07:22] Speaker A: So let's talk about your book. An Abundance of Caution. American Schools, A Virus and a Story of Bad Decisions. Now, the subject of lockdown school closures and mandates has been something of an obsession for us here at the Atlas Society since the spring of 20, even when more other objectivist or libertarian organizations took a more compliant stance. We've interviewed dozens of authors about the subject. Scott Atlas, Aaron Cariotti, Jeffrey Tucker, Martin Makari, Jennifer say, just to name a few.
[00:08:00] Speaker B: Those are my people.
[00:08:03] Speaker A: Ian Miller.
But none of they, none of them were invited onto legacy media.
None of their books were given the attention that your book has been given. Why do you think that is? Is it because you've written for many of these outlets such as the Atlantic, New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, or do you think it's just at this point the weight of the evidence has become insurmountable, or it's just a matter of time?
[00:08:36] Speaker B: It's funny, that's a question I've gotten a lot over the years. You know, even before the book came out, some other journalists who I knew were just other people who weren't journalists, but who were kind of shared some of the viewpoint that I was expressing, would ask, you know, how did you get that piece in New York Magazine? How are you writing this stuff in the Atlantic? And so on.
So I did occupy a pretty rare lane in that I was doing a lot of investigative work that was coming to conclusions that were very contrary to the sort of establishment accepted narrative. Yet I was largely doing that from within the establishment. So it was quite unusual.
The only conclusion I can come to is that, well, yes, I had contacts, I had written for these publications in the past, but I'm an independent journalist, so they were under no obligation to accept any of my pitches. So I think it helps having contacts at these places and having a track record, but that certainly is no guarantee. Rather, the type of writing I do, unlike a lot of journalists, is that I tend to not follow this sort of format.
If you ever read, I don't know, something in the Sunday Times Magazine or in the New Yorker, you said that there's this format where often there's this kind of like one or two or three people where they focus the article on like a human interest angle and then they'll use that as a launch point into trying to make some larger argument. And then they sprinkle in data and, you know, maybe they'll find an expert, quote, unquote, you know, to add some, add some comments here and there. I don't do that typically. And instead what I did was I try to just pummel the reader with evidence almost. I think of myself almost like a lawyer making an argument in front of a jury. And so when I am pitching an editor, you know, to use the sort of parlance of today, I come with receipts. I'm not just trying to make some sort of, you know, tear jerker or emotional or kind of just entertaining story.
But I strip all that away and it's just like, look, here's the evidence, here's what's going on. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And I just have, you know, essentially a bullet list, this compendium of evidence where I'm trying to make my case. And look, most of the sort of legacy media, regardless of what evidence I would present, would not be interested. But fortunately there are a few editors who really did care about that and they had enough juice internally and they believed in what I was doing that I was able to get these pieces through.
And I should say, to my knowledge, there is not one article I've written during the pandemic, nor I'm aware of anything in my book that's come out now that we're talking about from MIT Press. Nothing that I have done, there have been no major corrections, nothing's been retracted.
Doesn't mean I don't make mistakes. But that type of process, I think lends itself to making it much, much harder for an editor and hopefully for readers who at least have a fair mind about it to be able to object.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: Was it difficult to get the book published? You know, was it like the Fountainhead where she had 12 rejections and then somebody finally decided that they would give it a go? Or did you find a more receptive audience in the publishing world?
[00:12:22] Speaker B: So I'll tell you, it's interesting.
My agent, you know, when you publish books, you need a literary agent is typically how it works. You know, at least when you're working with the big publishers.
And there were more than one. But he gave the example. There was at least there was one editor who came back to him. You, when you publish like a nonfiction book, your agent submits a proposal. It's basically almost like a business plan. It could be five pages or 30 pages, where it's like, here's the book, here's what I plan to do. It's kind of like a really extended outline. So the proposal was with a bunch of publishers, and at least one of them had the candor. And they came back to me and she said, this is really excellent. I've got to tell you, this is one of the best proposals I've seen in a while. This is super important.
And he said, but I'm not going to publish this book because no one else here is going to go with this. And I need to persuade the marketing department. I have to persuade the people in promotions and sales and this. And he's like, they're not going to go with this.
So we were met with a lot of that, which didn't surprise me, because book publishing, those are more or less the same type of people who are in news publishing at large. But fortunately, there was an editor at MIT Press, Susan Buckley, who believed in what I was doing, and again, that same reason how I was able to publish my articles. I came to her with a proposal that was filled with evidence.
And people can argue with my book if they'd like. And I always welcome arguments. I love being challenged.
But what they can't say is that I haven't presented evidence. And indeed, in the book, I have hundreds and hundreds of endnotes with citations. I tried to make it where there is literally not one claim in the book that doesn't have a source backing it up.
[00:14:19] Speaker A: So last year I traveled to Australia, a country which had some of the harshest lockdowns and restrictions during COVID And I was going to give a speech and I said, well, gosh, you know, the obvious thing to talk about is how you guys, you know, all lost your mind crimes during this time and completely crushed your economy and crushed human liberties.
And there it was like, no, no, we, nobody wants to talk about that. You know, there was a sense that people just wanted to move on.
And I kind of see that in some quarters here in the United States, like my parents and I, who had, you know, starkly different views on this, these interventions and the closures and all of that. We, we haven't circled back to that. I, I, I don't know, maybe they'd be open to it, but I guess where do you think this reluctance comes from? And is there more of a willingness to confront mistakes when it comes to school closures specifically, but not the rest of the stuff?
[00:15:31] Speaker B: Okay, yeah, there's a lot there. So I would say there's a few things.
Number one, you're right. I believe that the evidence now is just so incontrovertible that even many people who were against reopening schools during the pandemic eventually, now at some point they've begun to admit that this was a terrible mistake.
But what's interesting is, and what I talk a lot about in my book, what I find interesting is narrative creation.
How is it that certain narratives within our culture catch on? How are they created? How are they enforced? How do they spread? And one of the things that's interesting is that the narrative early on was, can't open schools. Kids are in danger. Then the narrative shifted to, well, kids aren't in danger, but they're endangering teachers and endangering the community, and they live in a multi generational home.
So then they did that. Then years later, the narrative shifted once again.
Well, okay, maybe no one was in great danger from the schools reopening, but we didn't know. We did the best we could. It was a fog of war. And, you know, so this is something that's very conveniently exculpatory.
It allows these people to admit that something went wrong, but yet it still wasn't anyone's fault. It's magical. There was terrible, mistakes happened, but, you know, we did the best we could with the information we had at the time.
And what I try to show in the book over and over is that I take great pains that almost everything in the book, all the evidence I present is what was available in. In real time. I'm not doing a sort of retrospective look where I'm finding all these studies that were conducted a year or many years later. This is information known in the moment. And one of the most important things that I get across in the book is that we did know in the moment. But for a variety of complicated reasons that I detail at great length in the book, this information was ignored or was waved away improperly.
And as a result, the public was deeply, deeply misinformed about what the actual risks were. And they were also deeply misinformed about what any potential benefits of these various mitigation measures, including specifically keeping kids out of school for such an extraordinary duration of time.
I would say one little separate piece to your question is that the people who perpetrated these Interventions on the public, stripping away so many liberties of regular citizens, and perhaps most devastatingly, the rights and liberties of children.
Those are the same people, by and large or their supporters in the country. That's the same group of people who are the ones who put these plans in motion. So of course they are not going to be particularly inclined to revisit their errors. You know, it's much easier if you think about other large events in recent American history. The Iraq war, 9, 11, various mistakes were made. But the legacy media and the sort of elite part of our society, and in general, the kind of cultural elite that was easy for them to pick apart and write a zillion books about it and have the official narrative be about all the mistakes that were made because they were implicating someone else. It was George Bush's fault, it was Colin Powell's fault, it was this or that person. But the pandemic, it was their fault. It was the cultural elite, it was the legacy media, it was our public health establishment who made these terrible mistakes. So it's no surprise that most of these people do not really want to revisit this. So it's one of the reasons why I spent years working on this book was to create an actual document. So something exists. So when people hopefully are studying this time, years and years from now, there will be some evidence, some document to counter this false narrative that, you know, they did everything they could, we did the best we could at the time, which was just simply untrue.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: Right. And that we, we didn't know. You know, I should add one other name to the list of people that we've interviewed on this subject and that's Topher Field.
And speaking of Australia, he was probably the most, for most forward looking opponent who led the protests against lockdowns in Australia. And asking him that same question, why the reluctance? I mean, I get it, what you talking about in terms of the people who actually perpetrated these things, not wanting to revisit it, but you know, the people that were swept up in it, that you know, weren't leaders or health experts or public school officials, but who were just, you know, the average person out there or not out there inside their homes supporting this. And he had an interesting take. He said that for them that time was kind of their moment at the top of the Maslow hierarchy of need, that they were sacrificing, they were doing something very noble, it was an emergency and they were rising to it. And so to kind of go back and say actually it didn't have to be this way. You didn't have to sacrifice all of those things.
You know, your grandmother didn't have to die in isolation. You didn't have to do this to your child and have the result that, you know, you're seeing now. And people are just, you know, they want to kind of remember that time as a time of personal heroism.
[00:21:38] Speaker B: Well, I mean, the moral injury that people, you know, would suffer from acknowledging, wow, I really took part in something that was very, very harmful to a lot of people.
That's too much to bear, I think, for a lot of, you know, regular people who went along with this and who, you know, as you pointed out, interestingly, even sort of a number of organizations that brand themselves as libertarian. I was kind of astonished at a number of these organizations, the sort of, you know, crickets that we were hearing from them during the pandemic. It was quite a remarkable moment.
So I think people understandably, just don't want or are not able to actually acknowledge, wow, you know, something went really wrong. But, you know, there's. What I'm often met with is the people were dying. You know, how dare you say this? And it's like, well, you can't just, like, shout, people were dying. And somehow that wipes everything away. You know, we have all sorts of things in our society that carry different risks. I'm not interested in riding motorcycles, but some people like to ride them. That's a risk they are allowed to take because that's something to them that feels worthwhile. Other people like to go skiing. I like to swim in the ocean. Is there a risk? Yes, there is some risk. I'm willing to take that risk, you know, if the waves don't seem too big, because that's worth it to me. So an example I often give is how we drive on the highway and the speed limit is at 55 or 65. The government could make the speed limit 35, and we would have fewer fatalities. We would have fewer people who are grievously injured. But we choose not to because we value getting places faster. There are all sorts of things in society and how we conduct ourselves as individuals that we calculate in our minds, even if we're doing it subconsciously.
A risk, benefit type of scenario. What happened during the pandemic was that notion went out the window. And I have a quote from Francis Collins in the book.
Francis Collins was the head of the nih. He was Anthony Fauci's boss. And after the pandemic had ended, he admitted that. He said, look, we were way too myopically focused on one outcome, which was like trying to avoid people from getting Covid.
And we assigned zero value to everything else in life. Now, of course, this is an absurd binary. Anthony Fauci himself had said, I don't concern myself with the economic things. Well, sure, he's not an economist, but. But those, quote, economic things also have a great, great deal to do with people's health and well being. So the problem was, and I talk about this a lot in the book, which I hope your audience will purchase and read, is that there are many things that we needed to incorporate other types of voices, other experts into the conversation about what should have been done. But instead we accorded an enormous amount of power and influence to a very small number of people, including Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx and the cdc and then just sort of your generic random doctors who turned themselves into pundits. There was an emergency medicine physician who, I quote a lot in the book, named Megan Rainey, who was on TV and in the New York Times, in the Atlantic, constantly. She has no specific expertise on infectious diseases. She has no particular expertise about non pharmaceutical interventions. Nevertheless, she was the go to pundit. So we had this very small Rolodex of people who carried an enormous amount of influence. But we didn't hear from, we should have heard from economists at times, except for someone like Emily Oster who was then vilified for actually conducting research.
We didn't hear from the child psychologists. We didn't hear from the people who were trying to warn us what was happening with thousands of children who were getting abused. Where the cases of child abuse skyrocketed once these lockdowns happened. Why? Because kids normally were in school where they had time away from a dangerous adult who was in their home and also where teachers and educators were their first line of defense. That's. Those are the people who often spot something's very wrong with a child and then get them help and go to the authorities. What do you think happened to these kids when that resource, that teacher, they weren't seeing the teacher anymore. So you have tons of kids who are home with just a monster stuck at home with them day after day.
The adults weren't allowed to go out of the house and work somewhere in many instances.
So you have all these kind of what I would call, or what an economist might call second order effects. These are things that are not the initial aim of a particular intervention, but they're things that can happen as a result. These second order effects as Francis Collins said the head of the nih, they were assigned a zero of value. That is a deeply, deeply flawed way for a country to conduct itself during a time of crisis. But indeed, that's what happened. And it continued to go on. Again, I'm sympathetic to this happening for a brief window of time, but this continued for months and months and then for longer than a year, at least in particular with school closures.
[00:27:29] Speaker A: So there's one date in particular that has kind of anchors your book, and it's kind of the dividing line between, okay, maybe it's understandable before that, but after this May 17 European Union meeting, it becomes much, much harder to kind of dismiss this myopia.
Tell us about that meeting.
And why is it so important to understanding why the European and the American approach to school closures diverged so starkly?
[00:28:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I view that moment as kind of, you know, for lack of a better term, the original sin.
In the end of April, beginning of May, many, many schools throughout Europe began reopening.
In the toward the end of May, the education ministers from 22 countries met. All 22 of these countries began reopening their schools in some fashion or another. And the minister said, okay, the schools have been open for close to a month now.
And they said, we have observed no negative consequences. We have not observed teachers with higher case rates. We have not observed the broader community being affected. They met a second time in June. They had the same determination.
Virtually no one in America reported on this. I ultimately wrote about this in June of that year and then. But I spent a lot of time talking about this in the book because this is one of those moments, you may recall.
We were told, we don't know enough.
There's so many things we don't know. This is an emergency. We don't know what's going to happen when we open schools. Or worse. They said, we do know what's going to happen. It's going to be a catastrophe. And I have a lot of analysis, what I would almost call like a case study of these very, very important, influential New York Times features that I know for a fact. Many school districts remained closed because specifically because of these New York Times articles where they were just, you know, it was a siren blaring. They point blank said, there will be a catastrophe if we reopen schools. Bizarrely, you would think that this was the information everyone was waiting for. This should be on the front page of every newspaper. This should be on every cable news network. Great news, everybody. 22 countries in Europe have begun reopening their schools. And the official word is there is no observable negative consequence. This is the news ostensibly we were all waiting for. But guess what? This never made the front page of the New York Times. This wasn't blaring all over all the cable news. And that is an extraordinary thing that we need to reckon with. And I spend a lot of time in the book explaining why that is.
And, you know, there are a number of reasons for it. But at its base level, we live in an extraordinarily politically acrimonious environment. And unfortunately, once sort of opening things became branded as like Republican or right wing, it became basically impossible for anyone on the left to even entertain the idea of going along with that. And Donald Trump during that first summer, at some point tweeted in all caps with a bunch of exclamation points, we must open the schools in the fall. And prior to him tweeting that, for example, the aap, the American Academy of Pediatrics, came out very strongly for schools reopening. They even had said in an interview, one of the head AAP physicians had said, look, if you can't do six feet of distancing, don't worry about it. Three feet, that's good enough. Like, there's not good evidence that this extra distance is worth it to keep the kids out of school. Well, guess what?
Almost immediately after Donald Trump's tweet, the AAP reversed its guidance. Gone was the idea of don't worry about six feet of distancing. Gone was this idea of no matter what, get the kids in school. Instead, they flipped and said, you must listen to the experts, quote, unquote.
And they said that they needed an enormous amount of money in order for schools to reopen. It is also quite telling that the other difference with this new AAP guidance is not what's in it, but who authored it. The revised guidance immediately after Trump's tweet was co authored with the two largest teachers unions in the country.
[00:32:10] Speaker A: It's pretty sad that, you know, maybe the one thing that Trump could have done to make sure that school, that schools were opened would have been to call for them to be closed, because that's corrected out like this. Schools must not open under any circumstances, guaranteed.
[00:32:29] Speaker B: If he had said that, X number of left leaning public health people would have immediately said, hey, we have underprivileged children, they are in great danger. You know, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff, we need to get them in school. Because indeed, that is what many public health professionals had said in the beginning of the pandemic. And this is very important to note, prior to the pandemic, very, very mainstream thought within the sort of infectious disease epidemiology. There was much, much literature about this saying, warning about the harms of school, of lengthy school closures, among other interventions, and in particular the harms and risks to kids who were coming from low income backgrounds and for black children and other kids who had various challenges to them that they were at great risk. So this was completely mainstream within the epidemiological community.
Well, that went out the window during the COVID pandemic. Why? In part because in America, worrying about school closures, worrying about the harms of these interventions was immediately branded as right wing. And once that happened, and as you said, you know, when Trump did this tweet, he basically ensured that schools would remain closed.
It is just an absolute black mark on our society in the way how the elites and our most trusted or should be the most trusted individuals within public health let us down in that regard.
[00:34:07] Speaker A: So we're going to turn to questions. I can see in the comment section that we have the link to get David's book. You can read it, but if you're somebody who does audiobooks, like I do, to get through one or two books a week, I can highly recommend the Audible version as well. So I hope you will listen or read it. And I think you'll find a lot there that I learned. I mean, I feel like I have been following this pretty closely, but I totally kind of forgot about the whole May 17 meeting.
[00:34:42] Speaker B: So, yes, this conversation just scratches the surface.
[00:34:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
If you want all of those footnotes, though, do get the hard copy or the paperback.
So here's a question from lock, stock and barrel, which kind of dovetails into something I was going to ask. He says the risk of lockdowns is something we all need to be cautious of. If it was done once, it can be done again. Do you think that at this point there is a possibility that the next time something very frightening and unknown becomes the next pandemic, or whatever the next crisis may be, the climate crisis, that people will be so willing to go with this, particularly again if the same political tribal dynamics apply?
[00:35:32] Speaker B: Well, one thing we know for certain is that the trust in public health officials from a lot of the American public was destroyed during the pandemic. And there will certainly be an enormous amount of pushback, I think, when personal liberties are infringed upon, particularly in a manner that seems so nonsensical. You know, out in California, they were there was this person named Kim Prather, who I cite a number of times in my book, who's like an atmospheric scientist and others. They didn't want people even to go surfing. They, you know, they closed down the beaches, playgrounds, you know, with swing sets that were chained shut together with caution tape around them. These were things that you don't need to be a physician, you don't need to be an epidemiologist to understand very early that that was absurd and that we all that we knew very early the virus was extremely unlikely to spread outdoors. And we also know, of course, that being outdoors is incredibly important for health. So you had things like this where if any of your audience had little kids who were stuck at home and then they couldn't even go to a playground because it was chained shut, these are things that were just manifestly absurd. They were also not done to this extent in other sort of advanced countries and you think about much of Europe, but yet they were done here and in particular in places like California and to a large degree places like New York and elsewhere. So I think there will be an enormous amount of pushback from a significant portion of the population. What's going to be a problem though is in areas that are really dominated by a sort of more left leaning political establishment, those areas may become these sort of bubbles of infringement on liberties if and when there is some other type of emergency, whether it's a pandemic or something else.
So if you happen to be in one of those bubble areas, your experience may be very, very different from someone else who's, you know, in Montana.
[00:37:47] Speaker A: Well, you know, I think in some ways these public officials are very short sighted because you're driving people out of your state, you're driving away capital, you are driving away potentially down the road congressional seats and electoral votes. So yeah, okay, so good question here from Iliacin. He asks, what criteria did you use, David, to classify the failure of school closures as the worst American policy failure in a century? Was it the scale? Was it the harm? Was it the process?
[00:38:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know if, I don't know if I said it was the worst failure in a century. Maybe I did.
Look, that is, that is a subjective statement. There's no way to have a specific criteria of what the worst is.
But what I try to make the case extensively is that look, there are more than 50 million kids in America going to K to 12 schools.
No time in modern memory were healthy children barred from school for such an extensive period of time. And there's been a lot of attention paid to the sort of, what's been called learning loss and how you. And there. And I give a lot of statistics on this in the book, There is absolutely a direct correlation between the amount of time kids were kept out of school and the amount of learning loss that they've experienced. And many of them still have not recovered from that. So this is incredibly important and it's a, you know, a somewhat quantifiable metric to use. But one of the things that I think is really important that that is not talked about as much is all these other kind of ancillary or almost ephemeral things that, that happened that you can't quantify. When you think about if there's a kid who is going to be a senior in high school in Los Angeles and he was going to possibly get recruited into college for playing football, what do you think happened to that kid when that football season was terminated? His entire life trajectory has been altered. That doesn't show up in the statistics necessarily. We have no idea what happens to that kid and how his life may have been different.
All the children with eating disorders, the explosion of screen time usage during the pandemic, the explosion of anxiety, of depression, as I mentioned before, of child abuse, all these things are very hard to track in different ways, but they're very real. And I would say even beyond that, childhood is, is achingly brief.
And, you know, we each have this, this kind of montage in our heads, I think this kind of like highlight reel. You remember these moments of growing up, you don't get to do third grade again. This is it. You just get one shot. And for a child who spent third grade, the entirety of it sitting in their bedroom staring at a Chromebook, you know, looking at links to YouTube lessons or doing some Zoom class for an hour, they weren't allowed to play with friends.
They couldn't meet with their teachers, they couldn't meet with their peers. Couldn't even put an arm around a friend for months and months and months on end. We were told that if they did that, they were horrible, they were bad people.
That is an incredible harm that cannot be cataloged or quantified by, but nevertheless is very real.
And I think that's something that we lose sight of, is like something was taken away from these kids. And it's not a small number, it's an enormous number. And I think that matters a lot.
And that goes beyond all these other very much more kind of specific and documented type of harms that they incurred.
[00:42:05] Speaker A: My Modern Galt asks, is there any one institution or person or more than anyone else responsible for the school closures? You talk about that those on one side, generally more on the left, that say, you know, fog of war, no one knew. We, you know, we did our best.
But you also say that those on, on the right will blame all of this on the teachers unions, and that's not necessarily correct either. So where would you rank these institutions and dynamics in terms of culpability or how important they were to driving these bad decisions?
[00:42:45] Speaker B: Yeah, the question is framed. Well, I think it is incorrect the sort of like, spotlight that some people on the right have put on teachers unions. Make no mistake, I am very hard on the teachers unions in the book and I give an enormous amount of, of evidence of where they went wrong. And I won't go into it here. So make no mistake, I'm not giving them a pass. However, none of that could have happened without two very important institutions, and that is the public health establishment and the legacy or prestige media in America, that in the end, teachers unions could not have made these outlandish demands.
We will not open a school until we get HEPA filters. Well, they couldn't have made this claim if the public health establishment didn't support such an unsupported, nonsensical claim. And not only did they not support it, I don't ever remember Anthony Fauci or others saying this is wrong. I want to come out very clearly, any schools that aren't opening because they don't have a HEPA filter, this is a mistake, you know, or schools, if you don't want a three year old to wear a mask, that's ridiculous. I don't remember health officials by and large coming out and saying that. So in the end, the buck stops with the people who are, quote, the experts. And then secondarily, as I mentioned before, you know, I have these case studies where I try to create, essentially much of my book is a work of media criticism. And I describe and show how institutions like the New York Times, who I focus on, because the Times is so influential, but also the broader media establishment, how over and over again they reported in a manner that simply acted as a megaphone or even cheerleaders for the public health establishment rather than doing their job, which was to act as a filter, which was to ask questions, which was to present evidence. Instead it was Anthony Fauci says such and such, or, you know, this emergency room physician is giving her opinion on masks. Well, I really don't care what Megan Rainey, EMERGENCY ROOM physician what her opinion is on masks, she's entitled to give it. I want to see the evidence. What does the evidence show about mask mandates when the CDC is part of their evidence base is using studies where a mannequin is in a lab with a mask glued to the mannequin's face? I think I should be told about that, that that's part of the evidence base being used to justify masking a two year old. But that's not what happened. So over and over, the media failed its most basic task, its most basic responsibility, which was to hold those in power to account and to ask questions and if they weren't getting answers, to then dig and look for the answers themselves.
[00:45:44] Speaker A: All right, one last question from Jackson Sinclair. You may not know the answer to this. I certainly don't. He's asking what other countries, aside from the US participated in school closures. Was it restricted to the West? Was it a global adoption? I mean, you mentioned that in May the European countries were already meeting and having opened the schools four weeks earlier, we're not seeing any harm. So we know that for much of Europe, actually, they didn't continue with this. Was the United States just the lone outlier in having places that continued down this path?
[00:46:26] Speaker B: Sadly, no.
Schools were closed throughout the entire world to varying degrees.
There are some countries in Latin America that the schools were to close, closed even longer than the United States.
And to be clear, in Europe they had closures to varying degrees as well, but by and large they were open much, much earlier, as we've repeated many times now, beginning in the spring.
But there were closures and as you noted in Australia, Canada, my gosh, they were in many instances far worse than the United States.
So unfortunately, school closures occurred throughout the world. There are various different databases and resources from the United nations and other sources where they sort of catalog. It's very hard to have a precise metric because countries often didn't have one uniform policy.
So it's hard to say in aggregate how the closures were implemented in one place or another. But I focus on the United States and I compare us to Europe because Europe in many ways is I think, the most like the US in many regards and sort of advanced societies where we share a lot of commonalities with them, despite many obvious differences as well.
Certainly from an epidemiological perspective, there was nothing unique about Europe relative to the United States, where it made no sense that they could have the kids back in school and there was no real observable harm. But yet here in the United States, we were told that somehow that didn't count, which just was manifestly stupid on its face.
All these excuses we were given about the HEPA filters, the six feet of distancing, the universal masking, and on and on. They were not doing those things across the board in Europe, but yet we were told we needed to do them here. And again, there was no support for this from the health experts, and there wasn't really any pushback from most of the media either. So the United States was not unique in this incredible error that occurred. But I think for a country with the ostensibly, at least the most advanced public health system, with the most number of experts, you know, and professionals who are highly qualified to look into this type of stuff, I think the US Was unique and really, really faltering and making such a catastrophic mistake.
[00:49:05] Speaker A: So, as you described in your book, a common refrain from public officials during COVID especially early on, was, quote, there's so much we don't know. Okay, we know that wasn't true, but even if we accept that, that they believed that they didn't have answers, why wasn't there more of a robust search for answers, the getting more research, finding evidence, but there, it wasn't happening.
Why was that?
[00:49:37] Speaker B: Yeah, one of, one of the things that I talk a lot about in the book is that, as you pointed out, if there wasn't answers to things, well, we have the resources. This is the United States. We have plenty of money to conduct a study. One of the things that I did very early on, and I recount this in the book, is no one knew. Remember, people were wiping down their groceries. They didn't know what was happening. No one quite knew precisely how long the virus might survive outside what's called fomites. That means getting a virus off the surface of a material.
So I reached out to.
I forget his precise specialty, but a guy at UC Davis, I think he was there, who studied sort of infectious infectiousness of viruses and such. And I said, why is it that we haven't conducted any studies on, for example, like a jungle gym or a swing set? I'm hearing that it's highly unlikely the virus is going to spread outdoors. We've got all these playgrounds that are closed. How hard is it to conduct that? And he said it would probably take a week. You take some virus, you put it on the surface, then you put it in the sun, you test it 10 minutes later, 20 minutes later, and you see if the virus is still active or whatever, and so on.
I Mean, how much could that have cost? Even if it's a million dollars, Even if it's $10 million, who cares? But they didn't bother to do it. They also never did proper randomized trials on a whole variety of things, including mask mandates, including 6ft of distancing. And one of the sort of the peak of the book, in a way, is toward the very end where I talk about how is it that kids finally got back in school in most of America? And it's only because there were a small number of professionals, most of them in medicine or public health, a few outside the field, like Emily Oster, where there was a number, and they were mostly women, incidentally, But a number of these women, these professionals, a person named Weston Branch Element, who was an infectious disease specialist at Harvard Medical School at the time, they looked at schools that had 6ft of distancing versus schools that were doing 3ft of distancing in Massachusetts. The only way they were able to do that is because the Massachusetts governor ignored the cdc, which the CDC had been telling everyone, you have to do six feet of distancing. The governor said, I'm not going to require it. So because he didn't listen to the quote, unquote, the experts that enabled these professionals to conduct a real world study where they said, what's happened with schools where they were doing six feet? What's happened with schools where they were doing three feet? Well, lo and behold, we already knew this from Europe anyway, but lo and behold, they found that there was no observable benefit of requiring kids to be six feet apart. Well, what happens with the six feet of distancing is, of course, that that prevents schools from being full. You cannot abide by this amount of, you know, space between the students. It required the schools to be, at most, half full of kids. So they worked in these hybrid schedules, or they just simply remained closed once they provided this incontrovertible evidence from home. Again, even though this evidence existed from outside the U.S. once this was done here, eventually the CDC cried uncle. And they had to finally admit begrudgingly, that, okay, this metric that we've required everyone to do for such a long duration of time. Yeah, this is complete bullshit. And it wasn't helping any of these kids at all. How remarkable is that, that the only reason we came to an answer was because a particular state had defied what the experts, what the CDC told us we had to do.
[00:53:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Now we have just five minutes. I have so many more questions, but there's a couple things that I wanted to get through that.
[00:53:44] Speaker B: I'll try to answer more quickly.
[00:53:46] Speaker A: Sorry, eye opening for me. You mentioned a morbidity and mortality weekly report published by the CDC which found that pediatric deaths were being over reported by 35%. So one help us unpack that. Why did it get so little attention? But also, do I correctly understand you that the MMWR will not publish any research that conflicts with the CDC guidelines? And you know, doesn't that make basically the propaganda arm of the CDC jag?
[00:54:25] Speaker B: You're touching on all my bombshells in the book. I'm glad.
This is something that almost no one in the public is aware of. But mmwr, this is like the house academic medical journal from the cdc. They have a policy that they will not publish articles that have a conclusion that conflicts with CDC policy. How remarkable is that? So you have this medical journal that essentially is a propaganda tool in some regards that if some researchers find something that directly conflicts with CDC guidance, they're not going to publish it.
So yes, indeed, that is written about mmwr. And secondarily, yes, there was a study that was done by the CDC itself earlier in the pandemic which found that 35.2% of cases that were pediatric COVID deaths had no plausible connection to being caused by Covid. This was not the primary cause of death.
It's quite remarkable that this is not a small amount. It's not like they overestimated by 5%. This is an enormous inflation of the number of pediatricians deaths attributed to Covid.
If you're looking at 35% of them, and that's just one instance, and that was conducted by the CDC themselves. So there is a whole thing about died with COVID versus died from COVID The statistical way that these deaths are counted is quite complicated. It's not as simple as one or the other. There's a lead cause of death. There are multiple causes of death. But one thing we know that to my mind is for certain is that the way that this evidence was presented to the public was far, far from what the actual statistics and evidence really were showing.
[00:56:20] Speaker A: So finally, anything that any bombshells I didn't get to touch on and anything that people going out and reading your book should, should really take away from this remarkable work.
[00:56:32] Speaker B: Well, there are so many. But I gotta, you know, I can't put everything in the end the trailer here, I gotta leave. But trust me, people will be. I've been told many times people when they read the book that quote, unquote, they want to put their Fist through a wall.
I don't know if that's. If I'm selling the book right now or if that makes people not interested. But I'll say one other thing is that in many regards, my book at the top level is really about the failure of the experts.
These models that we were shown, I have a whole large section. I call it Seductive Models, a little play on words there. But the models were these graphs where they showed cases or hospitalizations were going to go in one way, but if everyone listened and locked down and stayed home, then they would go in a different way. These were just complete bogus models that they put together. Yet our entire pandemic response was based on them.
And one of the things, just to give one little more tidbit that is almost no one knows this, is that the CDC put out an ensemble forecast from these various models. I think they did it weekly. And the interesting thing is they let anyone participate. As long as you met certain metrics and your work sort of met these criteria, you could actually participate. Your work could participate in this ensemble forecast composed of many different models. Well, lo and behold, three of the top four most accurate modelers on, on what was going to happen with the pandemic, with cases and deaths as they were going along.
Three of the top four weren't even people in public health. You had a guy who I interviewed in the book, a guy who was a software consultant. I had. There was a physicist in Canada and some. And the third one was like a financial services firm or something like that. Some group from a firm like that. They bested people from Duke, from Columbia, from the Los Alamos lab, from IHME at University of Washington, which has gotten like $100 million over the years from Bill Gates, all of these most elite institutions and people who've spent decades in their career as public health experts.
What does it mean when a random software consultant produced models that were more accurate than these people produced?
[00:59:02] Speaker A: It means that this was yet one of the reasons why we should be skeptical. When somebody makes an argument from authority and says, you must do it as I say, because I am the expert.
Because when that happens, what will be the ultimate consequence is a complete deterioration of trust in expertise. And we do actually need people who are experts in certain things. When I want to get, you know, my heart checked out, I want to.
[00:59:32] Speaker B: Go to some expert cardiologists, want to believe in experts. My book, my claim is not to say all experts are fools and everyone should just do what they want. You know, if your car is Broken. Figure it out yourself and, and work on it. Or if you need heart surgery, just find some random person. We need experts. But ultimately what the book is about is about evidence. And I walk the reader through. To me, what I think is quite fascinating when we think about what is true. How do you know what's true? Well, one of the ways is a shortcut you might think about, well, this person with a particular credential is telling me this.
That gives you an inkling that something might be true. But when you're dealing with things that are so important, like what happened across society, where the sort of master switch of society is pulled, you need more than just, well, these experts, these people with these credentials. You need evidence. And to me, that's really fascinating. And I talk about, you know, since you guys are Ayn Rand, fans of philosophy, I go into these famous empiricists in philosophy, David Hume and John Locke, and how, how did people throughout the ages think about what is true, what is evidence? And I map that onto today to give a sort of framework about how we have and have not veered from sort of what people have known for hundreds of years about how we think about empirical reality.
[01:01:02] Speaker A: It's true. I think that's one of the reasons I also particularly enjoyed the book as an objectivist thinking about how do we know and the epistemological approach of using reason to, to get to the facts of the matter. So again, can't, can't recommend this book highly enough. David, any sense of what's next for you and best place to follow you?
[01:01:26] Speaker B: I'm easy to find. My email is on my website, davidsrock.com, i'm on X.
I have a substack called silentlunch.net so I'm easy to find at any of those locations. I'm working on a few different things right now, so not exactly sure what direction I'm taking next.
[01:01:44] Speaker A: All right, well, we will be watching and perhaps we'll have you back on again someday. So thank you, David.
[01:01:53] Speaker B: Thanks so much for having me. This is really terrific.
[01:01:55] Speaker A: And thanks everyone who joined us and who asked such wonderful questions. Be sure to join us next week when returning guest Peter Worrell joins us to talk about his latest book, Intention Unlocking the Life Force Inside High Performing Entrepreneurs. We'll see you.
