The Free Press
During the pandemic, most of the media turned its back on its core obligation to question authorities, and instead became their mouthpiece. David Zweig was one of a small band of journalists who kept demanding proof about our Covid policies, and whose reporting challenged the rationale for lockdowns. We were proud to publish some of David Zweig’s breakthrough findings during the pandemic, and we are delighted to present this adapted excerpt from his new book, An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions. As prominent voices continue to defend terrible decisions made by our officials during the pandemic, Zweig’s book is the corrective we need.
In the span of one week in March 2020, the entire school system in America shut down. The academic year for more than 50 million students was over, blasting a hole in the calendar three months wide. A master switch had been flipped by the governors of every state—a vast, unprecedented exercise of authority.
While we were told the decision was based on science—and was for our own good—there was no evidence for the benefits of what would soon become lengthy school closures. Well before we shut down our schools, evidence from outside the U.S. showed that children were largely unaffected by Covid-19, and that they were not the primary drivers of transmission.
After a brief shutdown, many of Europe’s schools reopened in the spring, welcoming back millions of children, and the data show what happened next: a long decline in cases. European Union ministers announced in May, and again in June, that they had seen no negative impact on society from opening schools. Their comments should have made headlines and quelled concerns in the U.S. Instead, they were largely ignored by our officials and the mainstream media.
Our authorities began developing a long list of interventions and criteria they said were necessary before children could be let back into their classrooms. But there was no such need.
In a number of countries, including Sweden, where primary schools never closed, young children were not masked. In many regions distancing was just three feet instead of our six, or there was no distancing requirement at all. There was not a systematic test and trace program throughout Europe, and schools there, by and large, did not have sophisticated systems to clean the air. And rates of Covid infection, population densities, even classroom sizes, in countless European cities and towns, matched counterparts in America.
A major reason our authorities were able to force these unsupported interventions on children was because of a compliant media. The prestige press, including, most damagingly, The New York Times, had an almost relentless obsession with framing its articles on the pandemic and children around the potential dangers to them, and on their potential to cause vast death by transmitting the virus to others. Schools would serve as the launchpad for the calamity.
On May 5, Apoorva Mandavilli, the main Covid beat reporter for the Times, authored an article with the ominous subtitle: “Cases Could Soar in Many U.S. Communities if Schools Reopen Soon.” This article, tweeted approvingly by many other journalists, as well as public health pundits like the physician and best-selling author Eric Topol, former New York City council members, and school superintendents, opened with a leading question: “What role do children play in keeping the pandemic going?”
The same day Mandavilli’s story was published, the prominent British medical journal—known by its acronym BMJ—published a paper titled: “Children Are Not Covid-19 Super Spreaders: Time to Go Back to School.”
It’s hard to envision a more radical divergence in how children and schools were covered than between these two pieces. Academic research shows that the Times-BMJ split that day is a microcosm of the larger phenomenon of inflammatory American media coverage of the pandemic versus that of media outside the U.S.
It didn’t take long for the harm being done to American children left to spend the day alone on laptops (for those who even had them) to become evident. Millions of kids were suffering academically, physically, and psychologically. A distressing number were disappearing from the system entirely. An April survey of teachers found that one in five students learning from a home computer never logged on or were sufficiently disconnected that they were deemed to essentially be truants.
So it was welcome when the American Academy of Pediatrics released guidance in June 2020 that argued forcefully and unambiguously for opening schools. “All policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school,” the guidance stated. “The importance of in-person learning is well-documented, and there is already evidence of the negative impacts on children because of school closures in the spring of 2020.” The AAP also challenged the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s onerous recommendation that children should be six feet apart, and suggested that three feet was acceptable.
“The notion of opening schools was seen as explicitly part of Trump’s ‘open everything up’ campaign, and in the process became radioactive to many liberals and much of the intelligentsia.”
Then, on July 6, President Trump tweeted the following: “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!”
Whatever momentum that began to build from the few op-eds and experts arguing for kids to be back in school immediately met an indomitable headwind. The notion of opening schools was now seen as explicitly part of Trump’s “open everything up” campaign, and in the process became radioactive to many liberals and much of the intelligentsia.
Just four days after Trump’s thunderous tweet, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a statement that was an about-face on the guidance it had issued only 11 days earlier. It dropped its opposition to the distancing guidance from the CDC that was so restrictive it meant that schools would remain closed or only be partially open. Now the AAP fell in step with the CDC and the broader public health establishment’s narrative that children should not be allowed to closely interact. The new statement also emphasized the need for “substantial” amounts of money for schools to open.
The most dramatic parting of ways from the original AAP guidance was not the new text itself, but its authorship. The new guidance was released as a joint statement from the AAP with the School Superintendents Association, and both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, the two largest teachers’ unions in the country.
Against this backdrop, a strange phenomenon occurred for me. Starting in early May 2020, I had been writing contrarian pieces about our pandemic response for Wired and other publications, and my inbox filled with a steady stream of emails from doctors—a pediatric immunologist, the editor of a leading pediatric medical journal, the head of pediatrics at a major hospital chain, among many rank-and-file physicians—and nonmedical people as well. Nearly all of them thanked me then said some variation of, “I’m a liberal but . . .” or “I didn’t vote for Trump but . . .” and would go on to say they were dismayed by the lack of critical thinking and discussion regarding the onerous mitigations imposed on children, most importantly school closures.
On a call with a dissident pediatrician who reached out to me, I asked how his colleagues responded to his views. He replied, “I don’t talk about this at work. Total third rail.” A small but growing underground of dissenting doctors and health professionals (including former CDC employees) from around the country began talking to each other, and me, with the agreement all conversations were off the record. We all struggled with the alienation that came with being a heretic—they from their medical colleagues, I from the legacy media.
It was deeply troubling that the physicians—many of whom had expertise of specific relevance to the pandemic—were afraid to speak out. Many of them told me they were scared into silence. Some had been reprimanded by superiors for publicly questioning, either on social media or via interviews with the press, the restrictions on children and school closures, or for pointing out inconvenient data.
Many days my phone would ping constantly with texts coming in from sources—most of whom were highly placed experts at esteemed institutions—complaining about the latest guidance or announcement from New York governor Andrew Cuomo, California governor Gavin Newsom, or head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci. They complained about articles in The New York Times they felt misrepresented risks to children or incorrectly summarized recent studies. This gave me a frustrating, and lonely, insight into how the public perception of uniformity within the health establishment—trumpeted by that very establishment—was incorrect.
Heading into fall of 2020, many teachers unions were adamant about not returning to the classroom. In Washington, D.C., teachers piled body bags and placed fake tombstones, inscribed with “RIP Favorite Teacher,” among other epitaphs, outside school system offices. In Milwaukee, the teachers union tweeted “paying tribute to those whom undoubtedly will die,” along with photos of gravestones created by art teachers that said, “Here lies a third grade student from Green Bay,” and “RIP grandma caught Covid helping grandkids with homework.”
Then a sort of nationwide uncontrolled experiment got underway when (mostly) red states and regions started opening while (mostly) blue states and regions remained closed—or open for so few hours and with so many restrictions, they might as well have remained shut. The results were brazen and inequitable: For more than a year, our country systematically denied an essential service to some children while providing it to others.
And today, millions of children are still paying the price.
One of the most heartbreaking consequences of school closures was the rise in child abuse. Children in unsafe homes, who normally would have had the respite of school, found themselves instead essentially locked inside with abusive adults for extended periods. A pediatrician told me of one child she treated who, alone all day with an abusive stepparent, was beaten with an electrical cord.
There are more than seven million students in the country with various disabilities who qualify for an individualized education program, many of which require in-person services. But these children with physical and cognitive issues that often made dealing with computers challenging were left at home and expected to sit alone and learn lessons on a screen, cruelly dooming them to failure.
The number of children seeking emergency mental health services, some who required immediate hospitalization, spiked from 2019 to 2020, and hospitals reported not having enough pediatric beds to handle the crisis.
“One of the most heartbreaking consequences of school closures was the rise in child abuse. Children in unsafe homes, who normally would have had the respite of school, found themselves instead essentially locked inside with abusive adults for extended periods. A pediatrician told me of one child she treated who, alone all day with an abusive stepparent, was beaten with an electrical cord.”
And of course academic performance suffered dramatic drop-offs, effects we continue to see to this day. The downstream consequences of poor academic performance are vast. Countless children left the school system altogether. There is a wealth of evidence that shows a correlation between educational attainment and lifetime earning potential.
Nevermind the shuttered playgrounds, canceled proms, and terminated athletics programs.
During and even after the pandemic a common sentiment was expressed, often as a rejoinder to someone pointing out the harms to kids from being kept out of school, that “kids are resilient.” “Resilient” became a kind of mantra, a way for the people responsible for this fiasco to absolve themselves. When Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, was asked in a February 2021 interview if there was a point that kids could be out of school so long that the losses were irrecoverable, she answered, “No. Kids are resilient.”
Millions of American children were mistreated for a significant chunk of their lives because the media and the health authorities failed in their most basic duties of providing the public with accurate information based on reliable evidence. In testimony before Congress in 2024, Fauci, who had repeatedly promoted the value of six feet of distancing during the pandemic, admitted that this was a “decision that wasn’t based on data” and “it just sort of appeared.”
One of the tragedies of this is that it didn’t have to happen; the facts were readily available. Millions of kids in Europe were safely in school full time, without masks, without barriers between them, without six feet of distancing. And schools were open right here in the U.S., many without any of these measures either. I wrote an article for New York magazine, published October 2020, that presented the statistical evidence on schools in Westchester County, New York: Districts that were open full time had no difference in case rates from those that were closed or in part-time “hybrid” schedules.
I naively thought that article would change everything. But it turned out evidence meant nothing to school decision-makers. This was about feelings, I was told. And some people didn’t “feel” safe.
The establishment narrative today is that closing schools was regrettable, but a reasonable decision during a chaotic time. But, in reality, evidence that showed schools were not driving transmission—and that they could be open without impacting the community—was available and known in real time. In the end, there was no benefit to keeping schools closed for so-called safety reasons out of “an abundance of caution.” And there were no reasonable trade-offs in doing so. There were just harms.
David Zweig is an investigative journalist and author. His latest book is An Abundance of Caution, about the catastrophic long-term school closures, and other policy failures, during the pandemic. His Substack is SilentLunch.net.
Order An Abundance of Caution here.