Ep 1181 | Silent Lunch & Stolen Childhoods: The Truth About School Shutdowns | Guest: David Zweig

Summary

Podcast Summary: Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 1181 | Silent Lunch & Stolen Childhoods: The Truth About School Shutdowns

Host: Allie Beth Stuckey
Guest: David Zweig
Release Date: April 30, 2025
Podcast Network: Blaze Podcast Network

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1. Introduction to David Zweig and His Work

Allie Beth Stuckey welcomes investigative journalist David Zweig to discuss his groundbreaking new book, An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and A Story of Bad Decisions. Zweig is renowned for his 2021 article in New York Magazine, which challenged the prevailing narrative that widespread masking in schools effectively curbed the spread of COVID-19.

[00:01] Ali Stuckey: "David Zweig published an article in New York magazine in 2021 debunking the myth that widespread masking at schools is preventing the spread of COVID. He is here today talking about his incredible new book... You are going to learn so much."

2. Realization and Investigation into Public Health Policies

Zweig shares his initial compliance with pandemic measures, influenced by mainstream experts. However, witnessing a significant drop in COVID-19 cases in New York by April 2021 without a corresponding return to normalcy raised red flags for him.

[02:10] David Zweig: "By the end of April, cases in New York had fallen by something like 50% since like a peak in early April... That's when I realized something was really wrong."

This discrepancy between achieved goals and ongoing restrictions prompted Zweig to investigate further, leading him to question the integrity of public health policies.

3. Media's Role and Lack of Critical Investigation

Zweig criticizes the media for uncritically accepting and disseminating public health officials' guidelines without sufficient scrutiny. He emphasizes the absence of dissenting voices within mainstream outlets during the pandemic.

[06:44] David Zweig: "The media, even for people who don't like the New York Times or who don't want to watch CBS or whatever it may be that still is influencing the culture, that still has an enormous impact... the experts were following theory."

He highlights how journalists often relied on anecdotal evidence and emotional narratives rather than comprehensive data analysis.

4. European School Reopenings as Empirical Evidence Ignored

A pivotal moment in Zweig's investigation was observing the reopening of schools across 22 European countries without a corresponding surge in COVID-19 cases. This empirical evidence was largely ignored by American media and public health authorities.

[13:14] David Zweig: "Millions of children started going back to school in Europe, 22 countries... How is it possible that this isn't a headline in every newspaper in the country?"

Despite differing protocols—such as less stringent mask mandates and reduced distancing measures in Europe—American institutions maintained stricter guidelines, questioning their own efficacy.

5. CDC and Mask Mandates Critique

Zweig delves into specific studies, particularly those conducted by the CDC, which he argues were methodologically flawed and misleading. He recounts an instance where official COVID-19 data from Arizona contradicted the CDC's published findings on mask effectiveness.

[18:51] David Zweig: "The CDC wrote back to me. We've looked at the study, and there are no errors. And that's something that you don't recover from, or at least for me."

This exchange underscored his belief that public health authorities were either intentionally obfuscating data or operating with gross incompetence.

6. Toxic Empathy and Emotional Manipulation in Media

Allie introduces the concept of "toxic empathy," where emotional storytelling in media manipulates public sentiment, leading to policy support not based on facts but on emotional triggers.

[26:03] Ali Stuckey: "Toxic empathy... when it comes to abortion, when it comes to so many other subjects... it's just triggering your empathy."

Zweig agrees, explaining how this strategy entrenched political divides and prevented rational discourse.

[27:56] Ali Stuckey: "Toxic empathy... does not promote truth but rather emotional extortion."

7. Lasting Harm on Children and Society

Zweig elaborates on the multifaceted harms caused by prolonged school closures and strict mask mandates, particularly on children from underprivileged backgrounds. He discusses increased instances of child abuse, mental health issues, and educational setbacks.

[49:57] David Zweig: "Poor people, black kids, brown kids... those are the kids who got harmed the most because of lengthy school closures in America."

He also touches on the broader societal impacts, such as the erosion of critical thinking and the imposition of one group's values over another's well-being.

8. The Intersection of Politics and Public Health

The conversation highlights how political motivations, especially anti-Trump sentiments, influenced public health decisions. Zweig argues that policies were not solely based on scientific data but were intertwined with class and political agendas.

[39:37] David Zweig: "It's like the American Academy of Pediatrics reversed its guidance after the Trump thing... completely politicized."

He points out the socioeconomic disparities exacerbated by these policies, where the upper-middle class could afford the luxury of staying home while essential workers bore the brunt of the restrictions.

9. Personal Impact and Conclusion

Both hosts share personal anecdotes illustrating the profound and lasting impacts of pandemic policies on families and individuals. Zweig emphasizes the necessity of documenting these events to prevent future occurrences and to acknowledge the irreparable damage done.

[55:08] Ali Stuckey: "Think about the memories that were lost, the quality time that was not spent because I wouldn't put my 2-year-old in a mask."

Zweig advocates for a thorough understanding of these failures to foster accountability and resilience against future crises.

[62:20] Ali Stuckey: "Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is refuse to say that two plus two is five."

[63:21] David Zweig: "Thanks, Ali. Appreciate it."

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Allie Beth Stuckey [00:01]: "You are going to learn so much."

• David Zweig [02:10]: "That's when I realized something was really wrong."

• David Zweig [06:44]: "The media... still has an enormous impact."

• David Zweig [13:14]: "How is it possible that this isn't a headline in every newspaper in the country?"

• David Zweig [18:51]: "We've looked at the study, and there are no errors."

• Allie Beth Stuckey [26:03]: "Toxic empathy... triggers your empathy."

• David Zweig [49:57]: "Those are the kids who got harmed the most because of lengthy school closures in America."

• David Zweig [39:37]: "It's completely politicized."

• Allie Beth Stuckey [55:08]: "Think about the memories that were lost."

• Allie Beth Stuckey [62:20]: "Refuse to say that two plus two is five."

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Conclusion

This episode of Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey offers a critical examination of the interplay between public health policies, media narratives, and political motivations during the COVID-19 pandemic. David Zweig's insights shed light on the overlooked consequences of school shutdowns and mask mandates, emphasizing the long-term societal and personal harms inflicted, especially on children from marginalized communities. The conversation underscores the importance of transparency, accountability, and diverse ideological representation within public institutions to prevent such missteps in the future.

For those interested in a deeper exploration of these themes, David Zweig's book, An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and A Story of Bad Decisions, provides a comprehensive analysis supported by extensive research and case studies.

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Note: This summary excludes sponsorship segments and non-content sections to focus on the substantive discussions between Allie Beth Stuckey and David Zweig.

Transcript

[Ali Stuckey]

Investigative journalist David Zweig published an article in New York magazine in 2021 debunking the myth that widespread masking at schools is preventing the spread of COVID And he is here today talking about his incredible new book called An Abundance of Caution. And he gives us a behind the scenes look at how our public health apparatus, how our, how our politicians worked together to hide the truth about COVID and COVID policies. Oh, my goodness. This is an incredible conversation. I learned so much. I know that you are going to appreciate his clarity and his courage. And this is a very timely conversation with everything that is going on. So buckle up. You are going to learn so much. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to good ranchers.com, use code ALI at checkout. That's good adventures.com code ALI. David, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. For those who may not know, can you tell us who you are and what you do?

[David Zweig]

Sure. My name's David Zweig. I'm an investigative journalist and author and I'm here to speak with you about my new book, An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, the Virus and A Story of Bad Decisions.

[Ali Stuckey]

Yes. When you reached out to me, I recognized your name immediately because I remember using your articles when I was talking about masks in. Was it 2021 or 2022?

[David Zweig]

Probably 2021, I think.

[Ali Stuckey]

Yes. And the reason why they were so instrumental is because suddenly we had a voice in the mainstream in New York Magazine, the Atlantic and elsewhere saying our masking policy, our school shutdown policy, it doesn't seem to be working. So can we back up to then? How did all of that come about for you?

[David Zweig]

Yeah, I live in the New York area, so like most people in my area when kind of things first shut down, I was fully on board and compliant with everything. I'm a little embarrassed to admit maybe there was even some wiping down of groceries in the. In the first few days.

[Ali Stuckey]

Me too.

[David Zweig]

Okay. Right. Because I was listening to the experts.

[Ali Stuckey]

Yeah.

[David Zweig]

And we were going, going along. And as your audience probably knows and remembers, we were given 15 days to slow the spread. Remember that slogan? And it was also flatten the curve. And you might remember they showed basically a graph where if everyone listened to their instructions and followed orders, then it would be this gentle slope of cases. But if you didn't listen, there'd be this big spike and it would overwhelm the hospitals. Well, by the end of April, I was walking with a friend of mine and we were just Recounting how miserable and absurd remote learning was. It was just, it was an abject failure. Basically from day one, it was obvious this wasn't going to work long term, but it was explained to us this was a trade off to keep people safe, to prevent the hospitals from being overwhelmed. So even though it was bad, you know, we went along. So something interesting happened, though. By the end of April, cases in New York had fallen by something like 50% since like a peak in early April. And I said to my friend, we did it, man. We flattened the curve, I guess. What do you think they're going to like open schools like next week or something? What's going on?

[Ali Stuckey]

Yeah.

[David Zweig]

And he was like, dave, they're not going back. And that's when I realized something was really wrong because we were told to do something, we all filed the instructions and we achieved the goal. And then they just moved the proverbial goalpost at that point. And that's when for me, as someone who's an investigator and I've spent a lot of time before the pandemic, I'm very familiar with talking with academics and scientists, reading journals about scientific articles. I was. Had this sense, I'm like, I better start looking into this because something's strange here because they basically lied and I'm not seeing anyone really much noise about this. This is kind of strange.

[Ali Stuckey]

Yeah.

[David Zweig]

So that set me on the path to trying to investigate things myself because I wasn't seeing any real questioning of what was going on within the media. And eventually I was like, well, I'm in the media, I guess I'll have to do this.

[Ali Stuckey]

And did you consider yourself progressive or like Democrat? Is that how you've politically identified in the past?

[David Zweig]

I would say most of my adult life I've been left leaning. I've always identified as an independent, although in New York you can't vote in a primary unless you're with a party. So from time to time I would just have an affiliation. But I've always leaned left politically. We can get into this if you want, but, and, but still been an independent thinker. I'm not like just kind of like a no matter what Democrat.

[Ali Stuckey]

Clearly. Clearly. Yeah.

[David Zweig]

So I always had a little bit of this independent or more than a little streak. But nevertheless, that's where I leaned. After my experience during the pandemic with the research I did, I have to say it's. My political leaning is completely shattered at this point. I don't lean toward the right either, but my faith and when people read this book. I mean, perhaps your audience already has cynical viewpoint on some of public health and larger institutions. It will be impossible for someone to read this and not have their faith completely shaken in our expert class. The book really is about the failure of the expert class.

[Ali Stuckey]

I'm so interested in that time for you when you looked around and you said, okay, something doesn't seem right. This doesn't seem to change. It doesn't seem to be corresponding with the data we see. A lot of people in the media at that moment said, well, you know what? I think I'm going to shut up about it because I don't want to be accused of killing grandma or killing kids. And they must know what they're talking about. But there was something in you. Maybe it was that independent streak. Maybe it's just because you love digging for truth. That said, you know, I'm not gonna be quiet about this, and this really bothers me, and I'm gonna do something about that. Where do you think that came from?

[David Zweig]

Yeah, it's a really good question because initially I just wanted to find out what was going on. I was in the middle of writing a book. I was under contract, totally different topic, obviously. And I just needed to know what was happening because the information we were being given didn't match. Again, that moment where it was like, we flatten the curve. Cases have dropped 50%. What's going on? Why aren't the kids going back to school? So for me, I just needed to satisfy my own curiosity. But then that shifted toward a sort of a professional goal when it was clear that no one else was covering this. And I guess I think there's just, you know, if you're curious about, like, my psychology or something. Yeah, I guess maybe part of me has always felt a little alienated and. And that degree of alienation, I think has some downside. But it also has enabled me to be really tolerant of being in an out group. Whereas most people naturally don't want to be cast out. They want their peers to like them. I'd prefer if people liked me. I'd prefer to be in group, but I'm willing to not be in the group. I don't care. I think also part of it maybe, and we can get into this, like, most of the people in the media are from a particular background. They went to fancy schools. I went to a state school. I wasn't a straight A student. I didn't follow this particular trajectory that so many of those people followed. So I think that also sort of set me apart. And it's one of the things that I think is so important about if we want to talk about how to restore trust in some of our institutions, in particular health institutions, but others as well, that to me, what you really need is there's so much talk about dei, but there needs to be diversity of ideology, of political views and other types of diversity. That's what really matters in my view is how people think differently. And unfortunately, and what I talk a lot about in the book, and I explain through lots of, I think really interesting examples throughout time, is how group think when people are within like a certain tribe is extraordinarily powerful. And unfortunately, people within the public health establishment, almost everyone there leans left. Almost everyone within the legacy media leans to the left. So when you have these two really influential institutions that were working basically together during the pandemic, most of those people, again, going back to what I was saying, how did they get there? How do you get to the New York Times? Well, you probably got straight A's in school, school. Then you went to Yale or Brown, then maybe you went to Columbia journalism school. Then you wind up there. All these people, not all, most of them followed a similar path to get to where they are. And that path involved not being a rabble rouser, not being an iconoclast. And that's within medicine as well. Medicine self selects for people who are really smart, usually who work really hard. Those are good traits. That's really important for a doctor. But it also selects for rule followers. You know, when you are in, when you're a resident, you can't just ignore the attending. You know, you have to file. You're not just going to go against all of your peers if they're saying something. So you have these institutions composed of a certain type of person with a certain type of political leaning and a way that they're, they all kind of got to where they are, the success they had by kind of staying within the group. And that's ultimately, I think what I show in the book is that's really dangerous when you have this one type of personality type. Again, I'm generalizing here, but that's more or less what happened. And ultimately it took a small number of people who are outside or who could tolerate being outside that group to push back against some of the things that they were doing and saying. Because unfortunately our public health institutions really misled the American public on a variety of things within the pandemic. But what I was particularly focused on is on children in schools. And the information from Those authorities was not questioned by the most prestigious media institutions in our country. So that's much of my book talks about the sort of dynamic, like how do the gears of our society turn? When your audience is thinking about, oh, there's some narrative going on now in the media or just in the country, how does that happen? How does that create? That's what my book shows. It's. It takes place during the pandemic, but that's really just the backdrop to understand decision making and narrative formation.

[Ali Stuckey]

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[David Zweig]

I would say very early it was obvious that children were not at any great risk from the virus. It was well established in the beginning. And so I just kept collecting more and more data to support that idea. I started talking with scientists, mostly in Europe, because they weren't doing this in America, but speaking with experts in Europe. And then the next question was, well, kids can be, quote, unquote, super spreaders. So the beginning sort of narrative was kids are in grave danger or they might be. We can't open schools. Then that shifted toward, well, maybe kids are okay, but they're going to kill their grandmother, they're going to kill teachers. So one of the main pivot points for me was toward the end of April and the beginning of May, millions of children started going back to school in Europe, 22 countries. Ali reopened in Europe, started reopening their schools. 22 countries, okay. And in May there was a meeting at the EU of education ministers. And in that meeting they said, we have not observed any negative consequences of schools reopening. We're not seeing anything with case rates or stuff like that. They met a second time in June. They had the same determination. We haven't observed anything. Now just like pause for a moment on this. This is not like a weird, like a tiny schoolhouse in the middle of Mongolia, you know, with 10 kids. We're talking about millions of kids in school in developed countries, not dissimilar from America. And this was virtually non existent in the media. This, this meeting. And I couldn't believe it. I watched this video over and over because I'm like, how is it possible that this isn't a headline in every newspaper in the country? Why isn't this on every single TV station? There's this, this is it. The main argument was kids are going to be putting other people in danger. Well, here it is. We have this real world experiment. You don't even need to do a contrived experiment. We have millions of kids. And this was ignored, Ali. It was ignored by the media, by and large. And it was ignored by our experts, the health officials. How could that be? So I ultimately wrote about the meetings myself, but I was just one voice within this. But that was one of the main points where I was, where I was like, something is extraordinarily wrong. That what we would call empirical evidence, which means evidence that you can see and experience yourself. That empirical evidence was being ignored. And instead the officials were following theory. They made up all sorts of contrived reasons. Oh, it's because that's Europe. That doesn't count. They're doing that. We need to wear masks. We need to have a HEPA filter, we need to have six feet of distancing. None of these things, by the way Ali were done across the board in Europe. They did not follow six feet of distancing there across the board. Many of the schools there were doing 3ft or 1 meter or nothing at all. Kids there, the ECDC, that's Europe's version of the CDC, they recommended against kids in primary school wearing masks. So forget about us saying two year olds had to wear a mask. They didn't even want them doing it there. They weren't following. There was a whole thing. I have a long section in my book about HEPA filters because it drove me crazy that schools in America, some of them literally were not opened because teachers unions or others were demanding that they have a HEPA filter. That's like a special filter on like air conditioning unit.

[Ali Stuckey]

Remember, the teachers unions make it a huge deal.

[David Zweig]

They don't use those in Europe. By and large, that would be very, very rare. Schools didn't have HEPA filters. So again, none of these things that we were told were critical to make school safe to open, none of them were being used across the board in Europe. And cases there, this is what happened to cases after they opened schools. They went down like this. Now, I'm not suggesting that opening schools causes cases to go down, but what that does suggest, of course, is that children were not super spreaders, schools were not driving the pandemic. And we can get into why that is. But the point is the evidence was there that this wasn't dangerous, this wasn't increasing cases, and it was ignored and it was dismissed with these contrived reasons. And for me, as a dad and as an investigator and a journalist, it was unacceptable.

[Ali Stuckey]

I remember there was a study, maybe it was around 2021, maybe 2022, that it was a CDC study and everyone was pointing to it saying, see these schools over here that wear masks, they're having fewer deaths in their community in these schools over here. And I remember you debunked that. You pointed out that journalists were kind of just looking at the abstract, decontextualizing it and report that and not digging into the study. Right?

[David Zweig]

Yeah. There's actually more than one study, unfortunately, by the CDC that purported that mask mandates were reducing community transmission or school transmission. And the evidence, I can't emphasize this enough, like I approach this topic apolitically, like I don't have an agenda. And you know, I'm not coming at it from one side or another. The reality is the CDC's science that they conducted or that they used to support their positions was incredibly poor and was incredibly misleading. I know that's hard for some people to believe. Maybe not your audience.

[Ali Stuckey]

Not my audience.

[David Zweig]

Right. But there are a lot of people who, you know, including me, my faith was, you know, these were the good guys, these are public health experts. Why would they lie to us? Why Would they, you know, manipulate something one way or another? So, just very briefly, this masking study that I had written about, there was a study done in Arizona. And I won't get into all the details, but at one point I got official data from the state of Arizona and from the counties that they were looking at. These were official numbers from the source, from the government there in Arizona. And the numbers differed from what was in the study that the CDC published. And these difference mattered a lot regarding how they came up with their findings. There were many, many things wrong with the study. But this was one thing where it wasn't my opinion, it wasn't my interpretation, because someone could argue about that. Well, who are you to say that the analysis is wrong? This was just, these are the data and they're different. So I reached out to the CDC and I said, hey, I have this data. This is from the state of Arizona. This is the official numbers, and it's different from what's in your study. How can that be? What do you have to say about this? And they wrote back to me. We've looked at the study, and there are no errors. And that's something that you don't recover from, or at least for me. And so when you're asking about these moments, it's the European schools opening. This was yet another moment where after that, I mean, you can't go back. I mean, it was an extraordinary moment. I mean, they were lying through their teeth when they said that to me. Or if they weren't, then they are so incompetent that they should not be in that field at all to have that response. It was quite stunning. And yet, as you point, as we're sort of touching on, much of my book is about the media. A lot of it's about evidence and about understanding how things work. But media, even for people who don't like the New York Times or who don't want to watch CBS or whatever it may be that still is influencing the culture, that still has an enormous impact. And then maybe even if you don't like it, then part of your effort then has to become, how do we counter these messages? So, again, one of the things that I think is so important about the book is I hope it will arm readers with information and an understanding about what I would call, like, the anatomy of how this thing looks and how it works. And as a writer, I was occupying this really strange, rare lane where I was still writing within some of these sort of legacy media publications, but I was the lone voice in pushing Back against what was an accepted view. Yeah, it was rare.

[Ali Stuckey]

And that's exactly what I was about to ask you about New York Magazine. I think that was the first article I saw. But you had written, you know, you wrote for Wired. And I was surprised that New York magazine was publishing something like this. I don't know what else they had published on Covid, but other mainstream outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post had been purveyors of a lot of the information that you're talking about kind of uncritically, just saying this is what the CDC says and so it must be true that informs policy, as you said. Were you surprised when you started getting published by these mainstream outlets as the lone critical voice?

[David Zweig]

Well, I was more surprised in the beginning when I had pitched a bunch of places. And look, as a freelance writer, no one owes me a response. No one owes me, you know, a guarantee. It's not easy. But I had written for them, I had contacts. Shortly before I started, I wrote my first piece and Wired, I had what I believe was the most read piece in the entire New York Times for at least a day, if not a couple days. It was about a newlywed who got stranded, newlywed couple who got stranded in the Maldives once, like the world shut down. And it was very. So these people knew who I was. And the way that I was able to sort of break that kind of wall, if you will, in a few publications was that I tend to not write things that are based on anecdote. A lot of the way journalism works, you have one person or maybe a few, there's a profile, it's personal, it's very effective. And then you use that to build your broader argument. You may bring in some statistics or studies. I don't do that generally. I just try to pound you with here's the information. And I just have a bullet list when I'm pitching an editor. Here's what I've got. And thank God there were at least a few editors at these places who had the courage and the ability internally to push back against kind of an accepted viewpoint because they read my pitch and they're like, this is kind of irrefutable what this guy is showing us. So I think that's the way that I was able to break through. Because other writers who I'm friendly with who are writing for more sort of right leaning publications or for substacks, they're like, how are you pulling this off? And that's even now with my book, which is published by mit. Press. This is very, very much within. That's about as within academia and the left as you can get. But I think they respect that my journalism is grounded in research. It doesn't mean I don't make mistakes. But by and large, I support everything I say. I have hundreds of endnotes in my book because I don't ever want to make a claim where someone's going to read and be like, where did he get that from? Because that's my main criticism of what the media did. Instead of there's this thing in philosophy, they call it an argument from authority, which I see you nodding. Right, which is. It's a logical fallacy. It means you shouldn't believe someone just because of their credentials, just because someone you know. And unfortunately, that's what the media did by and large, throughout the pandemic that they simply quoted, oh, Anthony Fauci says this, or they sometimes wouldn't even quote someone. It would just say, experts say, and then they had a list of things. But there was no evidence to support this. The journalists weren't doing their most basic job, which is to be skeptical of claims by people in power and to either force them to provide evidence or to investigate it yourself. But they didn't. So we had essentially a country where the people in charge were like this, kind of infantilizing the public, where this finger wagging sort of, mom, you need to listen to us and do what we say. It's almost like a mom, because I said so. That's essentially what we were told. It was the because I said so, do this. Because they weren't providing any evidence. And when they did provide evidence, it was very, very poorly supported.

[Ali Stuckey]

Oh, man. There's so much that I could analyze in that. I think that progressives suffer from misplaced mothering in a lot of ways. They actually take up social justice causes as a way to channel the instinct of mothering. And it leads to a lot of, I think, misleading or actually dangerous policies. But one of the foremost, I think.

[David Zweig]

That'S a fair hypothesis and my book would be strong support for that hypothesis.

[Ali Stuckey]

Yes, go on. And even though we don't, I'm sure that there are plenty of things that we don't agree with culturally, politically. The formula that you articulated about journalists kind of taking an anecdot supports the conclusion that they already have. That pulls at the heartstrings. The story pulls at the heartstrings. So when it comes to Covid, maybe it's a grandma who died because her child came home from school and had Covid. And then they go within and they sprinkle in the supporting facts. And I talk about that not to promote my book, but in toxic empathy when it comes to abortion, when it comes to so many other subjects, that is how a lot of these outlets will write their stories. It's not just peppering you with facts, it's starting with a story that is triggering your empathy. And then they've already got you, really. And then all of the, like, the supporting facts are just. It's kind of icing on the cake that makes you feel justified and righteous in your empathy, and then that leads you to vote a certain way and to support certain policies that may not actually be rooted in truth. And I saw that a lot with COVID It was emotional extortion. Do you want my grandma to die? What about this one 6 year old who also has asthma and is on a ventilator, you not wearing a mask is causing them to die. And most people cannot withstand that to the point of digging into the facts because it's too uncomfortable. And it's like the payoff for digging into the facts and creating that relational tension with the people who are blaming them for like the potential death of thousands of people. It's not enough. It's not enough. So most people just buckle under the pressure and say, well, I want to keep the peace as much as I can, but if everyone does that, we're in a really dangerous place. Right.

[David Zweig]

Which is exactly what happened. That's such a wonderful phrase, by the way. Toxic empathy. It's great. I mean, it's so.

[Ali Stuckey]

Not everyone thinks so, really. Well, progressives definitely don't.

[David Zweig]

I think it very accurately describes a sort of emotional manipulation. And then people feel vertical. I'm good, you're bad, I'm so good, you're bad. And when. So to have an anecdote that triggers someone emotionally, then they. And the problem is this began with at the early part of the pandemic where we were told certain things about certain risks. And there's a thing called the primacy effect, where when you're told something initially that tends to calcify for people. And it's very, very hard, even when people are presented with new information, to unwind what you've already kind of that feeling you've already established in your mind or in your heart. So even though there was tons of information and I was trying my darndest to get it out there and other people were as well, it didn't matter. That's one part of it is the toxic Empathy, as you're describing. The other part simply is that, that opening schools and then more broadly opening things up. But in particular, what was so damaging with schools was that this became very quickly coded as right wing. And once something got again with this calcification, once it was coded as right wing, again, these themes that I'm talking about with tribalism and groupthink, people, it was radioactive. Trump tweeted in July of 2020, something to the effect of open the schools in the fall. It was all caps with a bunch of exclamation points. Once he did that, he ensured that schools in half the country would remain closed. Because this was what I call like Newtonian physics. It's every action has the equal and opposite reaction. They had to react against it, especially.

[Ali Stuckey]

In an election year.

[David Zweig]

Exactly. So he and the American Academy of Pediatrics put out guidance that was very aggressive is not the right word, but very, very strenuously said, kids need to be in school. Don't even worry about six feet of distancing. If you do three feet, that's fine. It's not worth it to keep them out of school just for three versus six. They said, get them in there. After Trump's tweet, almost immediately after the AAP reversed its guidance, gone was this idea of don't worry about the six feet of distancing. Gone was the idea of no matter what, get them in. Instead, they said, said, listen to the experts. And they said, schools need a lot of money. We're going to need an enormous amount of resources to open the schools. And then the third piece of that is who authored this new statement with them. It was co authored by the two largest teachers unions in the country. So it was, and I have many.

[Ali Stuckey]

Examples, predominantly our Democrats and wanted Joe Biden to win.

[David Zweig]

Oh, yeah. I mean, Jill Biden's like first meeting in the White House was with the, the heads of the two largest teachers unions. There's Weingarten and Randy Weingarten and at the time, Becky Pringle. There's no ambiguity about the political leanings. And I have lots of stats in my book about, you know, donations and money. There's no, there's no ambiguity of where, of where their political allegiance lies. And they say that themselves. So this was the response in America was completely politicized. And to me, one of, one of the ironies is that the left generally views itself as a champion of the underprivileged. This is how they position themselves. But yet the policies that the left advocated for harmed the very people that they ostensibly cared about the most. Poor people, black kids, brown kids. Those are the kids who got harmed the most because of lengthy school closures in America and to a lesser degree, a lot of these other policies, the mask mandates, the hybrid schedules and all this other nonsense that harmed those kids the most. And it's one of the most tragic ironies of the pandemic and I think something that people on the left have not reckoned with.

[Ali Stuckey]

All right, want to remind y'all about Share the arrows share the arrows 2025 brought to you by our friends at Carly Jean Los Angeles. And it is going to be such an amazing event this year. We've got Elisa Childers, we've got Ginger Duggar Volo, Shauna Holman and Taylor Dukes that will be on a really unique and compelling health panel. We've got Katie Faust. We will be led in worship by the incredible Francesca Battistelli, Grammy award winning artist. I don't know of another Christian women's conference like this one. I'm sure there are some other great ones out there. But this level of apologetics, of theology, of challenging teaching, equipping, teaching for women, no matter what life stage you are in, whether you are a mom, a grandmother, whether you are single, it is just going to be such an edifying equipping day. You will walk out of there having so much clarity and feeling so much courage. Go to share the arrows.com We've got VIP tickets, we've got regular tickets. Bring your small group, bring your mother in law, your sisters, your friends. It's going to be amazing. October 11th Dallas, Texas this share the arrows.com tell us more about what you found out about the mechanics of public health. You said it kind of shattered your faith in our public health apparatus. What do you mean by that?

[David Zweig]

Well, something like that experience with emailing with the cdc and they're just, you know, the term gaslighting gets used a lot. But I mean they were full of it and they knew it. I don't know if I try not to curse on your program, making an effort, something like that, you don't recover from. And it was very clear that these people within these institutions were afraid. Most of them, people just go along. Most physicians don't read studies. They might look at an abstract and that's it. And instead but if you got into a debate with someone or an argument, they would say, well, I'm gonna listen to my doctor, I'm not listening to you. Well, it's like, sorry, your suburban pediatrician actually doesn't know anything about mask mandates. They also don't know anything about studies on viral mitigation. They just don't. And that doesn't mean they're not a good pediatrician taking care of the, you know, various things that you do in that practice. But the idea that, like, regular doctors had a clue about any of this stuff was farcical. But this was the sort of like a mic drop that you couldn't argue with them, that there was this sort of almost like this insular idea about who were the experts we were supposed to listen to and no one else could be listened to. And you know, two points on that. One of them is that touching on this idea when I mentioned about how the American Academy of Pediatrics reversed its guidance after the Trump thing, I also talk about in my book that once I started writing a bunch of these articles that were in these kind of legacy media outlets, but that very much were against the established view, I started having people emailing me and contacting me from around the country. And included in that list of people were a lot of doctors and even former CDC officials. And many of them the emails would start out with, thank you so much for writing this. I agree with what you're saying. I don't think this is right. The school should be open. This is harming kids. I don't think there's any benefit. The mask mandates are crazy, whatever it may be. And they said, but all of this is off the record, can't talk about it. And the reason was obvious, is because they didn't want to be cast out of their group. And I'm sympathetic to it to some degree. Look, if you spend all these years as a physician going to medical school, this is how you pay your mortgage. Not everyone has the type of, either professionally or socially, the type of personality to tolerate being cast out. But I'll tell you something else. A number of them also were explicitly told by administrators, and these are people, by the way, at top university hospitals in the country at some of our most prestigious institutions. And their boss or the administrator said, do not speak publicly against the CDC or Anthony Fauci or Deborah Birx. You are not allowed to do it full stop. So what our country was experiencing was essentially a manufactured consensus because we were repeatedly told, well, this is what the experts say. But we weren't being shown the public, by and large, what experts in Europe were saying and doing because they came to a very different conclusion about how to respond with schools and kids. And we also weren't hearing from These voices within the US who either were silencing themselves or were told by their administrators, you are not allowed to talk about this. So when you talk, when we think about the mechanics of how things work, that's one of the important things for people to understand is the degree of sort of tribalism and self censorship that goes on within these institutions. And I show how through kind of what are basically a series of case studies of how there was this essentially a divorce from what's called evidence based medicine, which is a specific scientific process to follow. And instead we were following intuition.

[Ali Stuckey]

And if that I would say that's a charitable reading.

[David Zweig]

Yes, I try to be char. Well, here's the thing. I try to sort of steel man the other side as much as I.

[Ali Stuckey]

Can, which is good.

[David Zweig]

So I try to imagine what I'm of someone I love, worked at the CDC or was saying some of the stuff. How would. What's the most charitable way I can think about it? Because here's the thing, like I understand that some people might say intuitively it makes sense. If you close schools, that's probably going to reduce transmission. Or if I have something in front of my face, maybe that'll reduce it a little bit. Maybe it's not perfect. I recognize some people that made intuitive sense. It did to a lot of people actually. But what I talk about in the book is that our intuition are often wrong and that's especially so in medicine. And I give lots of like fascinating examples through history about things that seem totally obvious actually weren't true once they were tested. And again, another irony is there were all these people with lawn signs around where I live in this house. We believe in science.

[Ali Stuckey]

Yeah, I still see some of those signs.

[David Zweig]

Sometimes people didn't know jack about the science. They had no clue. And, and it's just an exquisitely frustrating thing to see that. And those are the people who, by the way, I mean I was called a murderer, you know, and a Trumper and a lunatic and all this stuff for following science, for following evidence.

[Ali Stuckey]

Right. So how much of this do you think was just an anti Trump reflex? I know we already talked about that a little bit, but I'm trying to understand the motivations not just of the everyday person who maybe sincerely believed that they were saving grandma, but the people who knew better. Because if you as a freelance journalist were able to dig into the studies and understand it, there were certainly people in public health who were able to dig into the studies and understand it. And once they knew, they still didn't say Anything. To me, it seems like just naked political motivations to have continue to have Cuomo as the foil for Trump.

[David Zweig]

Yeah. And Cuomo really was the sort of like, hero for them in many ways. I think a lot of it also has to do with, you know, I can't get into the mind of these people and knowing what they actually believed, but it seems quite obvious, and I think I give a lot of evidence for this, that people did what's known as the noble lie. They knew they were full of bs, but they did it anyway because they felt like what they were doing needed to be done. Whether they felt like that, children and people actually were in great danger. And I believe that many of them thought that you're saying, oh, people at the cdc, surely they read what you were talking about. I'm not so sure. Ali, I gotta tell you, motivated reasoning is really powerful. And when people are motivated to think in a certain way to support their view, the mind does all sorts of acrobatics to kind of wall things out. I mean, I got into an argument with this person who is a big Covid pundit. She's an emergency medicine physician, but she somehow fashioned herself an expert on disease mitigation. And she kept saying, there's no harm from masks. And even the American Academy of Pediatrics was tweeting stuff out saying, like, masks aren't harmful. And I said, what is harm? Who are you to decide that? She said, well, they're an inconvenience. Maybe they're annoying. But I said, really? Are you three years old, forced to wear a mask for eight hours a day? I think it's fair that some people might interpret that as harm. Who are you to decide that? And that's kind of one of the big things is, like, so much of what happened was based on values, not based on science. Yet we were again, gaslit. We were told. And speaking of Cuomo, he repeatedly said, you follow the science, you follow the data. It's that simple. And it was very smug and very confident, and that was appealing to a lot of people. On Less. This is our hero. Trump is an unserious person. He's dangerous, this guy. He's serious. He follows the science. But science doesn't tell you what to do. Science is a process. Science brings you information and the values of the people who made the decisions. And this is really important, the values of the people who got to decide what happened and what I think could be argued was basically a tyranny on much of the public, that these people come from a Certain class, a certain political leaning with certain values and certain preferences in their own lives. And also a certain economic class generally that these people might call the laptop class, where they are generally upper middle class people making six figure salaries or better, working at places like the nih, the cdc, working as physicians, working in, you know, at prestigious media outlets. So their viewpoint about staying home, they could be virtuous. I'm just going to stay home and order Netflix. Well, yes, but a huge portion of our country was out there bringing them their food, out there, working in the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, keeping the electricity on and so on. All of those people. This was one of the most class based policies like imaginable in a generation. The way that there was one class who was meant to just wait on the upper class and not only wait on them, but the upper class fashion themselves as virtuous. We're staying home and we're good, we're good people for doing that. You dirty person. I don't want to get too religious about it, but the metaphorical value of the lower classes who are out there dirty, working on the infrastructure of our country, taking care of the clean people at home was quite extraordinary. So it's one of the things that it matters. And there's lots of stuff in my book about modeling, which is like these projections about, which were incredibly poorly done. But the same thing, the people who create the models that, that show well, if everyone stays home and does this, this and this, those are the people who fared very well because they get to choose what goes in the model.

[Ali Stuckey]

Right.

[David Zweig]

So, and you know, you and I chatted about this before we started recording. I wrote an article on a church in California that fought back against limits that Gavin Newsom and then more centrally within their county, Santa Clara County.

[Ali Stuckey]

What church was it? Do you remember?

[David Zweig]

Calvary Church?

[Ali Stuckey]

Okay. Yeah.

[David Zweig]

And they, they were, they, along with all the other churches in the area, were barred from having gatherings above some arbitrary number of people. And they said, we're doing it anyway. This is what we believe. And the county sued them. They sent out spies, which I get into all this stuff, who spied on them behind like a fence. And they used geo tracking with like digital stuff to monitor people's cell phone data. It's insane. It's wild what happened. And again, when you think about the sort of like tyranny of what, of this type of thing going on. But all this comes back to values, right? Because while that was going on, the malls were open. You could go to a casino, you could go To a liquor store. Strip club. Strip club. And this is the same thing. By the way, in New York City, there were little kids when they opened the schools. And by the way, open is like kids were there one or two days a week if they were lucky, but they called it open. When Biden came into office, we have, you know, X percent of the schools are open. Well, yeah, if the kids going in one day a week, if you actually call that open. But setting that aside, when the kids were there in the New York City winter, there were children sitting on the concrete eating lunch outside because they thought it was too dangerous, and many of them weren't allowed to speak. I have my substack is called Silent Lunch, which I've named as an homage to all these schoolchildren who were barred from talking.

[Ali Stuckey]

That is heartbreaking.

[David Zweig]

It's extraordinarily heartbreaking. Imagine little kids told, you're not allowed to talk during lunch. You have to sit outside on the concrete and eat your lunch, while at the same time, right down the block, two adults are having a glass of wine in a restaurant. That's fine. So when we think about the values of how much that impacts policy that we were told over and over, policy was based on science. That was a lie. The policies were based on values of a particular socioeconomic group and a particular political group, quite honestly, who had their values and they inflicted them on the rest of society. I don't attend church, but I understand and respect where if someone that's meaningful to them going every Sunday, that's someone that group that they needed, maybe they needed that more than the mall. Maybe a grandmother who's 78 years old, maybe she wanted to see her family and she said, you know what? I've got a one out of a hundred chance of something going wrong, but 99 out of 100, I'm going to be okay. I'm going to take those odds. I don't know how many years I have left. I want to see my family. But we were told we weren't allowed to do that again. So that's like such an important theme in my book is showing how the values of those in charge were inflicted on the public. And yet we were told that it was almost Orwellian. Yet they were telling us that it wasn't values. Oh, this is all science.

[Ali Stuckey]

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[David Zweig]

So one of the things that, you know, we keep is, is the lens through which we all see and experience the world. And for many people, their families, maybe it was just kind of an inconvenience. This was horrible for plenty of kids from well off backgrounds, make no mistake. However, by and large they fared far better than kids from underprivileged backgrounds. So if there are some people in your audience who for them, they're saying, yeah, I think most people admit now they would say, yeah, the pandemic that kind of sucked, that was really hard, but it wasn't that bad. Or what they aren't understanding perhaps is the incredible harm on so many children, millions of kids. And you have to think about what kind of society, as you said, what kind of society does this to children? And an argument, at least theoretically could be made, you might disagree with it, but that, well, we need to have these trade offs or sacrifice some of these things for children in order to save people. But the shame of it is because of these lies that I'm talking about from the public health establishment. There were no trade offs. It was only harm. No one was saved by long term school closures. No one was saved from masking 2 year olds. No one was saved by barriers on desks and all this other nonsense. This was only harm, no trade off, no benefit. And you know, early on this was known. This is going to be hard for people to hear, but early on the reporting of child abuse went down. And that sounds. Oh, this is wonderful. Wow, that's interesting. This is great. But it's not the case. What happened is teachers and educators are the most important people in a child's life. For a child who is in harm's way, that is the child's first place to go. Where either a child can speak to them or teachers see that something's wrong.

[Ali Stuckey]

They're mandatory reporters, they have to.

[David Zweig]

That's right. And when they closed schools. So everyone talks about the long term school closures. Let's pause for a moment. And closing schools for the entirety of the spring of 2020, that alone caused enormous damage. And people don't talk about that enough that even that was unnecessary and incredibly harmful. So these kids were left alone. These kids who were suffering from abuse didn't have a resource and they were left at home with a monster, many of them. And what they found was that the incidence of actual abuse had skyrocketed. And I want to be clear about something. This was observed as early as April of 2020. Public health establishment knew about this and didn't care. They kept the schools closed anyway. They knew a certain number of kids were going to get the crap beat out of them or something else horrible, and they kept the schools closed anyway. So it's really important. That's why I wrote this book. Ali is one of the reasons. And beyond those kids, and we can talk about the other examples, is that there needs to be a historical record, a document that says this happened, that we can't allow a sort of revisionist history, something that's convenient and exculpatory to the people who made the rules. And I understand. I'm glad you pointed it out. This may be hard. You don't want to shame people. Maybe, you know, even the people who didn't make rules, but maybe they thought this was a good idea. They were persuaded. I don't want people to feel shame. I don't want anyone to go to prison. But I want a document to exist. It's really important that people read the book, talk about it and know about this so we can make sure that something like this doesn't happen again. Because even beyond the horrors of child abuse, I mean, we could just run down the list, Ally from eating disorders, where the BMI in children went up. But then on the flip side, there were plenty of kids who became anorexic and bulimic. There were children. Screen time skyrocketed during the pandemic and never kind of went back down. Anxiety, depression. I talked with a lot of mental health professionals for children. Their practices were exploding during the pandemic, and it wasn't because of people dying. Let me be very clear about that. It was directly correlated with kids being kept out of school. We know about learning loss, which rightfully so, has gotten a lot of attention. That's directly correlated with the time that's out of school, with worse test scores and worse learning loss that we still haven't recovered. But I want to touch on one other thing, which is as much as these sort of statistics are important, and we can get into it by the way, kids weren't taken to the hospital when they had appendicitis until the last minute and it was too late.

[Ali Stuckey]

Parents were scared.

[David Zweig]

That's exactly right. And adults also didn't get cancer treatments right on down the line. The amount of harm that was done. This was not just, oh, we're just trying to help people. Cuomo had said, if I can save just one life. Well, sure, but you're taking one or more lives to ostensibly try to save that one life. It was extraordinarily foolish.

[Ali Stuckey]

But one of the things that's the toxic empathy, empathy, it blinds you to reality and morality and you ignore the victim on the other side of the moral equation. So just one life, one story, you know, one person that you're saving and then you've got a thousand people on the other side that they're bidding you ignore.

[David Zweig]

So to explain what in economics they would call that second order effects, what you're describing, there's the first order thing that you're aiming for, but then you can just picture a cascade or dominoes, there's all these second order effects happen. That's, that's the toxic empathy that you're describing, the harm that comes from going for that first thing without thinking about these other things. That's what people in public health are supposed to do. But instead they had this just extraordinarily myopic vision about one thing they wanted to achieve and disregarded everything else. But one of the things that's not covered in the statistics is when you think about a kid who was in the Bronx who was playing football and maybe he's the first kid in his family to potentially go to college, what do you think happened to that kid when the football season was terminated? And I've mentioned this example a lot because I interviewed a gentleman who runs a program for kids who are at risk in the Bronx and areas nearby with football. Because this is a place, it's a thing for kids to do to help keep them on track, help keep them out of trouble. And for a few of them, it was even a ticket out of there to get into college. Those kids lives, their life is permanently altered and that doesn't show up in the statistics. So when people are thinking about the harms, some of these harms do leave lasting scars. But many of them, it's something that's ineffable. You can't even articulate it or know what it is, but it's there. We harmed a generation of kids for nothing.

[Ali Stuckey]

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[David Zweig]

I love that you're touching on this. So this is at the very end of my book. One of the things I talk about is, you know, there are so many lasting harms, you know, unfortunately physical and also economic when you think about education loss. But so many of these harms are what I described. Just as you're talking about Ali, this idea of things that were you only get to do third grade once, right? You only have one senior prom, you only have one, you know, senior year football season. And these kids and some of them, they're fine, you know, they will be Fine, many of them. But when childhood is achingly brief and when you think we each now as adults, we have like that highlight reel in our head, you know, a montage of different scenes. These kids have a large blank space where there should be memories. And instead they were just alone in a bedroom in front of a Chromebook, some of them, and they missed that experience. We took something from them. It was essentially stolen in many regards. So it's, it's so. It's just so meaningful to hear you talk about that with, with your, with your child and missing seeing grandparents. It's the same thing. What it. This is not benign. The idea of just like, oh, well, they did okay. They learned at home. That was fine. Again, maybe that was okay for some kids. We must, must not only see things through a certain lens and understand the vast harm that was inflicted unnecessarily. And again, to me, I touch on all of these harms and I know we talked about them. That's not what my book is focused on. It's just, I don't seek to manipulate people emotionally. Over and over, it's in there, it's woven through it. To me, what's far more important is for people to gain an understanding of how things actually work. I'm someone who, I've written for the New York Times. I give, give an insider's look for what actually was going on behind the scenes. I talk about what was going on in public health. I had people from the cdc, I had others at top institutions talking with me where I want to pull the curtain back so your audience can read this and have information to understand, because it doesn't have to be a pandemic. It's any crisis, Any crisis, it's anything. The same playbook comes out on how these large, powerful institutions interact with each other. And people need to be armed with critical thinking and understanding of, oh, I saw this, I understand now. I read about this. Now I know how to respond. Whether it's politically they want to get involved or whether the response is just simply in their own mind and understanding the reality of what's going on.

[Ali Stuckey]

Because sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is refuse to say that two plus two is five.

[David Zweig]

That's right.

[Ali Stuckey]

Even if that is in your own mind. And we do learn that from 1984. You mentioned the Orwellian nature of all of this. Sometimes the most powerful thing that you can do is tell the truth. And that's what you do in this book. And so for people who are thinking, okay, I'm going to be prepared next time a crisis hits. This book is perfect for them. Not only because it's revelatory of all the things that we're talking about, the mechanisms that go on, but it arms them with the facts and also the courage to say, okay, maybe in my small way or maybe in some huge way, I'm not going to let this happen again. And so I'm just so grateful to you. I really am. Whether it's just your innate personality here or whether it is God inspired courage, whatever it is, I'm grateful for you for telling the truth and for coming on the show today. This was a very interesting conversation. Everyone go out and get this book. You gotta get it. It is called an abundance of Caution, American Schools, the Virus and a Story of Bad Decisions. David, thank you so much.

[David Zweig]

Thanks, Ali. Appreciate it.

[Ali Stuckey]

All right, guys, hope you loved that conversation with David. After, after I was done talking to him, I was like, this guy is amazing. He is so courageous. He is so clear and articulate. I learned a lot in that conversation, even as someone who is following Covid closely and all the masking regulations. And his book is just incredible. It reveals so much. So make sure you go out and get it. I want to remind you guys, speaking of just telling the truth and ensuring that people are informed and holding our public officials accountable, you have to subscribe to Nicole Shanahan's new show. You can go to YouTube.com nicole-shanahan make sure that you go to my channel and you watch the interview I did with Nicole. It will. If you don't know who she is, it will introduce you fully to her and show you just how much she cares about the truth and empowering people, especially moms and families. So excited that she has joined Blaze TV as a Blaze TV host. It is awesome. Also subscribe to BlazeTV. Go to BlazeTV.com Alli Subscribe. You'll get all of our exclusive behind the paywall content. It also ensures that you will never be separated from us by the censors because we never know what's going to happen on YouTube and Spotify. But. But BlazeTV, that's where we build our community and that's where we give you content that you can't find anywhere else. So go to blazetv.com ally to subscribe. All right, that's all we've got time for today. We will be back here tomorrow.