David Zweig
speaker
193 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard May 2025
David Zweig’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
What does it say about our country that we behaved so differently from many, many of our peer nations? The duration of school closures in America was extraordinary and unnecessary.
And what I show repeatedly throughout the book is that the evidence from the very beginning, Drew, we knew that this, like I said, the academic literature had already pointed out that this wasn't going to be successful over a long term.
It's possible that an immediate closure in certain locations where there was a massive outbreak, it's possible that a school closure combined with everything else being shut down may have some limited benefit for a very brief window. But what we know is that over a long period of time and there's some interesting studies on this that I point out. Do you remember the St.
Louis versus Philadelphia example? This was something that governors talked about. It was all over the media. They said basically St. Louis did the wrong thing. They had a big spike in cases, but Philly did their, I forget, or maybe it was the reverse, but one of those cities did the wrong thing. They didn't stay home. There was a spike in cases. The other one did the right thing.
And it was a gentle, it was sort of a, it was like the example of the flat and the curve. So that led to a lot of the closures, in particular school closures. This was used as a justification. Here's the problem with that. An analysis was done of the 1918 pandemic, including St. Louis and Philly and many, many other cities. What they found was over time,
All the school closures did nothing at all. There was no benefit from the school closures. There was no correlation. So you have this very arresting graphic of one city with a spike in cases, the other one where it's gentle. You're told, look what happened when you didn't follow directions. And everyone believed it. But they left out the ending. They only did the first chapter.
They left out the next five chapters where it wasn't effective. So we had this... circumstance in our country where the schools remained closed for month after month after month. And as you know, in California, there were kids who didn't step foot in the classroom for over a year. Healthy kids were barred from a classroom.
Just tore it up. That's exactly right. So there are a couple pandemic plans from the government. Two of them that I focus on that are most important, I think, were from the CDC. One of them was in 2007, and then they did a revision in 2017. And this was referred to specifically by CDC officials during the COVID pandemic.
So we know that this was part of their guide that they ostensibly were following. And those guidebooks were deeply flawed. They were based on all sorts of
dubious assumptions the idea about how they built their models was based on just a model on top of a model on top of a model i i bring readers through i tried to find out well where did they get the information that went into this model and you know you see like a citation in a study so i click on oh well let me read that citation that's where they must have gone
But then the citation just takes you to another model. And then that model takes it. It was just models for your audience who don't know. This is just a prediction. It's not an actual study. And so I likened it to like Russian dolls where it's just the layers. It just kept opening, but it never ended. And finally, one of them.
I hear you. And one cannot help but wonder, you know, when you start to see how models are built, you can't help but wonder how that's going to play out for all sorts of things, including that.
But finally, after the layer upon layer upon layer, I keep digging down in these citations, trying to find out one of them, because in the model they talked about, it was something like 37% of the transmission was occurring, would occur in school. So they build the model based on these assumptions.
So deep in the supplement of one of the, of like, you know, eight layers deep of the citations, deep in the supplement, I see something where they say about the 37% figure, they said, this number was chosen arbitrarily.
like people don't understand this is like one of the many bombshells i have in the book you're saying like people don't as bad six feet six feet six feet was completely completely pulled out of thin air but as bad as people think this may have been and as cynical as we are people do not realize the half of it the fact that the models that the whole response were built upon were in part
based on an arbitrary number. But you have to go deep enough digging into the supplement to find out. So this type of thing just shows the really shaky science. But here's where it gets worse. As bad as those guidebooks were, At least they were made during a sober period of time. They weren't done during an emergency. They had a plan. There was some logic in them.
And they even talked about some of the harms that would come from school closures. So they had a lot of problems, but they had a plan. And as bad as they were, we then completely divorced ourselves from the plan. So in some regards, we were two steps deep. First of all, we were following these very dubious plan books to begin with, and then we weren't even following them.
We just went even further off, you know, kind of reaching escape velocity, just where we were never to return. And I observed that very early on. As you noted, the whole plan was, let's just flatten the curve. Let's, you know, let's keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed. It's 15 days to slow the spread. I'm sure you remember the slogan.
Well, as you know, what happened after 15 days, they added another 30 days. But do you remember big pushback in the media? I don't. It just sort of happened. It's like the frog in the pot.
What's that say? I'm sorry. So for me, one of the things that kind of really set me on the path and that alarmed me was just, you know, kind of dovetailing with our point here about you add the 15 days. I live in the New York area. I wasn't knowledgeable about what was happening. So I'm going to go along with what the CDC says.
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