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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I didn't necessarily fully believe them or know, but I didn't have enough knowledge to go against their guidance at the time. But once they added on the 30 days, this sort of spidey sense kind of began for me where I was trying to make sense of what was going on. And toward the end of April, I was walking with a friend of mine on like a high school track at the time.
And at that point in time, I was tracking what was going on with case rates and hospitalizations. The new cases in New York had dropped by 50% by the end of April. So I said to him, my friend, I said, hey, this is great. We did it, man. We did it. We flattened the curve. We were told what to do. We followed the instructions and we achieved the goal. We did it. We flattened the curve. So I said-
do you think they're going to open the school next week or something? And he was like, they're not opening the schools. I'm like, what do you mean? We did it. We flattened the curve. We did what we were told and it worked. Now we flattened the curve and they didn't open the schools. And that was the first thing
That even now, this many years later, even after spending years writing this book, I still, when I talk about this, it still kind of makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It still is so alarming how things can happen when you're told, you know, the government has some degree, you know, of authority to act tyrannically if they think there's an emergency.
but then they just kept extending it and there wasn't any real evidence or reason given for why we achieved this thing we were told and then they didn't care and kept going and then the second piece to that is Toward the end of April and the beginning of May, millions of kids began going back to school in Europe. And as you know, in Sweden, their lower schools, kids never stopped going.
It took a little while for Florida before they went back. But in Europe, they began going back in the spring. And the education ministers of the EU met in late May and they said, There were 22 countries, 22 countries reopened schools, and they said, we've observed no negative consequences of this. Now, I watched this video over and over because it seemed like a mirage.
It was almost like, how could I be seeing this because no one was talking about it? This wasn't on the front pages of our papers, but isn't this the most important piece of evidence they were looking for?
that europe were our guinea pigs in effect we should have opened our schools way earlier but even if we didn't once they reopened and they said this wasn't in like this wasn't you know a blog post this wasn't in uh you know a an obscure medical journal this was a meeting at the eu and they said we've observed no negative consequence of 22 countries reopening their schools and they met again in june and had the same determination
And no one, virtually no one covered this. And that, to me, what I talk about in the book, it's almost like the original sin, or one of the original sins, at least, where at that point, no health professional in America could honestly say that, well, we didn't know. There was so much we were learning. We're building the plane as we fly it. All these very exculpatory metaphors.
None of them were true because millions of kids were already in school and they kept giving excuses. Well, that's Europe. It's different. It doesn't count. No, there were cities and towns throughout Europe that had the same population densities as cities and towns in America. Some of them had higher case rates. Some had lower case rates. It didn't matter.
They opened their schools and there was no negative consequence that they observed. And by the way, as you surely know, they also didn't have mask mandates on two-year-olds and stuff the way we had here. They did not have HEPA filters by and large. They did not have six feet of distancing across the board. Many of them were doing three feet or one meter or nothing at all.
All these excuses we were told were critical. We cannot open schools. They're not safe until we do this. They weren't doing any of that stuff there. Yet somehow this was like ignored. It was as if we didn't have modern technology to understand what was happening across the Atlantic. So to me,
It's very, very challenging to square how our public health, quote, experts kept telling the American public with the aid of the legacy media that all these very special interventions needed to happen in order to get kids in school, even though we had the most perfect open study, you know, natural study possible with millions of kids where none of this stuff was being used.
but I should say a significant portion of my book that School Closures is the launch point. You will be happy to know I have multiple chapters exclusively devoted to the media where it's, I have like the media part one, part two, and part three, where I basically dissect and take apart. You look at the anatomy of what happened in these like lengthy New York Times features and other pieces.
to understand what was actually going on with journalists, where I basically describe that they shirked the sort of core responsibility, which is to be skeptical of claims by those in power. When you think about what journalists traditionally are supposed to be doing, they're very skeptical of big business, of the government, of the church, whatever it may be, all these large...
institutions that journalists typically, or at least ostensibly, are highly critical of. Somehow that evaporated during the pandemic when it came to the public health authorities, which imposed arguably the single most invasive, you know, interventions on the American public in a generation, if not in history, yet there was no question. Even history.
exactly so it's it's it's so extraordinary and to what i discuss is i think a lot of this comes back to a sort of political tribalism the reality is most of the people who work in our prestigious legacy media outlets tend to be from the same background and same political persuasion as those within the public health community they all tend to lean toward the left
And they also self-select for a certain type of person. You're not an iconoclast generally in getting in at the New York Times or moving up the ladder in public health. These people often are very smart and work very hard, but they're rule followers. They're people who tend to understand and want to be within the group.
So when you have this groupthink between these two really important institutions, the public health apparatus combined with the legacy media, it was basically unstoppable at that point. Because as you know, Trump in the middle of the summer or early summer had said in his way with a tweet in all caps, OPEN THE SCHOOLS IN THE FALL with a bunch of exclamation points.
And once he did that, he ensured that half the schools in the country would remain closed because these people, it was intolerable to them to ever agree with Trump on anything. So once he said something, it became immediately radioactive, and they had to take the opposite stance.
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