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
And I give examples of how we know this is true because the American Academy of Pediatrics had come out very forcefully for opening schools. They even said, don't worry about six feet of distancing. As soon as Trump made that tweet, within days, the AAP reversed its guidance.
Narrative formation is how policy essentially was both created and defended.
And as you pointed out, I think at the beginning of our conversation, part of that narrative formation and sort of narrative, there's almost like a policing of the narrative, was the charge that anyone who disagreed was a fool, was, you know, you were a piece of garbage if you didn't want to wear a mask and keep your six feet of distancing. Never mind that these rules were made up and arbitrary.
you know, as I'm sure you're aware, that much of the mask, you know, defense of the mask mandates were based on studies such as ones that were done in a lab where they glued the mask to a mannequin's face. Like that is not how human beings operate. So, I mean, much of what I talk about in the book is this sort of distance between something that
might make intuitive sense and might look good in a lab study, but the distance between that and reality, because human beings are not mannequins. And generally, even health care professionals, and I'm sure you know about this, even they have trouble wearing a mask properly and tightly fitted for a long duration. And that's the professionals.
There was zero chance that children in the school, you have a bunch of five-year-olds wearing a mask that their parents bought off of Etsy or Amazon, that they were having any sort of effect on this. And sure enough, there's zero randomized trials that show that mask mandates in schools are effective. And they're not.
In fact, there's quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, that they're just not effective. And it's not because a mask theoretically will stop a virus from passing through. Yes, it can if it's glued to a mannequin's face, but humans don't behave that way. And it's the same thing with the school closures overall.
Someone might intuitively think, well, yeah, there's a bunch of kids running around with snotty noses. Sure, closing schools will probably have some benefit. But again, that is the distance between the theory and the reality, because the reality is, as we talked about earlier, Over time, people don't comply with uncomfortable and difficult recommendations.
Just like you're not going to keep a mask tightly fit to your face for eight hours, people, even the introverts among us, don't stay sequestered at home for weeks and then months and months on end. It doesn't happen. And sure enough, I point out in the book,
There's a lot of mobile phone data that proves this, that even before they pulled back on a lot of guidance, people were already moving around. And that's to say nothing of a significant portion of the population of the first-line people who are out there working. who are always mixing in society. And where were their children going?
Well, some were left home alone, but many of them went with the grandparent or a neighbor, or they went in some sort of childcare situation where they were mixing with kids from all different neighborhoods and towns, which it is argued is actually worse than just going to school if you're concerned with viral sort of spread.
That now, instead of kids being with the same group of kids every day at school, now they were mixing with all sorts of people. What I try to point out is that there's such a chasm between what our intuition might tell us and what actually occurs in real life that our intuitions are often wrong. And that's particularly true with medicine.
And I give a zillion examples through history where things that seem really obvious, like they might work, don't actually work once they're tested. And that's exactly what happened in the pandemic, is that in America, our health professionals followed intuition and theory and ignored empirical reality.
Right. Along with it on the airplanes, you know, where you're allowed to take it off while you're having a drink and all that. I mean, the idea. Yes, exactly. The idea that a bunch of kindergartners were going to effectively have a mask on all day long was basically so dishonest that it was farcical. There was almost a fantasy. I'm going to be charitable and say, David.
No, there was no reason to mandate them. For a vaccine that doesn't stop transmission or infection.
were moved to the priority line for the vaccine, and then they still didn't go back to school in many places, even after they went ahead of more vulnerable people. Just wanted to add that in since you're talking about the vaccine. No, of course.
What you've described is the exact argument people keep giving to me is, do you know how many people died? I'm like, whether it's 10,000 or 10 million, that still doesn't mean that these interventions were effective, would ever be effective. It's irrelevant.
because while you know this and your audience knows it, it's really important that I wanted to set the record straight that because otherwise you have this convenient exculpatory narrative of, well, we did the best we could. That is what most people within the establishment are saying now. So I hope my book,
for people will serve as this counterweight to try, at least we'll have something in the quote, official record saying, no, we knew from day one what was going on. This is not a retrospective Monday morning quarterbacking. This book takes you through chronologically in real time. Here's what was known. So we actually have a historical record of the failure of the expert class that happened.
That's an homage to they barred children from speaking during lunch in many schools. So I named my sub stack after that completely bonkers practice. They were not allowed to talk. Little kids were having silent lunches while sitting on the concrete outside in New York City. and other places. So that is the odd name of the newsletter, silentlunch.net.
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