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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And the most important part that I mentioned in the sort of chronology is that in late April and early May, many, many countries throughout Europe, 22 countries began to reopen their schools. Millions of children. We're not talking about like a little school somewhere in Tibet, you know, with 12 kids. Millions of children were going back to school in Europe.
And later that month in May, the education ministers met in the EU. And in that meeting, they announced, we have observed no negative impact from opening schools here. A month later, same meeting, same announcement. Here it is, yet another month later, we haven't observed any negative impact of opening schools, millions of children, 22 different countries.
No one in the American media reported on this. I did, ultimately. But when this initially happened, I was so astonished. I kept re-clicking the link for the video because I was like, how can this be? How is it possible that no media outlets? This wasn't in a blog. This wasn't some random or obscure medical journal. This is the meeting at the EU.
And they said millions of kids are back in school and nothing has happened. It's fine. This was ignored. To me, this is kind of one of the original sins that I point out that happened. Once we ignored that or waved it away, and we can go through this, Megan, the various excuses they gave. Well, that's Europe. That's different. That doesn't count.
And they gave this list of reasons which were all made up. None of them were real.
No one in Europe, or very few, this was not the norm. They didn't have HEPA filters in all their schools. I've spent enough time in Europe. I know people in Europe. The schools there are not all these glistening oasis of HEPA filtered air. Many kids weren't wearing masks.
In fact, the ECDC, that's like Europe's version of the CDC, recommended against kids in primary schools wearing masks, where in the U.S., they wanted kids as young as two years old to wear masks all day. They weren't doing distancing. In many instances, it was three feet or like what they would say, one meter or no distancing required at all.
A list of things that we kept being told by these public health experts. Well, don't don't look at Europe. It's almost like a magician. Look away. Don't look there. That's because and then they would list the things they controlled the They did all these things.
Right. I mean, one of the things, to your point, that's really important is this was so coded politically within our country that opening schools or wanting to go to work or go to the beach even or a child playing at a playground, that was coded as right wing. And to want to, you know, and it was virtuous and left wing if you stayed home.
Yes. Because those countries, which are far more progressive than the United States, they sent their kids back to school. And then you have other countries with more conservative governments where they were doing the reverse. There was no correlation between the political leaning of a particular government in their countries.
And with whether things were open or locked down, there was no correlation. So the idea, but in America, people were living within such a bubble of our own sort of world here that anyone who went against Trump was virtuous and anyone who agreed with him was this heartbreaker. horrible monster. What are you, some right-wing, you know, asshole? You're trying to do your own research?
So you had this situation that was so divisive in America. And again, it comes down to, we go back to that American Academy of Pediatrics reversal, where it was so clear that what was happening was this had to be a sort of reaction against Trump. And one of the things that I talk about in the book is that after I started writing my articles about
which were some of the only articles in sort of what we might consider legacy media or mainstream.
It was like, I'm actually getting value out of New York Magazine. Later in The Atlantic and other places. Right. And in Wired, which is, you know, ostensibly nonpolitical.
Right. So, okay. Somehow I managed to get my contrarian pieces in these publications. And people have asked me why and how did that happen? Because I've had other journalists who sort of shared some of my views. How did you do it? I said, because I provided evidence. Like, I think that's what it comes down to. But...
One of the things that I talk about is once these articles started coming out, I started getting emails from doctors around the country and regular people too, and former CDC officials. And these were doctors, not just necessarily some random pediatrician in a suburb somewhere. We're talking about people at elite university hospitals, at some of our top institutions.
And they would write me and say, I want you to know I agree with you. I think what's going on is crazy. There's no evidence of closing schools is going to be beneficial. This is terrible. Having little, you know, toddlers wearing masks, whatever it was. He said, I want to agree with you, but this all has to be off the record. I can't talk about it publicly. And I was like, why?
How is this happening? Because one, they knew. The environment was so clear. People aren't stupid that they self-censored. And number two, they were overtly censored. Many people were admonished by their superiors. Some administrator at the hospital saying, don't ever talk about this again. And I have a couple stories of that where people spoke out. So there was this environment overtly
where no one, no one could be seen, including, you know, a university hospital as an institution, none of them could be seen as agreeing with Trump.
I was there with Jay.
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