Be forewarned: If you had school-age children during the Covid-19 pandemic, you may want to down a couple shots before picking up David Zweig’s new book. It is a scrupulously researched, painfully detailed examination of why extended school closures were so misguided and why it was so tough for public officials to course correct.
Caution can be a healthy thing. But during the pandemic, Zweig argues, the notion of “caution” was hijacked. Officials and public health professionals cited “an abundance of caution” to justify unprecedented school closures even as evidence accumulated that schools could safely reopen. Meanwhile, these same authorities ignored cautions about the devastating effects of closure on youth learning, mental health, and wellbeing. To challenge the groupthink was to be deemed “anti-science”—or even an apologist for “human sacrifice.”
A journalist by trade, Zweig traces the genesis of this book to his experience watching his two young children “slowly wilting” during the early weeks of school closures in spring 2020. He recalls wondering, “How necessary was it to keep children away from each other? . . . And how long was this supposed to go on?” That spring, as Zweig interviewed specialists and read international reports, he concluded “a very large story was not being told.”
Rejecting claims that the nationwide imposition of school closures was a defensible “fog-of-war decision” or primarily due to the “malevolent influence of teacher unions,” Zweig offers a more sweeping indictment: “American politicians, health officials, much of the broader medical establishment, and the media misled, lied to, and manipulated the public.” This yielded, he argues, official guidance and policies that were based on “subjective values” but were “presented to the public as objective science.”
by David Zweig
The MIT Press, 2025, $39.95; 464 pages.
The result, Zweig concludes, is a portrait of “a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.” He’s not kidding. This is a story of profound failure. The inaccurate predictive models. The evidence-free case for extended closures. The dismal track record of remote learning. The inattention to reopening, and then the way the reopening debate became a tribal referendum on Donald Trump. The dubious rationales for in-school preventive measures. The devastating consequences for kids. The misleading media coverage. And for all of it, Zweig has the receipts.
Initially, authorities dismissed talk of lockdowns and closure. In January 2020, Anthony Fauci, later to become a media darling for his pandemic absolutism, said, “Historically, when you shut things down it doesn’t have a major effect.” In late February, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases was casually (in one line in a lengthy speech) urging parents to “think about” what they’d do if schools closed.
And then, with astonishing speed, the conviction took hold—fueled by admiration for China’s totalitarian lockdown strategy––that a willingness to lock citizens down was the measure of strong leadership. Before March was out, schools across the United States had shut their doors, with some not reopening for a year or more. Zweig notes that many states and municipalities in the United States “even forced two-year-olds to wear masks for six or more hours a day, for years”—an “extraordinary, absurdist, and cruel” policy unquestioned by prestige media or the public health establishment. (Indeed, the American Academy of Pediatrics was still arguing in 2022 for extended mask mandates.)
An Abundance of Caution offers an extended, devastating critique of Covid-era education. From the get-go, Covid’s “novel” nature was cited as a reason for school closure. Yet, Zweig notes that it was already established science that children generally have milder symptoms from coronaviruses than do adults and are less likely to be spreaders. To justify aggressive closures, officials and media outlets made much of a dramatic graph showing infection data from St. Louis and Philadelphia during the first months of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Within weeks, though, Harvard University economist Robert Barro crunched the data from 45 U.S. cities during that pandemic and reported that closures had had no long-term effect on mortality rates.
Indeed, well before Memorial Day 2020, countries around the globe had reopened schools, and it was clear that doing so entailed minimal risk. Across Europe, schools had reopened in April and early May without problems, including in nations where infection was substantially higher than in the United States. While Italy’s early experience with overwhelmed hospitals had been viewed as a cautionary tale, just 2 percent of cases involved youth aged zero to 18—and those youth accounted for just two (two—not 2 percent) of Italy’s 30,000 fatalities. The risks were of the same magnitude as going swimming or taking a bus to school. Tracking outbreaks in 15 schools, Australia reported that not a single faculty or staff member had been infected.
Zweig reports that by April 2020, CDC data showed school-age youth had accounted for less than 1 percent of hospitalizations in this country when schools were open—and without masking or mitigation. On May 17, the European Union’s education ministers shared the data from the first month of return-to-school in 22 nations and saw no evidence of increased spread despite minimal masking, three-foot (one meter) social distancing, and a lack of sophisticated HVAC systems. Yet, the prestige media offered a drumbeat of frenetic stories with headlines like “My Son Survived Terrifying Covid-19 Complications: If schools reopen, how many kids won’t?” in the New York Times. (Meanwhile, on May 5, the prominent British medical journal BMJ published the paper “Children are not COVID-19 super spreaders: Time to go back to school.”)
In Zweig’s telling, the teachers unions don’t loom quite as large as they do in many other accounts. It’s not that the unions are absent (in the index, the American Federation of Teachers is mentioned nine times and the National Education Association five times), but that Zweig is more focused on how the conduct of the public health community, the media, and public officials drove school closure. The result certainly doesn’t do anything to absolve union leaders for striving to keep schools closed, but it does suggest the culpability is more broadly shared than some of the more polemic accounts have suggested.
