Wendy Orent has a deliciously, and wholly justifiably, nasty review of David Zweig's new book on school lockdowns during the height of the Covid pandemic.
If you don't know who David Zweig is, he's not only a big supporter of the psychopathic Great Barrington Declaration, he was at the official rollout of the declaration because of his close ties to the principals behind that document. (He's an anti-vaxxer, hates masking, and thinks [STILL!!!] that children are immune as well)
“I love research,” David Zweig says in the introduction to An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.” That love isn’t evident in his book. At a time when the so-called “legacy media” are chastised for trying for too much balance, for struggling to maintain an appearance of even-handedness, Zweig discards any pretense to objectivity. He detests school closings, so much so he’s devoted an entire book to it. This long and highly repetitive text ranges in tone from apparently sober discussion to a protracted wail. But evidence-free, light on statistics, absent any other viewpoints, and not infrequently wrong, all his arguments amount to the same thing: Zweig is angry that schools closed during the early months of the pandemic. And he wants to make sure you know it.
And we know how much psychological damage the school closures did, because among children, suicides, suicide attempts, and emergency treatment for mental health issues ……… Checks notes ……… fell precipitously during the lock-down, to the tune of 12-18%.
Middle school and high school are bad for your mental well-being? Hoocoodanode?
………
But what infuriates Zweig is that he thinks schools shouldn’t have been locked down in the first place, since other countries (read: European countries, mostly unnamed) didn’t lock down at all, and anyway lockdowns were pointless even from the beginning. How do we know? Because the arguments were based on models. The very notion of models has a strange effect on Zweig: garbage in, garbage out, he intones, and he makes sure we know that all these models were wrong. They were based, for one thing, on pandemic influenza, which is all the modelers had to go on, as the 2003 outbreak of a related coronavirus, SARS-CoV-1 behaved in an entirely different fashion from Covid: it spread sluggishly, late in the course of infection, and generally in hospital settings. But pandemic influenza is also not a perfect model for Covid. Unlike Covid, flu is often spread by surface contamination. Basing Covid response on influenza led to hygiene theater: the scrupulous hand-washing and sanitizing; the meticulous scrubbing of food packages; the disinfection of surfaces, including (when the lockdowns partially lifted) shopping carts. None of it mattered much. Covid’s chief manner of spread is airborne, as several aerosol scientists (including Kimberly Prather, an atmospheric chemist Zweig holds up to particular scorn, though it isn’t clear why), demonstrated quite early on.
Still, the “experts” had to work with what they knew, and what they knew was influenza. At first, no one seemed to think the new disease could be worse than influenza, which, after all, has killed up to 80,000 Americans, mostly elderly, in recent years, according to the CDC. And no one knew if schools were going to drive transmission rates or not. Certainly, children in school settings sometimes drive influenza outbreaks. So, in “an abundance of caution,” state and local governments shut the schools down.
That decision enrages Zweig, who argues that influenza kills more children than Covid, but when you look at the actual figures you wonder what he’s smoking. According to Jonathan Howard, physician and author of We Want Them Infected, some 450 children had died of Covid by May of 2021. Zweig claims that in several given years, influenza claimed far more. For instance, according to Zweig, in the year 2012-2013 the CDC attributed 1160 children’s deaths to the flu. This contradicts the CDC’s report itself, which listed pediatric influenza deaths as “more than 170.” According to the American Hospital Association the highest pediatric death toll ever recorded was the year 2009-2010, when the novel Swine Flu pandemic took 288 children’s lives. Zweig’s “love of research” has failed him here. Is this carelessness, or inventiveness? There’s no way to know.
I'm going to try not to over-quote here, because the whole review is a thing of beauty.
Assholes like Zweig should be exiled from polite society. They literally have the blood of millions of people on their hands.
Maybe they could go to Mars with Elon.
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