Did 'An Abundance of Caution' during COVID do more harm than good for America's students?
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This is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, and it is Monday, so I feel like kicking off the week with a little bit of a thought experiment. Okay, so engage with me for just a moment here. Imagine that you are an extraterrestrial intelligence. Okay, I'm going there. I'm using aliens in this thought experiment. So you're a very, very far away extraterrestrial intelligence.

And you're that species version of an anthropologist. And you have been studying across the galaxies. This one beautiful, belligerent, utterly unsophisticated and unevolved, yet somehow magnetically interesting species that resides on the third planet from the star in what that species calls the solar system. All right.

So in this species infantile measure of time, it is spring of 2020.

And you, extraterrestrial explorer, have been watching as this species struggles mightily with the threat of a very simple life form known as a virus. And you laugh, whatever this extraterrestrial intelligence version of a laugh is, because you also watched this species decades earlier when they released a radio program that put them into a...

panic because of what they call aliens, and those fictional aliens were eventually done in by microbial life. Ha! So who's vulnerable to a small tangle of DNA now? Okay, sorry, this thought experiment's getting a little bit off the rails. Anyway, so you're watching Homo sapien in the spring of what they call 2020.

And suddenly you are pulled out of your alien reverie when you notice something specific on the third planet. There is a moment where every single one of the species' younger organisms are not where they belong. They are not in school. Across the entire planet,

For this blink of an eye, there isn't a single child in school. And this has never happened, as far as you know, in your alien life. This has never happened in this species of... this species' short history on planet Earth. And, as a much wiser alien intelligence, you know that if there's anything that's ever helped pull Homo sapien out of its troglodytic ignorance...

It's school. It's education. So why would every child on the planet be out of school? In this particular part of planet Earth called the United States, there are many children out of school for very, very long. And that doesn't really make any sense to your extraterrestrial intelligence.

Now, of course, longtime On Point listeners will know that I'm a sci-fi super fan because I basically believe the genre teaches us everything we need to know about ourselves as humans. But I actually love this thought experiment specifically because for me, it pulls me out of that, you know, 21st century American human being frame of reference and just simply asks with cold, hard logic, right?

How can we explain to someone very, very far away why so many American children were denied the chance to step foot into a classroom for so long during the COVID pandemic? Five years later, this still remains an urgently important question.

Not only because of the long-term impacts of being out of school for so long, but yeah, whether we like it or not, another pandemic will eventually happen. That is simply the way nature and science works. So back here on planet Earth, journalist David Zweig is the latest person to try to take a stab at an answer to those questions. And he does so in his new book. It's called An Abundance of Caution.

American Schools, the Virus, and the Story of Bad Decisions. David Zweig, thank you for entertaining my desire to do that thought experiment, and thank you so much for joining us today. I love it. That's the most novel setup I've heard out of any, so fantastic.

Well, I just figured that we've done so much COVID coverage that a lot of people might just like check out. And so I wanted to find another way to pull people back to this really, really important question, because like it or not, as I said, there will be generational impacts from so many kids in specific parts of this country not being able to go back into school building. So let me just ask you, David, first of all, take us back to that time in 2020. Like, what was your experience like?

of COVID that got you interested in looking more deeply into the school closures? So if we rewind the clock and look back at early spring 2020, I was like most people in the New York area where I live and probably most of your listeners. I was following along with all the instructions. I'm a little embarrassed to admit we were wiping down our groceries when they arrived.

and everyone was locking down. And part of that, quote, lockdown was my kids, who were in third and fifth grade at the time, were kept out of school and attempting what was referred to as remote learning with not much success. But I went along with everything. This is what we were told needed to happen. We needed to, quote, flatten the curve to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. So that's kind of where things kicked off. But very, very quickly, we

I observed that this wasn't going to work long-term very well for my kids. How old were they? They were in third grade and fifth grade at the time. But, you know, again, this seemed, okay, this is not great for them, but sure, we need to do this to save lives and, you know, flatten the curve. So we went along. But

Not too, too much later, I began to observe some things that didn't quite make sense. And that's what set me off on my path and what I'd love to chat with you about today is that what most of us in the public believed to be the circumstance was

was not actually what we were told was happening. And that's what I try to explicate in my book, is that we were living in a very, very misinformed sort of media bubble in much of the United States. Okay. So you actually said three really important things there. What we believed to be what was happening, what was not what we were being told,

And this was specific to certain parts or certain media bubbles in the United States. So are you saying that outside those particular bubbles, and you can identify them in a minute, people had a more accurate sense as to what was going on?

Yeah, I think that's right. Absolutely. Okay. So let's start off with the fact that you were actually doing reporting for Wired and other outlets during this time. What is one of the first things that you discovered in your reporting that led you to start to wonder about sort of this conflict between what people thought and what people were being told?

Right. So very early, I guess in April, I began to wonder what exactly was happening with the schools. There didn't seem to be a long-term plan.

And similarly, I began to poke around to try to get more evidence to figure out what actually was the risk to children, what actually might be the benefit of some of these interventions. I wasn't seeing enough evidence being printed in the media. So I

I have a lot of experience with science journalism, with reading academic articles, with talking with scholars. So just sort of for my personal benefit, I was working on another book at the time, totally unrelated to this. I just needed to try to poke around and figure out what was going on. I began talking with experts, most of them in Europe, and

What became very, very obvious very early was that one, children were at incredibly low risk, not zero, but a risk on par with many things that they face in any given day. It wasn't an unusual risk to them. And number two, and this is the real turning point for me, at the end of April and beginning of May,

countries throughout Europe began reopening their schools. And 22 of them began reopening. We're talking about millions of children here. This is not, you know, a small one-room schoolhouse in the mountains of Tibet. We're talking about millions of kids.

the EU education ministers met virtually in May, and they said, after these schools that have been reopening, millions of kids, we've observed no negative consequence of reopening these schools. I want everyone to kind of just pause on that for a moment. Millions of kids in countries that are very similar to America in many regards, no negative consequence. This was not in an obscure medical journal. This was not in a blog post. This is the EU.

And this information was virtually nonexistent, unavailable in America. I remember listening to the video feed of this meeting, and it was almost like a mirage. Like, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Why wasn't I seeing this splashed across the headlines everywhere? This was the news, ostensibly, we were waiting to hear because there was a large concern once it was acknowledged that kids weren't at great risk. Well, the other thing is,

Kids may be putting teachers and then more broadly the community at risk. Yet here we had empirical evidence. Millions of kids in school, no observable increase in cases in the community or among teachers after schools opening. And this information was basically ignored in America. Yeah. You know, we did more than 100 straight shows on COVID at that time, David. And I will say that...

I usually don't use this language, but I'm quite proud of our coverage because what we talked about is as soon as this information started coming out of places like Europe and then in Asia also, we talked to scientists who said, really, the strongest correlation between changes in the COVID infection rate and school openings has nothing to do with the schools. It has to do with the endemic infection rate in that community.

Right. And so and so it's like if the community was already having higher infection rates, the schools, as you said, didn't change that, didn't increase it or decrease it. And if it had a lower infection rate, didn't increase it or decrease it, which I thought was a really powerful thing for Americans to know. But let me ask you just quickly, were you in you were in New York at this time when you were doing this reporting? That's right. I live right outside New York. OK. And New York City was one of the hardest hit initial places. So I want to also ask you sort of about the.

emotional fragility of the time in places like New York where, you know, so many people were dying. And so that's what we'll do when we return from a break. We're talking with David Zweig, and he's author of An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions. And we'll have a lot more in just a moment. This is On Point. ♪

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So, David, let me ask you where you would pinpoint the first set of bad decisions, because you had mentioned earlier and very correctly so that when schools closed in the United States in just March 2020, there wasn't a plan about how to continue education in this country. And I fully agree with that.

But part of the reason why there wasn't a plan is because the Trump administration had thrown out whatever pandemic preparation plan had existed during the Obama administration. They literally threw it out. President Donald Trump repeatedly stood up in front of cameras and says, we're going to beat this thing. We're just going to get around the corner. This is just a two week pause. Don't worry, you'll be able to get back to your lives.

There wasn't necessarily any sort of signaling from the highest levels of government in this country that we should have a plan for what to do if schools need to remain. And I put quotes around need to remain closed for for more than two weeks. So I think that's an important part of the context here in terms of you said the U.S. is like the Europe in many ways. But in a certain way, it was not meaning President Donald Trump.

brought chaos to leadership in this country. Well, what you're saying is both true but not really exculpatory for what happened. That Trump, of course, was viewed as such an odious and unserious figure throughout his tenure, but, you know, specifically at the beginning of the pandemic. But let's not forget that

Deborah Birx was a serious person, as was Dr. Anthony Fauci, and they very much were platformed in leading the American response to the virus. They, of course, initially, Trump, as you may recall, went along with this. We had 15 days to slow the spread, which was the official slogan. So despite all of Trump's failures, and there were many,

The people who run the public health establishment in our country, they are the ones who set us on a path where there was no plan for the schools. We did have plans from the CDC, but

that were mentioned explicitly by people from the CDC. There was one made in 2007 and then a revision in 2017 that we were ostensibly following. It had nothing to do with Trump. This is what Deborah Birx and others that, you know, people within the CDC were saying. These are our guidebooks. This is how we're going to

go along with things. Moreover, there were models from places like Imperial College of London, IHME, which is in Washington state, and other places that we were basing our pandemic response on. So one of the things that I think is really important to get across that I talk about in the book a lot and that I want your listeners to understand is that

Trump becomes a very convenient kind of foil here where, you know, the villain in the story. But those may be contextual reasons, but not excuses for the decisions that were made by our public health experts. Yeah. You know, I personally believe there is not simply just one villain in this story. There are many. We'll touch on them all. But just one more thing apropos to the president of the United States. And, OK, perhaps...

In a sense, when it came to opening schools, he was on the right side of history here, right? Because he demanded that schools be open much sooner than they did in a lot of places in this country. But there is, and you reported on this, there was this Trumpian effect, right? That for people, let's say, just outside the White House circle, outside the federal level, doctors, school administrators, superintendents, public health officials at the state and local level,

If some of them in certain states risk saying, well, I think the Trump administration is right. There really isn't an evidence base to keep kids out of school now. They risk something very, very specific. Can you talk about that?

Yeah, you touch on a very, very important point, which is that, again, as I mentioned before, the view of Trump, he was so maligned and reviled that for anyone to agree with him within certain circles really meant being cast out, that anything he said, anything he favored immediately became radioactive. And

As I heard in the bumper before the segment aired, where we talk about the American Academy of Pediatrics came out very aggressively in favor of schools opening in early summer. They said, you know, for the fall, they said, this is incredibly damaging what's happening to children. They even said, don't worry so much about six feet of distancing. If it's three feet, fine, just get the kids in school. There's not likely to be a great benefit of, you know, keeping them out just to maintain precisely six feet.

After Trump tweeted, open the schools, you know, as is his way in all caps with exclamation points, the American Academy of Pediatrics reversed its guidance. NPR indeed reported on this. And this was immediately thereafter. Gone was the idea of don't worry about six feet of distancing. Gone was the idea of no matter what, let's get kids into school. Instead, it was listen to the experts.

And we need an enormous amount of money. Nothing had changed epidemiologically between the two statements from the American Academy of Pediatrics. The only thing that changed was Trump's tweet. And I have lots of examples in the book, just further to your point,

Had once I started writing articles That were challenging to some of the establishment views which I should add were where I wrote them. I occupied a pretty rare lane I was an M part of the legacy media But I was able to put these articles through and they gave permission to a certain segment of the population To sort of acknowledge certain things that were happening, you know from the places that they were being reported from and

Doctors around the country, along with lots of regular people and even former CDC officials, began reaching out to me after some of my articles were coming out. And they would say, you know, thank you so much for writing this. I want you to know I agree with you. I think this is really harmful having schools closed. I don't think there's strong evidence that this is beneficial, particularly not over a long period of time. I don't think masking two-year-olds is beneficial. They're not doing it elsewhere. And on and on. But all

But all of this is off the record. And people were afraid. And I asked a prominent pediatric immunologist at a top university hospital. One of the people who had reached out to me said, well, what are your colleagues saying about this? And he said, oh, I don't talk about this at work. Total third rail.

And on top of them self-censoring, many of them were explicitly told by their administrators, you are not permitted to say anything that goes against the CDC or Anthony Fauci or others within, you know, public health, other public health officials.

So we had an information environment. In some ways, there was this manufactured idea of a consensus. We were told over and over, this is what the quote experts believe. Oftentimes in New York Times articles, it was unattributed. It would just say experts believe

And that's why when we go back to what I mentioned about the millions of kids in school in Europe, I suspect some of your listeners may be saying, well, that's Europe. They controlled the virus over there. No, that's not the case. When you look at it on a city by city, town by town basis, which is the way to look at this, not on a continental basis or countrywide basis,

There were zillions of cities that matched the demographics and population density of cities within America. And they had case rates that were above, below, and the same as their counterparts in America. It had nothing to do with, quote, controlling the virus. Moreover, they did not have mask mandates across the board on the kids. They did not have barriers on the desk across the board. They didn't have HEPA filters. All of these things we were told that

were needed. So although you guys, which I'm glad you did, report on schools being open in Europe and The New York Times and plenty of other outlets reported on it, the context often given was, well, that's happening there, but we need to dismiss it for one reason or another. But as I just noted, each of these reasons were specious. They weren't doing the things we were told needed to happen here, and their case rates were all over the map, both literally and figuratively. Yeah.

for the record, we never actually said we should dismiss it on this show. Good on you. Good. I knew I could count on you for that. But, but I want to actually just, just so that people hear the, the voices of some of the folks that you're talking about, David, you,

I just want to play for a second Dr. Sally Goza, who in the summer of 2020 was the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics. And here's just her talking about what their guidance was pre that Trump tweet that you talked about. And she was on NPR's Morning Edition. Our guidelines reflect what we know right now about COVID-19 and its effects on children, as well as our own expertise and understanding of the benefits of in-person education for children's mental, emotional and physical health.

And we reevaluate these guidelines regularly since the pandemic changes so rapidly. But our latest guidelines articulate that our main goal is for students to be physically present at school this fall.

But we also recognize that COVID-19 remains a very real active threat to community health. And we really believe that decisions on when and how to reopen need to consider a variety of factors. But mainly a big one is the level of virus in the community. OK, so that was Dr. Sally goes in the summer of 2020. And you told the story of how the AAP's guidance quickly changed after that. So who who intervened?

Who in your reporting or which groups in your reporting were most influential in creating this politically punitive environment that made it difficult for, again, this sort of apolitical data-based analysis to really break through in the United States? It's a good question. And so...

A central thread within my book is trying to figure out what happened, what was this dynamic that led America, somewhat uniquely, to basically have a divorce from what we call evidence-based medicine or evidence-based public health. And instead, we followed theory.

We followed this intuition where, well, it seems like keeping schools closed would be beneficial, right? That makes intuitive sense to a lot, made intuitive sense to me initially. It seems like having a piece of cloth in front of everyone's face, that seems like it should work, right? Like there should be some benefit. But the history of medicine is littered with examples of where our intuitions are often wrong.

And that's why we do science. That's why we have evidence-based practice. And the reason why we were able, by we, I mean the public health establishment, ignored what was going on in Europe and then later in much of, quote, red states or red areas in America, was there is such a tribal environment within our country. There's such an acrimonious, and it's, you know, it goes on both directions, acrimonious

environment politically, that again, when Trump and Republicans were viewed as the quote, open everything up party, it became literally impossible for public health experts and many others to go along with anything they said. You know, there's a cliche, even a broken clock is right twice a day. I

I'm not familiar, I don't know what literature Donald Trump was reading or not, but he happened to have been correct on this particular point about schools. But as I noted, people were self-censoring and they were explicitly told, "You cannot disagree with the guidance coming out of the CDC." That is a deeply, deeply dangerous and I think un-American way of conducting our country during a crisis, any crisis, to not have

Robust debate. Yeah. I'm Magna Chakrabarty. This is On Point. David, I just want to sort of add a little transparency-based anecdote here from our own experience about this idea

feeling that you just can't have certain conversations, right, in 2020. Because there was a point in time where I wanted to actually do a show on the Great Barrington Declaration. I was there. Yeah. And I wanted to do a very, like, sort of just a rigorous analysis of what the basis of the recommendations from the Great Barrington Declaration, what the basis was, and, you know, do what you said, like try to bring some evidence to scrutinize it.

positively or negatively. And for folks who don't remember, I mean, I guess, David, you could actually explain even better. But the Great Barrington Declaration was a group of professionals who met and said, well, there's a different way to approach pandemic change.

control. But the key thing is, as Francis Collins very quickly, it was discovered later, wanted to squash the declaration saying it was like a bad idea. The reason why I bring it up is these political pressures. There was one person in particular that was a colleague of mine who just said, we cannot talk about it. That even talking about it in a rigorous, objective manner is spreading misinformation.

I'll never forget that. The hair is on the back of my neck. But this person is someone I deeply respect and admire. And their decisions are top notch, highly, highly intelligent. I want to bring up this story. I mean, feel free to answer any one you want. But I want to bring up this story specifically because fear, not just political fear, but fear of the virus and being part of any decision that would...

potentially increase its lethality was very, very real in people, not just in policy circles, but in the media as well. So that's a really good point. And so why was there so much fear, we should ask?

And part of the answer is that the American public was deeply misinformed about the risk profile. When you think about, and this goes back to the Great Barrington, their idea, and people can and should argue about whether it was applicable or not, they said we should focus protection on the people who are most vulnerable. There was a thousand fold or more so

between the risk to elderly and vulnerable people versus children in America. I mean, it's hard to even statistically articulate what that means, a thousandfold difference. There are polls about Americans. They overestimated the proportion of children who accounted for COVID deaths

not by 20 percent or not even by 100 percent overestimated, but a 40-fold estimate. Again, it's like hard numerically to even articulate how wildly off most of the American public was in understanding the risks from the virus. None of this is to say that COVID wasn't horrible and that it wasn't killing people and that we needed to try to protect those people the best we could.

But people already from kind of as a launch point had a deep misunderstanding about the risk to the general population. And on top of that, the other risk on the flip side was a deep, deep misunderstanding about the effect of these various non-pharmaceutical interventions, what we call NPIs. And when you go back to the Great Barrington Declaration, what they were talking about was

Things that were very, very common knowledge and commonplace mainstream beliefs within epidemiology. A guy named D.A. Henderson, who was like one of the most celebrated epidemiologists. He helped eradicate smallpox. This is like super mainstream thought was...

These types of interventions where you are attempting to close down aspects of society are not effective over a long period of time. Moreover, they can cause incredible harm. There was lots of academic literature on this that said this before the pandemic. None of this should have been a surprise. Yet in America, as you noted, Francis Collins in a private email exchange with Anthony Fauci said, who are these fringe epidemiologists? And by the way, they were from

Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, not exactly fringe places. He said, "Who are these fringe?" And we need a, quote, "devastating takedown."

So that idea then spread throughout the media as well. When you think about who are members of the legacy media generally, who are members of the public health establishment generally, they tend to lean in one direction politically. And it made this sort of groupthink and tribalism incredibly hard for people to break out of. But because of that dynamic, tremendous harm was done to our children. More than 50 million kids in America

attend K-12 schools. And they were kept out of school, some of them unnecessarily, for more than a year. David, hang on for a second, because when we come back, there's one particular group that you haven't actually pinpointed just yet. And we're going to talk about them in a moment. This is On Point.

This is one of those conversations that I wish we were one of those like podcasts that could do a three hour long episode because there's so much to wade into. It's breaking my heart. That's what the book is for. That's what the book is for. But I do want to play a little bit of tape because this gave us the impetus to go back to our own on point coverage from 2020 and 2021 to sort of reexamine what we did, both, you know, good and bad. And I want to resurface some voices.

Speaking of the fear, right, that we talked about, all through that period we heard from teachers, because we've got to refocus on schools here, right, who shared their experiences, their concerns, their concerns for their students, for their own health, their own families. So here's one. This is Catherine Vaughn. She is, at that time, was an arts teacher at Brighton Elementary in Brighton, Tennessee.

And she left us this message in 2021, right after her school reopened. So coming back the first day of school, I cried the entire way in. It's overwhelming, the thought of going into a building where there's a disease that can cause death. I would really like to have a requirement for staff to be vaccinated. As teachers working with children, I really feel that that's on us.

I also would like a mask mandate, especially until our students have reached the age or the vaccine is available for them. So that was in 2021. But even more recently, namely just this week, Dan, who listens to On Point in New Hampshire, left us this message. I realize that there have been some major setbacks for children regarding the quality of their learning, right?

But at the same time, it also feels like people have forgotten that people were dying in large numbers. And people out in public, including children, even if they weren't getting sick themselves, they were bringing the disease home to parents, grandparents, grandparents.

Friends, other people were getting terribly sick and many not surviving. Okay, that's another on point listener from the late 2020, 2021 period. Here's one more voice. It's from a podcast with Axios from February of 2021. This is not a binary choice. We know in school learning is really important.

And it has to happen safely. And what the AFT is doing and we're doing is we're trying to make sure that districts all across America actually don't just say they want in-school learning, which is really important, but they do it safely. And that's what we're trying to do. That's been our that's what we've tried to do since last April. And that is what we're trying to do right now.

So it's February 2021. You know who that last voice is. I do. That's Randy Weingarten. President of the American Federation of Teachers. And I wanted to bring that up because I was actually quite interested that in your book, you don't talk about the influence that teachers unions had. You don't talk about it very much in terms of the prolonged closing of schools in certain states. Right.

Well, I do talk about it. They get their fair share of critique, but you're right. They're not the central focus of my book. And the reason is, and listening to those clips just makes me very sad because, and I suspect a lot of your listeners may be thinking the same thing. I'm often met with the response, well, people were dying. And what about the teachers? Again, let's go back to the beginning of

millions of kids were in school in Europe and they observed no negative consequence. And you can look at the data itself. Cases actually went down in Europe after they closed schools. Now, of course, I'm not suggesting that opening schools causes cases to go down. But what that does show is that opening schools did not lead to this super spreader catastrophe that we were warned about.

Moreover, hearing Randy Weingarten talk about, well, I want schools open, and Anthony Fauci said this too, I've always wanted the schools open, but they always had the qualifier of when it's safe. But safe?

was a made-up term. Safe means different things to different people. Well, the presumption then was safe was zero COVID. Let's be honest. Right. But that's absurd. In a lot of communities, a lot of communities, people were saying, and I'm just, I want to... Right, right. You brought the reporting here, but I want to put the clear...

Please, be sure.

But we have it at 55 and at 65. Why? Because we're willing to tolerate some degree of harm to ourselves and to society because we want to get places faster. There are a zillion things in our culture that we do that are not simply about trying to maximize

the protection against death. That's not how a society functions. And most of us, I doubt your listeners, all of them are riding, you know, 35 miles an hour in the right lane. It doesn't make them bad people. Similarly, there was this monomaniacal focus

on trying to stop a highly contagious respiratory virus. And again, the literature before the pandemic had shown this, and the data very early showed this as well, supported it, that it was never going to work over the long period of time. Shutting everything down for a week or two perhaps could have been beneficial in some areas like New York. There was never evidence this was going to be beneficial over the long term. Why? Not because people are jerks, but because they're humans.

and they have trouble keeping a mask on their face all day. And the cellular data show that people started moving about long before the restrictions were lifted. Human beings don't stay isolated. And by the way, a significant portion of the country, not just volunteering to move about, but they had to. These were the frontline workers. Well, what happened with their kids? They were mixing with other kids all over the place. I recognize people's intuitions tell them, "People are dying. This is scary. It's reasonable to keep the schools closed."

But that's why we have science. That's why we follow evidence because our intuitions are often wrong. Yeah. You know, my master's degree is actually in environmental science and risk management and public health. And so I wish I could talk to you about like the many papers that you mentioned in the book. But you're pointing out something very, very, very important. And that is there was this –

emotional, social and political perfect storm around schools that made them persist in certain places in being closed, even as in those very same communities, as you just pointed out, kids were going with their parents and grandparents to the grocery store, right? I mean, outside of... Bars were open, restaurants were open. There was total mixing in communities, exactly. But we had this like mental framework that was...

impervious to actual good data on that particular, on this particular pandemic. And I do want you to spend a minute talking about one of the sources of the sort of, again, that imperviousness to real data. Because this was one of the things that really opened my eyes in your book. And that is some of the models, one of the models that was used to justify the continuation of school closures was

So there's one that you say were developed that was developed by epidemiologist Neil Ferguson and and Michael Glass. And it was used to help say talk about why schools should be closed for longer periods of time. Can you talk about that for a minute?

Yeah, I spend a lot of time toward the beginning of the book talking about the models. These are those, you know, graphs. Everyone can probably picture it in their mind where it showed if everyone listens to instructions, then we'll have this nice gentle slope of case rates. But if you don't listen, there's going to be a spike of them. And we were told, you know, two million people are going to die within the span of X number of months. And this was all based on what models. Models are not studies. A model is a projection. And the researchers take various inputs and

And they plug them into the model. And if they don't like what the model says, they can change the inputs. And what we need to understand about these models is that they were built on very dubious information. I have a lot of quotes in my book from a researcher named Jennifer Nuzzo, who's very prominent in the field. Now she's the head of a public health school at Brown. She was at Johns Hopkins at the time. And she explained why.

how the idea of keeping things closed over the long term doesn't work and how a lot of these models are built on assumptions that people are going to do certain things, that human beings are sort of believed to behave like a robot. And, you know, this goes back to some of the mask studies were done on mannequins where the mask was glued to their face. It's obviously going to perform differently from a mask on a human's face out and about in society.

The models, and I know this might sound dry, trust me, it's very engaging in the book. It's a fascinating story to learn how we develop evidence. How do we think about what is true? And what I found digging down and down, and I liken it to the Russian dolls where you just keep opening a doll after a doll after a doll, it wouldn't stop,

was that the models have citations. So where do we get this assumption from? Well, let me read the citation. And then I noticed, oh my gosh, this citation is another model. And then it's another model. Finally, all the way down, one of the citations led me to a study where deep in the supplement, it said,

This number, and this was what they presumed transmission in schools would be something like 37%. Is this the glass model specifically? Well, it's not glass, but it's part of the Neil Ferguson, which it's all intertwined. And it said, this number is an arbitrary number. And I want people to really think about that, that the models that our pandemic response were based on, in part, at least this one piece related to schools, was made up.

I know it's really hard for people to take this in. It's hard for me as a journalist. As I went through reading this stuff, I kept rubbing my eyes like a cartoon character, you know, looking at a mirage.

I know it's hard, but we have to reckon with what actually happened. So during the next crisis, and it doesn't even need to be a pandemic, but that we are thinking critically, that we don't get stuck in our own ideological bubbles. Again, I wrote for The Atlantic, for The New York Times, for New York Magazine, Wired. We need to reckon with how we as a culture behaved, including people on the left who I'm sure all had the best intentions.

But we weren't following evidence. People were blinded by things. And what I try to show is how the gears of society turn and the interplay between the media and various establishments. So, David, but about the glass model specifically, because I did not know this. OK, I'm just reading that that you found that this model was important in terms of it came to the conclusion that youth are.

are, you know, the grimy, snotty backbones of viral spread. I mean, it's considered common sense, but he had a model that supposedly proved that. Can you tell me what the basis for that assumption was or that conclusion was? What simulations did he use? Well, in part, he worked with his daughter, who is 14 at the time, and she was doing a science experiment in school. And they just kind of modeled it out that

these again then go back to that citation i was talking about these things were based on assumptions they were also based on influenza which operates differently from a coronavirus and we had lots of information about coronaviruses and how they typically are pretty benign to kids but for years coronaviruses this is kind of what the common cold often is as a coronavirus they can be really dangerous to older people in nursing homes there often are deaths related to coronaviruses

All these things we were told that were novel and that were crazy and different and strange were actually part of like a narrative, a contextualizing of things that wasn't true necessarily. And this model was based on these ideas. Well, sure, a bunch of snot-nosed kids running around. Again, this might make sense.

If everything in society is closed and if this lasts for a week or two, this does not make sense. And I talk with this researcher, Weston Branch Elliman, who is at Harvard Medical School, who's an expert in implementation science. And they study the effects of how do people comply or not comply with guidance? You know, if you're told to take a bunch of giant pills that give you a headache and a stomachache, you're probably not going to keep taking them. Or they know some portion of patients will stop. Well, it's the same thing with these types

of interventions. People simply were not capable of staying home and locked away. Moreover, we knew on the flip side that doing so to kids would be incredibly harmful. So much attention has been paid to learning loss, and rightfully so, and the damage from that will be long lasting. There's so many harms that aren't quantifiable in that way. The poor kid in the Bronx, and I spoke to a guy who did football programs for these kids, underprivileged kids,

who was depending, he was going to be the first kid in his family to ever go to college. Well, what do you think happened to that kid when the football season was terminated? His life trajectory is permanently altered because that scholarship evaporated. There are so many things and harms we inflicted on kids, and I want to be really clear about this. This was not a trade-off. This was all

only harm. Sadly, there was no benefit. You look at California versus Florida, wildly different responses to the pandemic. There was no benefit in overall death rates for California versus Florida. I don't mean to be rude in jumping in, but we only have two minutes left. And I have to say, I appreciate the, like, you have the energy right now of a man who's been waiting a long time to talk about this.

I mean, I know you've done other interviews here, but we just have two minutes, and I want to take a step back here because what I think is really important is, first of all, we need to have conversations like this more because, as I said at the beginning—

Look, another pandemic is going to happen. That's just the way of things. We have to learn as much as we can. I don't necessarily want to engage in some like finger point and you don't do this either, but like finger pointing, you know, Monday morning quarterbacking. Because we talked about the really toxic mix that was happening in this country. We had we had massive political polarization that set us up for failure from the start. We did have

You know, a scientific establishment that oddly was not ready to be able to talk clearly and honestly about what they knew or didn't know about COVID. We had the politics of school unions, etc., teachers unions, etc.,

What I want to hear from you, and again, we only have like a minute now, is with all of this, you know, thinking that you've done before, in writing this book, I still fundamentally believe that good science, and I'm going to emphasize the word good, good science is worthy of the public's trust. And it's essential in important decision making for a nation. How do we regain that trust?

Of course. Yes, that's the most important thing is how do we trust these people who are giving us guidance? I think one of the slight positives potentially is Jay Bhattacharya, who's now in charge of the NIH. He was one of the great Barrington guys. One of the things he wants to do, one of his priorities is replication. And that means studies that have results that a lot of

our policies are based on, he wants to do some studies again. There's a thing called the replication crisis, which you're probably aware of, where so many of our famous medical studies, particularly in psychology, can't be replicated. Things that we think are true might not be true. So that's one thing that's really important. And I'd say the broader thing is exactly what you're doing, which is let's have a conversation about this. We need to reckon with what happened. And I assume your listeners are critical thinkers. If you want to think critically about things,

You need to actually address what happened. And that's what my book does. It's not about Monday morning quarterbacking. It's about let's look at what these kind of big pieces in society and how they operate and understanding how things work behind the scenes. And that's what my book will bring to people. Well, the book is called An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, the Virus and the Story, a Story of Bad Decisions. David, thank you so much. This is On Point.

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That's S-P-A-C-E-8-0. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com and enter promo code SPACE80. Support for this podcast comes from It's Revolutionary, a podcast from Massachusetts 250. Follow wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Katherine Switzer, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon.

You're listening to It's Revolutionary, a podcast celebrating 250 years since the shot heard around the world was fired right here in Massachusetts. I'm Jay Feinstein. From revolution to revolution, we're exploring the people and places in Massachusetts that shape America. Katherine Switzer is one of these people.

In 1967, she became the first woman to officially register for and run the Boston Marathon. I spoke to her a few weeks ago. So the first thing I wanted to ask you is when did you first become a runner?

I first became a runner when I was 12 years old. I wanted to be a high school cheerleader and my father said, "No, you don't. Cheerleaders cheer for other people. You want people to cheer for you." He said, "Life is for participating, not spectating." And he said, "You should get out and run a mile a day so you can make the field hockey team in your high school next year." I did it every day all through that hot summer and then into high school. And it was very, very powerful for a 12-year-old kid going into high school.

I would look at the 18-year-old next to me in class and I would think, "I'm not afraid of him because he didn't run a mile today and I did." And it really gave me this wonderful sense of empowerment. I used to call it my secret weapon. And pretty soon the mile became two miles and then three miles. And when I got to Syracuse University, I asked the coach there if I could run on the men's team.

And he said, no, not officially because it's against NCAA rules. There were no sports for women at Syracuse University. Can you imagine? But he said, you could come and train with the team if you wanted to.

But he wasn't serious about it because I heard him laughing to his colleagues. So I showed up. He was very surprised. And I got adopted by the team. I couldn't keep up with them. But a volunteer coach who was 50 and had run 15 Boston Marathons took me under his wing. And every day we would run together. We ran longer. And he would tell me another Boston Marathon story. Until one day I told him I too wanted to run the Boston Marathon.

When I said that, he said, that's impossible. No woman anywhere could ever run a marathon. And we argued. And he said, I'll tell you what, if you show me in practice that you can do it, I'd be the first person to take you to Boston. And indeed, then came the day we ran our 26.2 miles. He passed out at the end of the workout.

because we actually ran 31 miles. I wanted to overdo the distance to make sure I could do it. I was so excited. And when he came to, he said, women have hidden potential in endurance and stamina. And I would say that was the day I really became a runner. You know, you started off saying that

you know, you wanted to do something where people would cheer for you. And when I think of the sights and sounds of the marathon, the first thing I think of is the cheering. What does that feel like? Running and seeing everybody as you pass everybody, all the crowds,

It is an astonishing experience. The Boston Marathon is an astonishing experience. But when I ran it the first time, I really wanted to be very low key. I want to keep my head down and just go and run. I wanted to run my marathon and not have any fuss about it. So as we know, there was a big fuss about it because at a mile and a half into the race, the press truck discovered that I was a woman and were all over me taking pictures,

shouting at me, what are you trying to prove? And as that was going on, the official truck came by and the co-race director, Jock Semple, jumped off of the official's truck, ran down the street after me, grabbed me and screamed at me, get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers and tried to rip my bib numbers off.

So there was a melee. My coach tried to get him away from me. He was just out of control. But then my burly boyfriend, who was running with me, threw a crossbody block into the official and sent Jock flying through the air. And my coach screamed, run like hell. Down the street we went. I mean, it's a hilarious story in the retelling, but it was a very, very bad moment. And I was terrified and scared. And I was just 20.

And I thought maybe somehow I had damaged this really, really important race. But the press kept badgering me like, when are you going to quit? And I told them to leave me alone. I wasn't going to quit. And I told my coach, I'm going to finish this race on my hands and my knees if I have to. I did finish the race. I didn't finish on my hands and my knees. But by the time I finished the race, there were three things that had happened. One, I had forgiven the official.

It wasn't his fault. I just figured he was a product of his time. The second thing is, is I was determined to be a better athlete. I ran in four hours and 20 minutes. I wanted to be a better athlete than that. And I knew I could be if I trained hard and I did become a very good athlete. And the third thing is, and I didn't know what it was going to look like, but I needed to change the status of women.

It's been fantastic to see the astronomical growth in the whole social revolution that women's running has become. And a lot of it is from that day at the Boston Marathon. It's Revolutionary is a podcast from Massachusetts 250. And that's just the first five minutes of my conversation with Katherine Switzer.

The full episode also includes a conversation with Ryan Montgomery, the winner of last year's non-binary category of the marathon. I think a lot of the environment I was in told me that I should act a certain way or be a certain way or show up in a certain way. But I felt like every time I would go running, especially in the outdoors, in the forest, I felt like I could just be me.

Be sure to check that out. For the extended cut, look out for It's Revolutionary wherever you get your podcasts or head to wbur.org slash ma250.