David Zweig Doesn't Care About Children
Top Scientist Power Rankings, Week 7
We at the PAI are proposing a radically new idea: a reality competition show inspired by Vince Mancini's Top Chef Power Rankings, titled: Top Scientist!
As a below-average looking New York City bachelor in the advertising industry who occasionally rescues lost kittens, I don't have much time for cooking shows like Top Chef. I have to read other people's writing about them and then steal the recipes off the Internet. Thank you, Vince. I owe you about as much thanks as I do the team behind the "OkSeatbelts" dating website for fans of the Uhh Yeah Dude podcast, which worked for precisely one person, and only once: Me. Woo!
Introducing America’s Next Top Scientist
So, back in the initial chaos of 2020, the oil and gas industry which is rendering our planet uninhabitable for human life had a big sad that a bunch of people were working for home in the onset of an international, once-in-a-century pandemic disaster. Through their propaganda outlet, the "American Institute for Economic Research" they recruited some contrarian academics who had enjoyed the luxury of experiencing the pandemic from behind the safety of a laptop screen as well as a journalist propagandist named David Zweig.
These privileged few were very excited to be in front of a camera, clinking champagne glasses, and encouraging Americans to get infected with a virus that had already killed and disabled so many, including many educators. Many are still suffering to this day. Zweig doesn't care, and he's crapped out a new book titled An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, which is centered around his uninformed opinion about SARS-CoV-2 being harmless in children (a well-documented falsehood in 2025) and his refusal to accept evidence contradicting this.
Look at this embarrassing drivel in the Wall Street Journal:
“[Abundance of Caution] documents the poor evidentiary basis for the prolonged school closures and attendant follies such as masking requirements and social distancing. Mr. Zweig distinguished himself throughout the pandemic by his willingness to question the assumptions of self-identified “Covid hawks.”
Left unsaid is that Zweig got pissy that the scientific answers invalidated his uninformed opinions as a vocal supporter of infecting kids with a new virus:
“Since 2020, student absences have ‘soared’ while the number of disabled workers and levels of excess death have increased. Excess death is ‘quite substantially elevated for younger ages.’ -Andrew Wilkin, The Hamilton Spectator
The real "story" is that the truly "Bad Decision" was Zweig publishing this thoughtless crap. You don't need to read more useless drivel from someone who has done little more than post on social media these past five years; You cannot find photos or video of Zweig treating COVID-19 patients in a pediatric ICU. You cannot find evidence of Zweig vaccinating anyone against SARS-CoV-2. Most hilariously enough, you cannot find footage of Zweig volunteering as a substitute teacher for schools overwhelmed by COVID-19 outbreaks.
Digging deeper, you will not find any evidence of Zweig donating his Substack revenue for treatment of children or teachers disabled by COVID-19, which he insisted was harmless and benign for them.
David Zweig is attempting to profit from speaking authoritatively about a crisis that he has merely been an armchair quarterback for over the past half of a decade, and yet we're expected to treat him as a legitimate voice while his words are published in The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, as well as Substack.
I call bullshit.
Top Scientist, Season Premiere
Thus, we at the Pandemic Accountability Index Studios (a totally real company) are pitching a new reality competition program to local cable networks. The show is titled Top Scientist, modelled after Top Chef, and is hosted by some of the world's leading pandemic experts, who I'm sure are very excited to judge the medical and scientific abilities of social media's loudest talkers. This will be an incredibly enlightening program for the general public.
"Any doctor who says that only RCTs can answer pandemic questions should by now be able to state which RCT they participated in. Talk is easy." -Dr. Jonathan Howard, Feb. 21st 2023
Zweig sees fit to write an entire book about the public health response to a disease that put countless Americans in the hospital, where Zweig could not be found treating patients. He was too busy cheerleading for the virus on social media.
For the first episode, the challenge will be designed by Dr. Jonathan Howard, who actually treated COVID-19 patients in New York City during the initial wave of the pandemic. Our competitors will be coated up with stethoscopes & no PPE, since Zweig and his ilk think the entire industry of PPE manufacturing is engaged in a global conspiracy of fraud, treating patients in an overwhelmed ICU ward during a simulated pandemic outbreak.
Inspired by Dr. Howard's real-world experiences, this will feature overwhelmed healthcare workers taking their own lives as over-extended emergency wards are pushed well beyond their breaking point. If Zweig can put down the champagne glass and get his hands dirty, then perhaps what he has to say holds some weight. Otherwise, you can safely ignore his tome and related forms of COVID-19 fanfiction.
Will Judge Howard have positive things to say about these pro-COVID voices when forced to actually deal with the crisis that their favorite virus caused? Doubtful. Don't worry, the next episode gets a lot more challenging.
Top Scientist: Hard Sciences Edition
"We must find a way to build back science literacy and critical thinking skills in K-12. We're creating an entire generation of incurious influencers, so ready to be activated by conspiracy websites, seemingly desperate to be told what and how to think." -Prof. Peter Hotez MD PhD, April 19th, 2025
Episode Two will be judged by vaccine scientist Dr. Peter Hotez, who will design a challenge for our competitors to conjure up a vaccine to combat the pathogen they encountered in the previous episode. For people who talk very authoritatively about vaccines and how horrible they seemingly are on social media, it would be quite fascinating to see them have to try and produce one of their own. Oddly enough, I feel that I could confidently predict that most of them would fail in this task.
It seems like actually producing a vaccine would be much more difficult than spending all day on the Internet trying to scare the public about them. Why don't we find out the truth?
Episode Three will be judged by Matthew Oliver, aerospace & electrical engineering expert. Our remaining competitors, if they're not absolute cowards, will now be tasked with designing an engineering solution to prevent transmission of the simulated virus they've encountered in the previous episodes, in order to ensure uninterrupted education, healthcare, commerce, etc. Matt gets to have a lot of fun here, because he gets to twist wrists and explain rudimental engineering science to people who have never thought about it pre-2020 yet speak rather authoritatively about entire scientific fields in 2025. We at home all get to learn from their suffering.
If you're not picking up the theme so far, it's that voices like David Zweig profit from talking quite arrogantly about topics they are incredibly ignorant about. There's a lot of really embarassing COVID-19 fanfiction that follows this pattern, and the public should be forced to see how these authors handle a real-world crisis situation instead of merely yammering from their abstract imaginations. In the alternative universe where this show was actually produced, Vince Mancini's roundup would simply read: "Jesus Christ. What a bloodbath."
Who Can Actually Keep Schools Open In A Pandemic?
Our two-part finale will be judged by epidemiologist Ellie Murray, (E is for Epi) who has been targeted with all sorts of outrageous, abusive comments for years due to her unforgivable crime of being an outspoken woman in STEM who argued for preventing SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks. Boorish men like David Zweig, who championed the virus as harmless and benevolent even years after it had already killed and disabled so many, absolutely despise Murray. Men like Zweig hate the fact that women like Murray correctly pointed out that children have been killed and disabled by their favorite virus, completely invalidating their unscientific, unresearched opinions.
So, for our final challenge, our competitors are given the role of grade school administrator under threat from the simulated pathogen they encountered in previous episodes. Men like Zweig will insist that we do nothing, letting the virus burn through schoolchildren and faculty like wildfire. So, they have to explain to the teachers that some of them will be expected to die as part of the terms of their employment, many will become disabled, and all of them have been press-ganged into not only struggling to teach a crowded, underfunded classroom, but also serve as nurses for children getting very sick from a brand new virus - diverting energy & resources away from the primary role of teachers: to educate children.
Now our contestants have to explain how classrooms are being combined as too many sick teachers, and not enough substitutes, results in disrupted education - with standardized test scores falling as a result. You have to deal with children struggling to focus on their studies because they've been traumatized by the experience of being infected at school with a novel pathogen and bringing the virus home to infect a parent, killing them. Struggling to come up with an excuse for angry parents whose child is now disabled thanks to a virus you used their classroom as an incubation chamber for. With only a semester, loudmouthed ignoramuses like Zweig would crumble as they're confronted by the results of embracing schools as focused infection multipliers, foolishly celebrating sick and diseased children as a metric of success.
Even worse, the political quagmire that is caused as kids start dying due to a nationwide shortage of pediatric ICU specialists that existed prior to 2020 and persists today - including kids who aren't infected with the hypothetical virus this show is centered around, thanks to overwhelmed pediatric ICUs. It's easy to open a word processor and type "if I was in charge, schools would have stayed open in Spring 2020." Trying to make this work in reality is much more difficult.
The Grand Finale
The sixth and final episode of our first season has our panel of judges come together to pick a "winner," and see who truly is the "Top Scientist" among SARS-CoV-2's most vocal advocates. Spoiler alert: There's no actual winners, because pandemics are not a "game" you can possibly "win."
The point of these seemingly impossible challenges is that COVID-19 fanfiction authors like David Zweig have never faced real-world responsibility when it comes to a pandemic level threat. They casually infer that a hypothetical 2019 flu pandemic response proposal was all we needed as part of their fantasy of a mitigation-free SARS-CoV pandemic, and that schools overwhelmed by viral outbreaks could function "normally" with minimal disruption, with teachers expected to risk death and disability as a condition of their employment.
They simply are not concerned with protecting children and their families' health, because their priority is to spew unscientific propaganda solely promoting themselves.
All of these cranks would immediately crumble under the pressure and fail if they had to put their own ideas into practice. Journalists should be honest with the public about bad-faith actors like David Zweig and how little they actually know, speaking over and censoring actual scientists and doctors trying to protect the public from a global pandemic threat. There was simply no alternative mitigation-free COVID-19 response which minimized the casualties caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Anyone who is selling that heap of lard should be forced to answer for how they would deal with the real-world challenges that COVID-19 has presented the world and accept responsibility for when their failed ideas would inevitably be abandoned come another pandemic. Instead, they get to sling cheap insults in the media.
Just look at this drivel from a recent Zweig interview in “The 74 Million:”
Just a few weeks into the COVID pandemic, veteran New York journalist David Zweig began looking into the evidence behind universal school closures.
In early 2020, the findings suggested that children were essentially unaffected by the virus and minimally contagious when they caught it…Media outlets, he alleges, routinely overhyped the seriousness of the virus, despite evidence that children were not major carriers — and schools didn’t drive transmission.
Thousands of dead later, with countless disabled, and mountains of medical research documenting COVID-19’s harms on pediatric health & development, Zweig still insists kid were “essentially unaffected.” He’s never cared about kids.
If men like Zweig are allowed to re-write history and science to influence future public health policy, centered upon the basis of embracing new viruses, then all they will accomplish is merely create an even bigger mess left for other people to clean up. Hell, we're only beginning to understand the damage caused from infecting children with SARS-CoV-2 repeatedly, a fact that Zweig soundly denies - as he would be forced to admit that he's done nothing for the past five years except waste everyone's time with his nonsense.
An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions would be much more appropriately named: "Caution: David Zweig Has No Responsibility for His Words." Instead of volunteering to substitute teach or providing solutions to protect schools from COVID-19 outbreaks, Zweig instead spent the past five years betraying his obligations to the public as a journalist - to instead serve as a propagandist for the larger anti-vaccine movement. Now Zweig sees fit to opine about how he would have maintained "normalcy" for American kids under a tidal wave of pestilence? Get real.
We as a society really have to stop tolerating this nonsense, which serves solely as a distraction from the very real problems caused by SARS-CoV-2, not public health mitigations, not non-pharmaceutical interventions, nor PPE mandates.
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