Last night, I had the displeasure of attending a talk with the author of An Abundance of Caution, David Zweig. The evening opened with a “lab leak” joke to set the tone. Full disclosure: I have made my displeasure of Zweig's little media parade known previously, recognizing him as someone who spent the past five years spewing insults, smears, and disinformation from behind the safety of a laptop. Co-host of the podcast We Want Them Infected and cultural anthropologist Wendy Orent reviewed the book for the Accountability Journalism Institute and was woefully unimpressed. I highly recommend giving her review a look if you haven't already.
Foolishly, I had mistaken Zweig to have spent the past five years in New York City, where the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020. In truth, he was just a 45-minute train ride up the Hudson River from Grand Central, in a cute suburb called Hastings that hosts jazz jam sessions by the station regularly. Now, there's nothing wrong with this on its own, but Zweig reads from the preface that starts with his experience in Hastings, March 2020. The horrors of remote learning, combined with evening after-dinner walks by the riverside with his children, had to be such an incredibly traumatizing experience.
Just down the river in New York City, we experienced a very different start to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Hospitals and morgues were quickly overwhelmed, with freezer trucks delivering corpses to mass graves. I struggled to sleep with the constant wailing of ambulances rushing infected patients to the hospital just up the block. Dozens of educators died of COVID-19 in just a few short weeks - which forced American schools to adopt remote learning programs, especially under the chaos of the first Trump Administration's disaster mismanagement.
I am thankful that Zweig's upstate community, where the average home price is well over a million dollars, did not have to directly experience this same nightmare. Preventative public health mandates saved a lot of lives, to varying degrees of effectiveness, and one could make good faith critiques of how to better prevent COVID-19 outbreaks in schools & needless death - including thousands of American children. Yet, in his talk at the Hastings Public Library, Zweig's primary grievance is that his feelings were hurt, and there was nothing to fear about a new SARS virus.
For the better part of an hour, David Zweig led an audience of mostly white, older conservatives (I was the only one in attendance under the age of 40) through an obscene narrative that heavily relies upon lies of omission. This was much closer to a “Greatest Hits” show of an aging rock band way past their prime, desperate to reclaim past glory. Tired old myths that were debunked years ago, including "...but Sweden!" were regularly employed without an ounce of scrutiny, as if we had learned nothing between now & 2021.
Worse yet, Zweig directly misrepresents an under-supported remote schooling program, which did their best to make exceptions for special needs children, as school "closures." Nobody, especially teachers, were thrilled with conducting classes over Zoom. Yet, the alternative was clearly much worse. Had Zweig gotten his way in 2020, headlines of educators dying en masse in New York City would have been repeated in every major city and led to an additional 850,000 deaths. Just how does that keep schools open & kids learning? Zweig isn’t concerned with this.
David Zweig’s book & talk also willfully omits what happened to children in the Delta and Omicron waves of 2021-22. Many children died, many more became disabled, and many lost a primary caregiver because they brought the virus home from school when Zweig got everything he lobbied for under Biden. When you grow comfortable with lies of omission, you can casually omit this massive burden of human suffering with a casual brush of the hand.
David repeats a shared mythology from the conservative cinematic universe when talking about his allegedly “apolitical” book, of how the liberal media completely failed American children by not "filtering" experts such as Megan Ranney, an emergency room doctor who Zweig deemed unreliable & lacking any knowledge of infectious diseases. Appointing himself the supreme judge of all medicine and science, Zweig paints a broad brush to claim that liberal American doctors, scientists, and public health officials got everything about the COVID-19 pandemic wrong and were overly cautious about the impacts of a new SARS virus on children.
As an aside, Zweig did take the time to defend Trump from the lying fake news media's claim that he suggested bleach might be an effective treatment for COVID-19. This was a rumor Trump heard on social media, from a religious cult hawking a fake cure for COVID-19. Zweig excludes this fact to dump on the liberal “tribe.”
You see, Zweig admitted that he considered debunking right-wing disinformation as “boring” and not worth wasting energy on, even though it killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. The left “tribe” which advocated for caution in the face of a new SARS virus, which was known in 2010 to cause serious long-term health complications (another fact Zweig excludes), was what David Zweig chose to “pick on,” in his own words, referring to himself as a “crazy person.”
Zweig's justification for his allegations is an absurd claim that European schools reopened after only a couple months in 2020, and their "experts" claimed that they didn't detect any negative impacts of COVID-19 on infected children. Well, Hastings is still part of the same country as New York City, which is not part of the European Union, and it's obscene to pretend we haven't learned anything about pediatric COVID-19 in the past five years. While Zweig claims he "loves research," he's clearly never bothered to interrogate just how COVID-19 can negatively impact children through a growing mountain of peer-reviewed medical research and real-world accounts, as this would completely invalidate his narrative:
It's also worth mentioning that David Zweig has a history of spreading fraudulent statistics to claim that influenza was more dangerous than COVID-19. In an article fearmongering about the COVID-19 vaccine from June 2021, Zweig wrote "Pediatric mortality is on par with or less than that from influenza in recent seasons." COVID-19 had killed well over 300 children at that point, and influenza 10 children. Zweig did not bother to encourage vaccination for influenza, but more importantly: Why should anyone trust Zweig's indictments of “expertise” when he and his "mensch" Jay Bhattacharya (we'll come back to this) clearly struggle with basic arithmetic?
Possibly the most offensive part of the evening was in which Zweig peddled the absurd claim that children are a sort of "mini-vaccine" that protected parents from COVID-19, an obscene butchering of basic immunology, and a rehash of a disinformation article he previously wrote in December 2022 for New York Magazine. I'm sure this is wonderful news to the hundreds of thousands of American children who brought the virus home from school, infecting their parents who suffered and died an agonizing death. Zweig did not share this incredible discovery with the parents of thousands of American children who died of COVID-19, neither. Zweig makes clear that he believes infecting tens of millions of unvaccinated children with a brand-new SARS virus in 2020 was the best solution to a pandemic disaster, and something "we knew," but the "liberal media" and experts concealed this from the public to maintain a state of fear and control.
The highlight of the evening, however, was the reveal that a fellow resident of New York City, a doctor who had actually treated COVID-19 patients in March 2020 while Zweig was enjoying evening walks by the river, was also in attendance: Dr. Jonathan Howard, author of We Want Them Infected and Everyone Else is Lying to You, who informed the audience about Zweig's ongoing public association with Jeffrey Tucker: a neo-Confederate white nationalist who believes child labor protections should be destroyed so kids can be taken out of public school to work at retail stores & fast food restaurants for minimum wage, and that teen smoking should be encouraged.
Zweig insisted that he merely cared about poor non-white kids being kept out of school, yet earlier in May of this year, attended a party hosted by neo-Confederate advocate of child labor Jeffrey Tucker. Zweig downplayed this association to his upstate New York audience.
Jeffrey Tucker also sponsored the Great Barrington Declaration, which featured two unqualified, but wealthy & comfortable academics - Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff - that now have senior positions in the second Trump Administration. They are now working tirelessly to restrict lifesaving pediatric vaccines, not just for COVID-19, but other infectious diseases. Knowing that he just helped put his own children at risk for grave harm, Zweig distanced himself from his involvement with the GBD, even though he was featured prominently in the filming of this champagne party cheerleading for the virus; something that real-world epidemiologists never do.
Yet, Zweig had to be corrected when he claimed that Bhattacharya and Kulldorff were victims of a “devastating takedown” by former NIH Director Francis Collins, when in truth, the “premises” of the GBD were what the two were against, as was the overwhelming majority of the medical and scientific community, including doctors who were seeing firsthand what COVID-19 could do to patients. Zweig commits to revisionist history in alignment with the Trump Administration, insisting that the left/liberal “tribe” silenced the GBD & conservatives, suppressing debate, when in truth: there was debate in Fall 2020 just weeks before a vaccine was ready. They lost.
In closing, I left disgusted. You can’t “debate” someone so deeply committed to dishonesty. David Zweig thought he could get away with spinning a tale of lies by omission to suggest that children (and parents & teachers) didn’t need to be protected by SARS-CoV-2 in any way. David shamelessly tried to distance himself from the worst villains of the pandemic, that he publicly associated with & endorsed, as they now work to bring back all the other infectious diseases that have killed countless American children before vaccines. Hopefully, at least one person in that audience saw through Zweig’s gimmick, now that he couldn’t hide behind the safe space of social media any longer.
My article from April was completely validated: David Zweig doesn’t care about kids.
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