Since the end of the Covid pandemic, officials, including former US health official Anthony Fauci, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and teachers’ union head Randi Weingarten, have denied that they played decisive roles in the closure of public schools and insisted that officials made the best decisions given what they knew at the time.
But journalist David Zweig, author of a new book from MIT Press, An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, says that is nonsense. Officials knew, said Zweig, that “people are going to mix outside of school, regardless, [and] we had evidence from Europe since the end of April and the beginning of May, 2020, when 22 nations began reopening schools.”
Defenders of the school closures at the time said America was different. The U.S. media and officials who supported the closures said, according to Zweig, “‘That's Europe! That doesn't count. They controlled the virus.’ Or, ‘They're doing this, that, or the other thing.’ There was a list of reasons we weren't supposed to acknowledge that Europe mattered.”
But, said Zweig, who named his Substack, Silent Lunch after the pseudoscientific that children not talk while eating so as to not spread the virus, “Each of these reasons they gave were false… [European nations] weren't doing six feet of distancing, by and large. They didn't have these mask mandates on little kids at all the way they did here.”
