An Abundance of Caution

A searing indictment of the American public health, media, and political establishments’ decision-making process behind pandemic school closures.

An Abundance of Caution is a devastating account of the decision-making process behind one of the worst American policy failures in a century—the extended closures of public schools during the pandemic. In fascinating and meticulously reported detail, David Zweig shows how some of the most trusted members of society—from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists to eminent health officials—repeatedly made fundamental errors in their assessment and presentation of evidence. As a result, for the first time in modern American history, millions of healthy children did not set foot in a classroom for more than a year.

Since the spring of 2020, many students in Europe had been learning in person. Even peers at home—in private schools, and public schools in mostly “red” states and districts—were in class full time from fall 2020 onward. Whatever inequities that existed among American children before the pandemic, the selective school closures exacerbated them, disproportionately affecting the underprivileged. Deep mental, physical, and academic harms—among them, depression, anxiety, abuse, obesity, plummeting test scores, and rising drop-out rates—were endured for no discernible benefit. As Europe had shown very early, after they had sent kids back to class, there was never any evidence that long-term school closures, nor a host of interventions imposed on students when they were in classrooms, would reduce overall cases or deaths in any meaningful way.

The story of American schools during the pandemic serves as a prism through which to approach fundamental questions about why and how individuals, bureaucracies, governments, and societies act as they do in times of crisis and uncertainty. Ultimately, this book is not about COVID; it’s about a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.Preface
Introduction
1. Remote Learning While Flattening the Curve
2. GIGO
3. Red Dawn
4. More Assumptions
5. (Wrong) Lessons from the Past
6. Europe
7. The Media, Part I
8. It’s Good to Feel Like You’re Doing Something
9. Out of an Abundance of Caution
10. The Evidence from Daycares
11. Technological Solutionism
12. If Trump Is for It, Then We’re Against It
13. Politics and Tribalism
14. The Media, Part II
15. Risk Aversion, Groupthink, and Safetyism
16. The Media, Part III
17. The Worst of Both Worlds, Part I
18. Parents Advocate for Open Schools
19. Bad Incentives
20. Rights and Responsibilities
21. The Worst of Both Worlds, Part II
22. An Absence of Leadership
23. Institutional Failure and the Success of Empirical Studies
Conclusion
Epilogue
NotesFeatured in The Atlantic, New York, the New Yorker, On Point/WBUR (NATIONAL NPR), CBS Morning Plus, CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper, The Free Press, The Hill, Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey, and more.


"An Abundance of Caution takes the reader on a journey that starts long before Covid, tracing the origins of existing epidemiological playbooks on pandemic mitigation and showing how they were distorted into the public health policies implemented during the pandemic. It weaves through the political realities of the moment and offers a scathing indictment of media stenography and conformity...There is some solace to be taken in the growing consensus that school closures and in-school mitigation measures left a trail of ruin through children’s social skills, mental health, and education—if only because it means there might be sustained efforts at healing those wounds. But An Abundance of Caution lays bare how the experts had the knowledge and the data to make the right decisions early on; that the media had enough information to assess new guidelines with a critical eye; and that politicians who actually cared had the authority and the tools to ensure that children would be largely safe and healthy. The data on the well-being of the young Americans who lived through the pandemic and its disruptions of the standard journey from childhood to adulthood will reveal over time the degree of the disaster. But that it was a preventable disaster can no longer be questioned, as David Zweig’s essential book demonstrates."
—Commentary


"An Abundance of Caution, by the journalist David Zweig, 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'...By recounting his own experiences as a father of school-aged children trying in vain to convince his local school district to consider other options, Mr. Zweig movingly conveys the dumbfounded disillusionment many Americans experienced during the pandemic."
—The Wall Street Journal

“It is a scrupulously researched, painfully detailed examination of why extended school closures were so misguided and why it was so tough for public officials to course correct...While the education world is today full of handwringing about distrust in institutions, experts, and the media, Zweig’s damning account suggests this distrust is both understandable and hard-earned. As he makes all too clear, we’re dealing with the aftermath of long years during which public officials and experts failed abjectly, while the media championed destructive policies and ignored or belittled those who were asking about the emperor’s lack of clothes. The experience shattered the public’s already fragile trust in schools, experts, and media. Rebuilding that trust will be tough, absent an acknowledgment of what went so wrong. That makes Zweig’s magisterial contribution not just an overdue exercise in truth-telling but also, potentially, a crucial first step in that restorative journey.”
—Education Next

"Author David Zweig doesn’t want the catastrophic policy failure that caused this lasting damage to get memory-holed. In his new book An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, he set out to hold leaders and the media accountable."
—New York Post

"Powerful and necessary."
—the Washington Free Beacon

"Five years after the first school closures, Zweig’s third book, An Abundance of Caution looks back on what he considers the questionable deliberations surrounding COVID at almost every level. While it takes the pandemic as its subject, Zweig notes that the book is about something much broader: 'a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.'"
—The 74, America's Education News Source

"Harrowing and revelatory.”
—the Washington Examiner

“An Abundance of Caution posits that Trump’s flagrant mishandling of the COVID crisis gave cover to the rampant (but less obvious) dissembling, posturing, and about-facing of élite institutions and public-health experts, which Zweig diligently itemizes."
—the New Yorker

"Zweig intelligently catalogues a number of underlying factors that positioned the American expert class to make all the wrong decisions while trying to make the most of the crisis, putting it to the service of their political and social agendas and, not incidentally, their careers."
—The Dispatch

“The tragedy of this country’s pandemic school closures should not be forgotten. Thanks to Zweig’s remarkable book, it won’t be.”
—City Journal

"A blazing indictment of public health officials, politicians, and journalists alike...an impassioned account contending that in recent years, politics has tainted health policy and science."
—Undark “An Abundance of Caution is a book the world badly needed. David Zweig writes crisply, with a rare combination of journalistic rigor and empathy. But his book is unsparing in revealing how frustratingly predictable many of the mistakes made during the pandemic were—and how partisanship was used to suppress the pursuit of science and undermine the public interest. As much as some might hope to forget the pandemic, An Abundance of Caution is indispensable reading for preventing the next catastrophe.”
—Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight and author of Silver Bulletin

“This book is important. It tells a disturbing story. Faced with the erosion of its legitimacy and authority, the scientific community needs to engage seriously with Zweig’s analysis.”
—Paul Romer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, and Director of the Center for the Economics of Ideas at Boston College

“For those interested in the failure of evidence-based medicine and public health to protect our children during prolonged COVID school closures, An Abundance of Caution is a uniquely rigorous, incisive, and must-read account.”
—Jeffrey S. Flier, MD, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Former Dean, Harvard Medical School

“A powerful analysis of the largest public health intervention in modern history. Using a clear, scientific approach, Zweig asks piercing questions that shed light on medical dogma propagated by groupthink.”
—Marty Makary, MD, Johns Hopkins surgeon and author of Blind Spots

“Through both his reporting and his congressional testimony, David Zweig was one of the only journalists brave enough to tell the truth about the ill-fated school closure policies during the pandemic. His book is a meticulously researched history of unpopular, scientifically unsupported, socially catastrophic policy decisions.”
—Matt Taibbi, investigative journalist, bestselling author, and publisher of Racket NewsDavid Zweig is the author of the novel Swimming Inside the Sun and the nonfiction book Invisibles. He has testified twice before Congress as an expert witness on American schools during the pandemic, and his investigative reporting on the pandemic has been cited in numerous congressional letters and a brief to the Supreme Court. Zweig’s journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York, Wired, The Free Press, The Boston Globe, and, most often, his newsletter, Silent Lunch. He lives with his family in New York State.