In the Manhattan Institute 2024 President’s Update, Reihan Salam noes that Martin Kulldorf’s essay “Harvard tramples the truth” was City Journal’s most-read story last year. Dr. Kulldorf tells his story of the suppression of truth by academic and public-health in the first person:
I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story—a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic.
Read the whole thing at the link above.
Manhattan Institute senior fellow James Meigs picks up the school-closure thread of the story in his City Journal review of David Zweig’s An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, by David Zweig. Mr. Meigs is the former editor of Popular Mechanics, “where he helped reposition that century-old brand to become a major voice on technological issues of the day.” He also writes the Tech Commentary column for Commentary magazine. His Tech Commentary columns are collected here.
This is the opening of his review of Zweig’s book — headlined “What were we thinking?”
* * * * *
In the early spring of 2020, freelance writer David Zweig was, like most suburban dads, willing to follow the advice of experts. “People were dying from a scary new disease, and my family and my neighbors were readily compliant with the governor’s orders to stay home and stay apart from each other,” he writes in his new book, An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions. As a member of the “laptop class,” and living in a charming Hudson Valley village, Zweig knew that he and his family were among the luckiest cohort of Americans when it came to weathering the Covid-19 pandemic.
Still, something didn’t feel right. Zweig watched his two elementary-school-age children “slowly wilting in the gray light of their school-issued Chromebooks.” How long would they be cut off from the touch of a playmate or face-to-face contact with a teacher? Concerned and curious, Zweig set aside a book he was working on and began calling experts and asking questions. Did closing schools really slow the progress of the virus? Why did all U.S. schools shut down in a single week in March, even in regions with virtually no Covid cases? What science supported the CDC’s heartless recommendation that even two-year-olds in day care must wear masks?
The deeper Zweig dug, the more his sense of astonishment—and then of outrage—grew. As early as March 2020, it was clear that Covid, unlike influenza, posed little threat to children. Nor were schools major centers of virus transmission, studies showed. In other words, the scientific evidence supporting long-term school shutdowns was weak, the author discovered, while the policy’s negative impacts were potentially devastating.
Zweig pitched his editors at the New York Times: How about an article detailing the scientific case for reopening schools? They weren’t interested. Nor were several other outlets he had worked with. Eventually, the article ran in the tech magazine Wired. The piece had little impact on the national debate over school closures, not because it wasn’t persuasive but because there was no national debate over school closures.
As in other elite communities, Zweig’s neighbors posted “In this House We Believe” signs in their yards stating, “Science Is Real.” Government officials, including New York governor Andrew Cuomo, relentlessly insisted that their policies were based on “data.” But when Zweig and a handful of other researchers convincingly challenged the scientific case for school closings, the blue-state voters and policymakers took little notice. The media, which normally prides itself on curiosity and skepticism, refused to question the overnight consensus. “The narrative was set,” Zweig writes.
In contrast, European policymakers took the research involving Covid and children seriously. By May, most European countries were beginning to reopen their schools. Liberal Americans usually think European nations are more enlightened on issues of social policy. But U.S. media and public health leaders mostly ignored the European example. When pressed, they waved away the disparity, insisting that European countries had “controlled” the virus prior to reopening schools, unlike the U.S. under the erratic President Trump. It wasn’t true, but it fit the narrative. American schools stayed closed.
Most U.S. schoolchildren wouldn’t return to full-time, in-person school for more than a year. That interregnum, we now know, seriously degraded their social development, educational attainment, and mental and physical health. All too predictably, disadvantaged children suffered the worst declines.
You’d think these facts would have put liberal America in an uproar. Yet, even today, this policy disaster rarely comes up in those circles….
