“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,” Hanlon’s razor advises us. But then again, as another saying goes, “never say never.”
In trying to wrap my mind around the self-inflicted catastrophe that was America’s COVID-19 lockdown regime, imposed five years ago this spring, I’ve been inclined to assume that public health leaders deserved something close to a free pass for those surreal first few months — that given the panic and the fog of war, people such as Anthony Fauci were entitled to some measure of grace as they adapted to a fluid situation. But in his harrowing and revelatory new book, An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, journalist David Zweig details how swiftly national COVID-19 policies diverged from the broadly accepted protocols enshrined in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s pandemic playbook toward an indefinite lockdown model seemingly inspired by China’s heavy-handed mitigation efforts. “The arrival of a new infectious virus was not unprecedented,” he writes. “But the response to it was.”
With Zweig’s young children languishing in front of screens at home week after week and fading prospects of getting them back into classrooms, in spring 2020, the professional researcher and fact-checker started digging into school closure policies around the world, scouring studies and speaking with epidemiologists and other public health specialists, particularly in Europe. What he learned was as baffling as it was frustrating: Many of the so-called studies the New York Times and much of the American media breathlessly cited were based upon computer modeling built on assumptions that were iffy at best, and evidence seemed to suggest that not only were children typically less vulnerable to COVID-19 than to some years’ more virulent strains of influenza, and far less likely to transmit the virus than adults, but that the entire dubious strategy of locking down schools for months was unlikely to do much to slow the spread. Whatever fleeting benefits were likely to be more than outweighed by the longer-term disruption to children’s educations and development, prompting schools throughout Europe to begin reopening by early May of that year, if they’d considered it prudent to close in the first place.
And yet, as Zweig attempted to air his findings among mainstream American media with whom he’d published before, including the New York Times, he almost always found a striking absence of curiosity or critical analysis. That uncanny disinterest “dovetailed with an ignorance and dismissal of a rich literature on both the inescapable harms that would result from the closures and on the evidence of their lack of benefit in the long term,” he writes. “Reasonable people could disagree about whether the schools in the US should open or not at that time, but there was close to zero dissent among politicians or in the framing by legacy media outlets on the topic. The narrative was set.”
What could account for this distinct lack of scrutiny toward the biggest news story on the planet? For one thing, Zweig suggests, for many professionals, “it’s good to feel like you’re doing something,” and a wealth of research suggests that people in charge like to imagine that they exercise more agency and control than might actually be the case. Plus, out of the “abundance of caution” that so many decision-makers so frequently claimed, it was easier just to go along to get along than to conduct substantive cost-benefit analyses.
Another key factor, Zweig argues, was the stark political polarization of discourse purporting to pit the “science-based community” of enlightened managerial progressivism against the drooling hordes of backward Trumpism.
“The Left and much of the cosmopolitan elite in America saw Trump as so clownish, ignorant, malignant, and harmful to society that, with rare exception, it was anathema for a Democratic politician or official, or journalist or news organization (outside of conservative outlets) to ever be seen as agreeing with him on anything,” Zweig writes. “This dynamic was no less ingrained in much of the professional and influencer classes in publishing, technology, entertainment, medicine, academia, and polite society in blue state America.”
Speaking as someone who worked as a flack for Columbia University, chronicling one of the nation’s leading schools of public health during the pandemic, I read Zweig’s reportage about what went wrong with a sickening sense of recognition. In handling the centennial commemorations for Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, I enjoyed ample opportunity both to delve into the history of the field and to observe how the public health establishment was thinking and talking about COVID-19. What I discovered was not exactly encouraging.
Though public health was no doubt a historically noble calling that had saved and improved countless lives over many decades of rigorous empirical and quantitative work, by the 1970s, things had begun to go wobbly: More and more activists were tilting the field away from empirical rigor and toward lacquering a questionable scientific patina atop their political priorities. There were still top-flight epidemiologists and others working on challenges such as clean water and infant mortality, but more and more of the field consisted of laundering activism on issues such as gun control or gender norms into pseudoscientific “scholarship.”
To significant extents, the pandemic was exploited as the most tremendous of opportunities, and it’s not hard to understand why. Culturally and institutionally, public health has increasingly attracted and rewarded zealous and literal-minded technocrats who feel that achieving a rationally equitable global society is mainly just a matter of funding and empowering enough credentialed experts to supervise. By January 2021, with a new administration in charge, new standards of respectability and cooperation were becoming ever more standardized. All the norms were largely based on assumptions circa the beginning of 2016, when Brexit was but an unthinkable lark to be vanquished and Hillary Clinton was an inevitable shoo-in to break the glass ceiling and usher in six or seven Supreme Court seats for whatever we, the global intelligentsia, knew was needed.
From an establishmentarian perspective, it was supposed to be a new year zero, and an irresistible chance to restore the natural order. It was, of course, inevitable that the nation-state would wither away, and that soon, we elites in the know would more or less enact the enlightened United Federation of Planets as seen on Star Trek. It was not that people such as Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Francis Collins were monsters, but that they acted monstrously in their arrogance and imperiousness and hubris in striving to enact what they felt they might achieve.
On one hand, they blithely used children as political pawns and stunted millions for life, and on the other hand, they really did believe that with unlimited funding and obeisance, they could readily build it all back better. The problem was inherent deep in the public health formula: the hope of starting again from some kind of beginning for a whole new, reimagined generation of children. Promising as it undoubtedly is for a principled reformer such as the new head of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, to be taking over, the inertia is what it is. One comes away from Zweig’s book with the sinking sense that reforming much of the public health universe to create a new class of experts that could address a disease outbreak effectively but would not do what the public health establishment did in 2020 would be like asking economists to stop talking about supply and demand.
Jesse Adams is the writer, editor, and consultant behind The Ivy Exile on Substack.