Following the junk science: How a health crisis became an educational disaster

Schools around the world closed at the start of the Covid pandemic. It quickly became clear that young children were at very little risk from the disease and unlikely to spread it. Many European countries reopened schools in April and May, typically without masking or distancing.

In An Abundance of Caution, David Zweig explains why U.S. policymakers got it so wrong, and failed to correct their mistakes, doing grave harm to children's mental, physical and academic health.

The father of two children, Zweig saw the cost of remote schooling and isolation, and began asking questions. He published The Case for Reopening Schools in Wired in May, 2020, pointing out that the U.S. was an outlier. A year later, his kids were still out of school, he tells Greg Toppo in an interview on The 74.

Toppo asks the key question: "By May 2020, schools in The Netherlands, Norway, Finland, France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and more than a dozen other nations had reopened, with evidence mounting that COVID wasn’t even a modest risk to children. At a European Union conference, researchers reported that reopening schools there brought no significant increase in infections. Why weren’t we in lockstep with Europe?"

"A uniquely acrimonious and tribalist political environment in America is one large reason," Zweig responds. Schools seemed set to reopen in fall of 2020. The American Academy of Pediatrics was all for it. Then, on July 6, President Trump tweeted: “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL.” Four days later, the pediatricians reversed course and opposed reopening.

Trump hatred "so dramatically distorted the lens through which they were seeing the world that they conducted themselves in a fashion that was completely disconnected from reality," says Zweig, who once considered himself on the the left.

One of the great ironies of that era was these lawn signs, “In this house, we believe in science.” These people with the lawn signs generally had absolutely no clue what the science said. They had no clue what they were talking about.

Doctors and medical researchers told Zweig -- off the record -- that U.S. policy didn't reflect the scientific evidence, he writes. But most were afraid to challenge the CDC's narrative.

Zweig tells the story of "profound failure," writes Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, in Education Next.

“American politicians, health officials, much of the broader medical establishment, and the media misled, lied to, and manipulated the public,” Zweig charges. The most alarmist forecasts were hyped. "Inconvenient evidence" was ignored.

The response to Covid "shattered the public’s already fragile trust in schools, experts, and media," writes Hess. "Rebuilding that trust will be tough, absent an acknowledgment of what went so wrong."

"Of the many mistakes made in the COVID era, none were as glaring as prolonged school closures, Zweig writes in The Atlantic. "The damages go beyond loss of learning, a dire consequence in its own right: Millions of families, both children and parents, still carry the scars of stress, depression, and isolation." And the failure was foreseeable.