How would you spend £200 million? I'm Sorrel, and I'm back for season two of the insanely lavish Rich Beyond My Wildest Dreams podcast, where hilarious guests get their hands on an imaginary 200 million pound jackpot on Euro Millions from the National Lockdown. I would buy tickets to go and see Backstreet Boys in the sphere. I'd buy the sphere? What are we talking about? The bougier, the better. Turned into a lunatic with all this money. I'm trying to buy Europe.
So get ready for Confetti Cannons. Champagne. Giant Czech. and some of the most outrageous ways a person could possibly spend a 200 million pound fortune. Jacuzzi karaoke. Jacuzzi karaoke. You can get that Euromillions feeling every Friday by searching for Rich Beyond My Wildest Dreams on all podcasting apps. YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Since when did pride in your country become prejudice? Our thoughts exactly. The Telegraph. We speak your mind.
I sat down with the investigative journalist and Twitter Files journalist David Zweig. We discussed his MIT published book, An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, where he explores... what lockdowns and the pandemic, or more specifically, the establishment, the health establishment. did to affect the children of America. His MIT published book which was peer-reviewed
The peer reviewers describe David as having a talent for explaining very complicated scientific material to make it easy to understand. So, here he is. days like great to have you on the show and the second time we've spoken the last time back in 2022 2023 And we discussed the origins and cover-up of COVID. And now we're going to discuss your new book, An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, The Virus, and A Story of Bad. I also note that it's five years now since.
It was the anniversary of COVID, I guess. So anyway, congratulations on the book. Tell me, what is the story of the American schools through lockdown? How long do you have? The story of the American schools is... complicated insofar as The United States government had all sorts of plans within their health departments about how a country should respond.
to a pandemic. Most of them were modeled on influenza, but nevertheless they had plans. And what I talk about a lot in the beginning of the book is simply to just set the stage that Number one, those plans were made, a lot of them were based on very dubious assumptions. based on very poor information. I even have a section in the book where I show I kept digging and digging in the supplement of a particular study that they base things on.
that the percentages of what they expected children to transmit a virus was a, quote, arbitrary decision. This is what happened in the sort of official... planning guides in our government, there was information in there that was based on, quote, arbitrary numbers. This is what happens when you read a lot and go all the way into the, you know, 35 pages into a supplement of a study. So that's one thing.
was that we had these guidebooks, plan books, based on very dubious information. Do we know when those guidebooks were written? There are a number of them. The ones that I focus on are from the CDC, and there was an initial one in 2007, and then there was a follow-up in 2017. But that's the first piece. But the second piece... is that as flawed as these plans were, and they were quite flawed in certain regards,
The United States government at the beginning and then throughout the pandemic veered away from those plan books anyway. So very early on, we were already two steps removed. from a sober, logical, thoughtful response. We had a poor planning guide to begin with. And number two, we didn't even follow that poor guy. And it's not like we did something better. Instead of the guy, we ran even worse off and we took it in the wrong direction even further. Okay, so the COVID hits, they've got this...
Guy had sat there. leaning on what exactly happens then reminds the view me and and listeners the rollout because lockdown was that uh it was it was by march or was it it was a different state of state So in the beginning in March, the... President at the time, Trump, along with Deborah Birx, who was running the sort of COVID response, Anthony Fauci and a few others, they announced this thing called 15 days to slow the spread. You may remember this phrase.
And this was based on the idea, and a lot of people will remember there was a visualization where you want to... flatten the curve, that there is a spike in cases and transmission. If everyone can stay home, then this will blunt the spike. and it will keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed. So that was the initial thing, was this 15 days to slow spread, which, of course, included school closures. And this is in March.
that the entire school system in the United States, more than 50 million children, the entire system, was shut down in the span of around one week. This is Public Nonprofit Schools. Correct. All of them. The entire school system in the United States. And universities as well? Yes, universities as well. My book doesn't focus on that, but at least to my knowledge, yes. Everything was shut down. What happened was, after those 15 days,
They then had another press conference where they said, hold on, we know we told you it was 15 days. We need to, let's extend this for another 30 days. And as soon as that happened, the sort of spidey sense, the hairs on the back of my neck went up a little bit. I'm like... That's interesting. We were just told we needed to flatten the curve.
Well, I thought we had flattened the curve, and yet here we go for a longer duration. And I remember in the middle of April, or toward the end of April, talking with a friend of mine. And I said, you know, I've been looking at the statistics and cases have come down. from the peak in New York City, I'm sure they're going to be opening schools. We did it. We flattened the curve. This is terrific. We did it. And he looked at me and he said, they're not opening schools.
I'm like, what do you mean? They told us we just had to flatten the curve. Well, we did. Now it's been flattened. It's unambiguous cases are going down like this in New York City and surrounding areas. We're all set. He said, the kids aren't going back, Dave. And that was another one of those moments where I thought something... very problematic potentially was happening. We were sold something that wasn't what was actually happening. And what I talk about a lot in the book is that...
The narrative that has developed over time is this idea of, well, we didn't know. We were facing a novel virus. This was dangerous. They did the best they could. They're building the plane as they fly it. Whatever metaphor that they could conjure up. to defend the idea that they could just keep doing whatever they wanted as they went along without any evidence necessarily that this was effective. And what we saw early on was that...
They made this initial 15 days and then extended it. And what happened was no one or virtually no one questioned it. If you look back, anyone can go and go look at the media report. There weren't people ringing alarm bells. No one was saying, hey, wait a minute, we were told 15 days. People were talking about this on Twitter and elsewhere, but as far as the sort of establishment within the United States, this was just kind of, eh, no one cared.
It was almost like the frog in the pot type of scenario. So just on the why's at that point, so what would be a strongman position of...
why they were motivated to do that. Do you think it was just chaos behind the scenes? I mean, I seem to remember the argument perhaps is more of a... an american thing but you could maybe have a different some people on lockdown some people not in lockdown so like it was affecting the elderly let's keep the elderly locked down and let the other people go and go to school, let others go to work.
And the problem, though, is how exactly to do that effectively. That seemed to be like a very tricky thing. Was that part of their reasoning, do you think? Or were they wrong to think that? The idea of everyone staying home in a sort of authoritarian-style lockdown like we saw in China, where there were images or at least talk about people actually being welded into their homes so they couldn't escape.
That likely is effective for a short period of time, including school closures. But what I talk a lot about in the book is this idea that They had this idea in their minds that they then projected to the public, and policies were based on this, that everyone just needs to stay home, you're a virtuous person if you stay home, and this is going to work. But what the evidence actually shows, and we've seen this in history, and it certainly bore out during the pandemic, is
That only works for a short period of time. And here's why. Because first of all, an enormous number of people were still circulating in society and working. These are the people who... Everyone was happy to stay home while someone else was at the slaughterhouse, someone else was fixing the electrical lines, someone else was a cashier in the store, on and on, the first-line worker.
So we had millions and millions and millions of people who are still circulating, number one, so it could never be a truly effective lockdown. Number two, when we think about children, what happens in a family, Winston, when there's a single parent who has to go work as a cashier?
Schools are closed. Where does their young child go? Well, they can stay home and they're left alone, which happened to plenty of children. Or what happens? They go to daycare. They perhaps go to an elderly relative's house. They're then going to some other place where they're mixing with kids from towns from all over the place. So when we think about school closures, and I have a lot of this in the book where I talk about...
Some of the behind the scenes, these experts were saying, kids today, they're just on their phones. They don't even go to the mall. None of this matters. That schools will be closed. They don't see each other anyway. They hadn't thought through. how people still circulate in society, particularly... Even under a lockdown. Even under a lockdown.
and particularly children who are from either underprivileged backgrounds or have a situation in their home where they don't have parents with them. And there was a lot of evidence early on. and this continued throughout, that the idea of closing schools was going to reduce transmission in any meaningful way was completely bogus.
And it's forgivable and understandable to do this perhaps in the first few weeks when things were still a little chaotic. But the idea that this was going to continue without any end in sight and know the term that they used was off-ramp. was an absurdity.
but nearly everyone went along anyway. And sorry, just so I've got this clear, it's bogus and an absurdity because practically speaking, even on the lockdown, because of the people who had exceptions to the lockdown, you were never going to be able to do a full lockdown.
Have I understood that? Or is there something else? So that's one piece of it. You understood it perfectly. So one very large piece is that people, unless there is a very small, there is a very small portion of the population who had both the means. and the desire to hermetically seal themselves off. but I knew, and I'm sure you did too, most people
over time, simply are not capable of being isolated in this manner, particularly children. I knew plenty of people were a very COVID-safe family. That's how they would describe themselves. And then you see them, you know, a week later having lunch with someone. Everyone made exceptions. And you know why? Because that's what human beings do. We're social creatures.
100% the idea that a lockdown is basically impossible were the idea where people aren't... circulating with each other because that's just not how human beings operate except for, again, a very small portion of the population who had the wealth and the ability and the desire to stay home. But the other part of it is, a cost benefit. And I talk a lot about this in the book as well. I interviewed a number of really smart philosophers and people who study the philosophy of medicine.
and the philosophy of ethics in these types of situations. And the question that everyone kept talking about was, well, are kids going to spread the virus? Are schools going to be this sort of like... a place where it's a super spreader and all this stuff. But what they weren't really talking about, it was touched on, but it never seemed to factor in, was the idea of, well, what's the harm to children and what's the benefit? What's the trade-off? What's the trade-off?
So the problem was, not only were these school closures going to be ineffective, but they also were harmful. So we had no real evidence that this was going to work, yet we did have evidence from the very beginning that this was causing harm. Now, it probably didn't cause very much harm.
to kids who are wealthier, who are in comfortable homes. They suffer too, make no mistake. Just to be clear, we're talking about the school closures here, not lockdown generally. That's right. I mean, my book is focused on the school closures, but... That's really a launch point into a larger discussion about the philosophy that took place that that...
that basically dictated these lockdown and the sort of lockdown idea. Which we'll come to. Let's stay focused on the schools then. Sorry I interrupted you. No, that's quite all right. The lockdown of schools, you're saying there was no evidence it was going to work. That's right. Again, if we think about for a very short period of time in conjunction with everything else being shut down, yes, then that can be effective. For sure. If everyone's literally home.
But that only happened for a period of a couple weeks. Generally, from day one, there were people still circulating. And there's a lot of evidence on this. It's interesting. You can see this in... mobile phone data and you can see movement of people that over time there's this concept within medicine they call it voltage drop and I explain this where they Over time, people's adherence to certain protocols that they're supposed to follow within medicine or public health.
falls over time. You can't keep doing something that's hard to do. And this is one of the reasons why certain doctors will prescribe a certain type of treatment or analysis that maybe it's slightly less effective than something else, but if they think there's a higher likelihood that someone's going to adhere to this schedule, better to go for the good than the perfect.
So the flip side of that idea is when you think about a school closure and the idea is that these children weren't going to interact with each other. Well, yes, that might work for a day, a week, a couple weeks. That certainly was not going to work for four weeks, for month after month. And then when you think about children in California, children in Virginia, in Oregon, in Washington State, and all these other pockets in the country.
they didn't step foot into a physical classroom for more than a year. Meanwhile, Casinos were open, bars and restaurants were open, restaurants were open. Adults could do whatever they like. The absurdity of the idea that the school is going to be closed while all these other facets of society were running.
it's still, to this day to me, five years, it is astonishing that that actually occurred. And I don't think there's been a sufficient reckoning with this on how this actually happened, that people allowed this to take place. and that the media went along with this, and this is a very important thread in my book, and I spend a lot of time on a critique of the mainstream or legacy media, because my central argument is, the policies that came from the public health experts.
were poorly thought out and were based on incorrect information in many instances. And then the media... who's the sole job of journalists is to be skeptical of people in power and to question and to dig to see, is what this person is saying true when they're making claims? And time and again, they failed. And I have these amazing case studies where I'm basically just analyzing articles in the New York Times and elsewhere that had incredible amount of influence on the public.
and on officials and you know within school systems These articles, none of them questioned the veracity of what experts were telling them. They simply acted as a megaphone and repeated it. And that... is the central, not the only, but it is the central reason why something so absurd where you have a school closed and a child can't step foot in a classroom, but people are having drinks at a bar down the street at the same time.
made note that's how something so insane like that can happen well so before we have that the reckoning that you so want uh just just in terms of like timeline so you mentioned a few states there How many states were the schools not open for over a year? Was it...
No, it wasn't all of them, was it? No, it was not. So there's some great graphs that I have in my book where I show over time the different trajectories. And there basically were three models of schooling that took place in the United States. During the pandemic, there were schools that were fully in person and fully open. There were schools that were fully closed.
And when I say closed, I mean kids were in remote learning. Some people objected to the idea that that was a closed school. But I think for all intents and purposes, the school is closed. You couldn't go in there. So you have schools that are fully open.
schools that are fully closed, and then you have schools in what they would call a hybrid model, where around half the kids or a third of the kids could go in one or two or possibly three days a week, and they would alternate. We're on this sort of halftime schedule. And I have these graphs where you can see over time the different percentages of...
schools in the United States that were within each of these models. All the states that acted a certain way, is there things that they have in common? Is it politically motivated? Is it sort of... progressive democrat states acting differently to republican conservative states so the data are unambiguous that this was almost entirely based on the political persuasion of the particular state, and even more so, I drill down and show the particular county or district.
that there was no connection between the severity of the virus prevalence in a particular area, no connection between that and school closures. Instead, it was, you can predict, if it was a blue state, or a blue region or a blue city within a red state. that was much more likely to be closed. And if it was a, quote, red state or red area, it was much more likely to be open. Again, no correlation with severity of the...
severity of the pandemic in a particular area, the correlation was related to politics. Okay, so why is that? Why is it that conservatives went one way and Democrats went completely different? Wow. I mean, I'm obviously generalizing a little bit. There'll be people who betrayed their own tribe. That would be someone like me. So the general conclusion that I've come to is that...
it comes down to a sort of groupthink and tribalism. And when Donald Trump tweeted in all capital letters with like 20 exclamation points, We need to open the schools now, something to that effect, in the summer of 2020. Immediately after that happened, he essentially sealed the deal that the schools were going to remain closed. Because the way so many people on the left... felt about Trump, this man was so odious, was so objectionable, that anything he said
They have to do the opposite. If he said, I love puppies and vanilla ice cream, they would say, we hate puppies. We hate vanilla ice cream. This is the worst. And there's evidence for this. One of the great pieces of evidence is, before Trump's tweet about this, the AAP, the American Academy of Pediatrics, had put out pretty strong guidance saying that, more or less,
Kids should be in school. We'll figure it out. Let's not worry about six feet of distancing. Let's not worry about these other things. We'll do the best we can. Let's get the kids in school. Almost immediately after Trump's tweet, the AAP reversed course and put out very different guidance. Now it said, hold on, we need to listen to the experts. And it said something else.
We need a lot of money. That's very important for the schools. They need funding. And I'll tell you a third thing about this second AAP statement. is the authors of the statement. It wasn't just written by the AAP. Signed at the bottom were the two largest teachers unions in the United States. Hmm. So people can make from that what they will. Again, that is the chronology. The American Academy of Pediatrics coming out strongly for children to be in school. Trump saying, open the schools.
The AAP and everyone else rallied together and said, no, no, no. we need to keep them closed, and in order for them to open, we need an enormous amount of money. Okay, so let's just... drilling on the teachers' union aspect of it. As you speak there, what comes to mind is the investigative journalist
Alex Goodentag, who works with your fellow Twitter files journalist, Michael Schellenberger, at Public. And she's a famous example of someone who was a teacher and was ostracized for... speaking out against the tribe. and she paid heavily for it, though she's now rebuilt her life in an impressive way. But I'm curious about what's going on within the trade unions and
It seems you're saying it's money is the motivation behind it, but is it as simple as that? I'm not saying that was the motivation. I'm saying that's what was mentioned in this official statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics. That wasn't in the earlier statements from them where they now said, oh, and by the way, an enormous amount of money is necessary for these schools to reopen. So I'm not saying that they won the money for.
Well, because the schools weren't safe and we need to make them safe. And this, this is the fun part, at least for me as an investigative journalist, is digging in and saying, and I spend a lot of time in the book on this, where... There were this list of things that... teachers unions in different
districts and in different states said were necessary in order to open schools. And I don't want to point the finger at teachers unions too much here because what I argue is ultimately the teachers unions couldn't ask for any of these things unless the public health officials and the experts within public health and within the medical fields unless they were saying these things were important as well.
So ultimately, this is not about teachers unions in my view. Ultimately, this is about the experts. The smartest people in the room were wrong. And I go through great lengths to show why they were wrong. We were told over and over. Kids can go back to school, and you'll see Anthony Fauci discusses this today. Everyone, Randy Weingarten from the AFT, it's the second largest teachers union, they all say, I wanted kids in school. Oh, I was always in favor of kids being in school.
if it was safe. Well, what does safe mean? And safe to whom? Well, they said you have to do a series of things, including, for example, we need HEPA filters in schools. It's very important. And the argument I make is... What's a HEPA filter? A HEPA filter is a filter like in an HVAC system for air conditioning heating. It's a filter that filters out particulate in the air.
And they were saying, we need this fancy, souped-up HVAC systems in order to clean, to filter the air, to make it safe. Here's the thing, though. There is not one study that shows that HEPA filters in schools were going to reduce the incidence in any meaningful or statistically significant manner.
for reducing the incidence of transmission of the virus. So then why do they come to that conclusion? And hold on, and one other thing is that, and I spent a lot of time on this as well, is that millions of children We're in school in Europe. We had the best. sort of open, natural study possible. You can contrive, and there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of studies where people can have them sort of manipulate the data or the conclusions whatever way they want.
But the best study is you can look at Europe when in the spring of 2020, they started opening a lot of their schools. millions and millions of children. We're not talking about a tiny school in Tibet with 12 kids in one room. Millions of children. We're back. And you know this, at least within the UK. The school's there, by and large. are not filled with high-tech
air filtration systems. No, they just sent them back. We don't even have an aircon. That's right. That's right. Most of them, they have sort of cast iron heating. They don't even have forced air systems in a lot of them where this would even be possible. So that's just one example, but I go through the list of basically what our excuses, what our contrived reasons of why the schools were closed and things that needed to be done.
Yet by and large, none of these things were done in schools that were already open, and there was no noticeable ill effect from that happening. Okay, so what is the reckoning then? To my mind, and other people, some people want people to go to prison, I'm not advocating for that. To my mind, a reckoning is simply an acknowledgement. about what happened and about the mistake.
and errors that were made, and that's a generous term. Some of them perhaps were not a mistake, but done very purposefully, but about the things that went wrong. And what I hope is that my book... will serve as a corrective to that history because the narrative... Initially, and one of the things that I find so fascinating is how narratives in society are created. And during the pandemic, for quite a long time, the narrative was...
Kids are fine. We need to close schools. This is dangerous. They'll be fine. Then, once the evidence was so irrefutable and overwhelming that one, closing schools was not beneficial, and two, that it was causing great harm to a great number of children. Once you couldn't deny that anymore, then the narrative shifted. Then it became, well, okay, this was a regrettable thing. This was a mistake. We shouldn't have kept the schools open so long.
it was understandable. This was a fog of war. No one knew what was happening. We did the best we could. This was all done with good intentions. So the narrative changed, but notice it was still exculpatory. The narrative was still... Defending. the people who did this and the decisions that were made. And what's so important to me, at least my book can serve as a document, as a record, that that narrative is false. And the thing that I do within my book is I try to make it almost like a...
TikTok chronology where it is not a Monday morning quarterback. It is not a sort of after the fact where I'm pulling all sorts of data and studies that were acquired years later. That's exactly right. I take you through at the time and I show. on this day or within this month, here's what we already knew. Here's what was written about in such and such journal. Here's the evidence. Here's the graphs. All of this information was available in real time. and it was ignored.
or it was dismissed. Don't ever fall for this narrative.
that we did the best we could. There was so much we didn't know. That's incorrect. We knew, but they chose not to look at this information or to accept it. Did you examine in the book... how the lockdown specifically affected the closure of schools affected children like how did it was it the obvious thing is mental health then affecting their studies what was your what was your what did you discover So I think at this point, it's just manifest the harms that came to children. and
But I spend some time on this in there to really highlight, and a lot of it depends on who you're talking about. So again, we come back to the idea of children with fewer resources. generally, we're going to have more harm done to them by schools being closed. Okay, so it hurt poorer kids. For sure. And the irony, of course, is that the left...
generally is thought of as the party who cares the most about the underprivileged. The policies they want in place are policies that are designed to give a leg up, to help kids who have fewer resources. Yet, this same... group of people on the left who ostensibly care so much about the underprivileged, their idea of school closures harm those children the most. And so, yes, there's... There's mental health, but mental health affected all children, including children with means.
There's physical harm. There were children who were home with abusive parents or step-parents. And it's heartbreaking. I give some of the statistics. Interestingly, early on, what they saw very early in the beginning in the spring was that the number of calls that went in.
to hospitals and other places regarding children who are being abused and harmed, the number of calls plummeted. Now, you may think, oh, that's wonderful. The kids were doing better. No. It was that teachers are the most important person in a child's life, teachers and educators in general, who see a kid coming into school and something's wrong. Well, you take that away, what happens? You have millions of children who are stuck at home with a monster.
And there's no one there to help them. Oh, it's millions of children. In America. Sure. We're talking more than 50 million kids. were kept home from school. Out of that, there certainly, maybe it's not millions who were abused at this level, there certainly were millions who suffered.
a degree of harm in one direction or another. I'd also say if you're cooped up with your family, particularly close quarters. Right. That just exacerbates if you already have a peaceful family household. That's right. So there's... the physical abuse, there's mental harm, the mental health, the rates of...
overeating and BMI skyrocketed. And on the flip side, there were rates of children who were not eating at all. Screen time skyrocketed. And then, of course, what's talked about so much is academics. Now, the argument that's been made is, well, what's better, to be dead or to have, you know, lower grades on a test? But that's a false argument. Because again, closing schools didn't prevent any deaths in children.
So they created this kind of straw man where it's like, well, fine, academics aren't that important compared to life. Sorry, but it didn't... produce any deaths in children, but as I touched on earlier, because there was You can't have a full lockdown. So those children might have been connected to people. They would have been with their elderly parents. You know, you might often have the case where grandparents are looking after the kids whilst...
frontline workers were going out. So those kids were now with people who were more vulnerable. I'm trying to make a case for like, the kids might not have died, but it might have led to elderly people dying. So there is no evidence. schools being open, increased community rates. outside of school. In fact, the evidence suggests the opposite. Schools, by and large, had a lower case rate than the surrounding communities that they were in.
And this is something people need to wrap their heads around. Because intuitively, it's children. Children have runny noses. They're always touching each other. They're hanging out. And that may be so. in certain instances with certain viruses. But when you look at what happened during the pandemic, How would you spend 200 million pounds?
I'm Sorrel and I'm back for season two of the insanely lavish rich beyond my wildest dreams podcast where hilarious guests get their hands on an imaginary 200 million pound jackpot on Euro millions from the national lock. I would buy tickets to go and see Backstreet Boys in the sphere. I'd buy the sphere? What are we talking about? The bougier, the better. Time to do a lunatic with all this money. Try to buy Yorah! So get ready for Confetti Cannons. Champagne. Giant Czech.
and some of the most outrageous ways a person could possibly spend a 200 million pound fortune. Jacuzzi karaoke. Jacuzzi karaoke. You can get that Euromillions feeling every Friday by searching for Rich Beyond My Wildest Dreams on all podcasting apps. YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Since when did pride in your country become prejudice? Our thoughts exactly. The Telegraph. We speak your mind.
Schools that were open, their surrounding communities did not see an elevated rate in cases because the schools were open. And this comes back to what I talked about with you before, which is the fact that... With schools that are closed, kids are still mixing and interacting with each other anyway.
and it didn't matter at that point. This might work for a week or two, but the idea that this was going to be effective when you have a society with all sorts of things happening, where adults are out and about, either for entertainment or for their profession. and kids were mixing anyway, this had no benefit. Wow, so you're not even arguing that there's a trade-off. There was no trade-off. There was no trade-off. There was only harm. This benefited no one. This was all for nothing.
And people who might be watching this, Maybe they're parents and they say, well... My kids were okay. Yeah, this kind of sucked, but it was okay. Well, that is true for many children. If you lived in a comfortable home, if you were a good student, if you had a loving family, this was not an ideal situation, but it was tolerable.
But there are so many children, even children who are in comfortable homes and good circumstances, maybe they had a learning challenge and it was impossible for them to actually do remote learning sitting on a computer. There are plenty of children who have what's known as an IEP. These are children who have special educational challenges. And there are laws within the United States that these children are due specific...
help from their school district. By law they have to give these children certain things to aid them in their education as they go along. Well all of those things were taken away. If you think about a kid who has an autistic child who requires a variety of services, including physical services with someone to help them. that's impossible to be done remotely. So part of the argument that I want to make that's so important is that We must look outside.
of our own circumstance and not only use that as the lens through which to see a policy about whether it is or is not beneficial or helpful or whether it's harmful. You have to understand the circumstances of people. who are living differently from you, if you're one of those people who lived well. The people who made the policies, by and large, are the people who also fared the best during the pandemic.
Someone who works at the CDC or the NIH, or certainly someone who's in a governor's office, these people are part of the laptop class. They can do their work from home. They're paid good salaries. Their experience was very, very different from millions of children and families that they were in who did not live in that circumstance. So it's quite interesting how this dichotomy...
was created by the very people who ostensibly care about these underprivileged kids the most. They would argue this was all based on the idea, well, these people are at the greatest risk. but there was never any evidence that this was the remedy. to being at a higher risk. Closing schools was not the remedy for that and this was known in the academic literature beforehand and I have some studies that I point to where I show how over time school closures were not effective.
And it was known very early on when we saw schools open in Europe. Do you know what happened after the schools opened in Europe in the spring of 2020? No. Cases went like this. They went down. I'm not saying opening schools causes cases to go down, of course. What I am saying is opening the schools did not lead to a calamity. It was very clear that they were not driving.
the pandemic. They were not driving transmission. Is there any reason to believe that it affected different communities differently, not just on... sort of income level, and maybe let's say like race level. And I asked this question because in Britain, there were politicians saying that COVID was affecting different race groups differently. And I wondered if there was a similar thing going on in America.
Or at least allegations of it. Well, there is a correlation between people who have less means and who are in poor health having worse outcomes with the pandemic, just like they would have worse outcomes with any virus or any ailment if you are less healthy and generally if you have less money, which often correlates with... not as good health, that those people are going to not do as well. And there, of course, is a correlation then when you start looking at different races within that.
but the idea that closing schools was going to help them was false. Because as I mentioned many times, but beyond that, it's also interesting. Many people in these communities wanted schools to remain closed. When they were asked about it, they said, well, we're happy with this, but why is that? Well, there are two reasons. One, because the media frightened them into thinking that this was effective and that this was necessary. And number two, this is fascinating to me.
There's a study that was done by a guy named Vladimir Kogan, and what he found was that once schools opened in a particular area, like in a certain blue district, that something very interesting happened with those parents who had been saying they wanted schools to be closed. They changed their mind. And they saw that once the schools were open, they said, you know what? We actually are in favor of this now. So what this means is that THE REASON WHY
So many parents, particularly if we think of parents of color in a lot of these communities, when they were saying, well, they want the schools to be closed. We must follow them. This is what they want. But yet, the reason why they wanted it was simply because they were closed. That human beings, at least in these communities within our country, people tend to favor whatever is happening. That's what the evidence showed. Because once they opened, they changed their mind.
But no one or very few people had the courage to actually just open the schools. It was kind of like a tail wagging the dog. Or something like that. Right. I think you were the journalist. at Great Barrington, Massachusetts for the Great Barrington Declaration alongside
the man who is now director of the NIH, Dr. J. Bhattacharya. Am I right in remembering that sort of August 2020? I think it was October. October 2020. And in that declaration, there's a mention of schools. I think it says... unequivocally, I just read it quickly before we started talking, that it says that there's no benefit from schools and universities being closed.
Back to our timeline of events, I remember that coming out and being quite controversial, certainly to the establishment. Presumably by that point you agreed with it and you thought it was unequivocal. What do you remember about... the Great Barrington Declaration do you think that reflecting on it they were absolutely right did they get anything wrong do you think that they obviously were maligned. What's your sort of reflection now coming up to five years after that?
The idea that was put forth in the Great Barrington Declaration was what they called focus protection, which is let's try to protect the people who are most vulnerable and let other people continue on if they would like to do so. because I believe they rightly noted that this virus is going to spread no matter what, and there's very little that we can do that's going to be effective.
And we can see this. There are tons of data on this now when we look at that. When you compare somewhere like Florida to California, when you look at Sweden versus other countries, The countries that were the most restrictive or the states that were more restrictive did not fare any better when we look at overall excess deaths and when you control for age differences, there was no benefit. So we know this is just true.
that this stuff wasn't beneficial. So I believe they were right in saying there's very little we can do short of a Chinese-style lockdown that's actually going to stop the virus from spreading around, certainly over a long period of time. Again, maybe this is effective. for a brief window, but this is not going to work for a very long period of time. So I think they were correct in saying that. And I remember, I think there's a line where it's, this is a grave injustice to children.
The idea that they put forth, as you noted, they were immediately maligned. Look, in the fall, I remember, I think I was still wearing a mask everywhere, partly because I had to. That was the rules you had to follow. But I hadn't yet started digging into, well, what's the evidence behind that? Does this really work? important and interesting about the Great Barrington Declaration is that this is not like a very prescriptive
policy-detailed white paper that's 50 pages long. Some of the critiques of it, whoa, they don't explain how exactly this can happen. This is more of just, like, a theoretical kind of launch point for people to go from there. They're saying, like, this is just conceptually what we think makes sense. We're not going to get into all the details here. It was, you know, a page long or whatever. But we knew from then
that the stuff wasn't going to work. And what was interesting is the ideas in the Great Barrington Declaration are actually perfectly mainstream within the epidemiological community.
for years and years before the pandemic. This was not an unusual idea to talk about trade-offs, to talk about harms that can come to children or citizens in general. This was not... a fringe idea this was not unusual this was actually quite mainstream but yet it was flipped on its head and now all of a sudden these people were maniacs who had no idea what they were talking about
If I can pick on one thing, which I'm not clear about, which is that as of last year, the CDC have the number who died from COVID in America alone at between 1.1 and 1.2 million. died with COVID, not from necessarily... I think they write... I'm sure they do. So you contest that number? Well, I would say from the evidence that I've seen, and I talk about this in the book, An Abundance of Caution, that...
There's a study from the CDC that showed that within children, I think it's 32.5% or something like that of them who died. and were listed as COVID deaths, had no plausible connection to COVID. Maybe they had a car accident. Maybe someone fell down the stairs. Whatever it may be, their death, they just happen to have COVID at the same time. That's right. And that's a separate report from the...
Oh, yeah. This is not the one million deaths thing. This is a study that was done early on, earlier in the pandemic. So the point I'm making is the same ratio does not seem to be the case for adults. So I'm not claiming that the numbers are false necessarily, but it is a distinction that's important. And again, from the CDC's own study, that distinction really matters when you talk about pediatric death.
that a significant, we're not talking about 5%, a huge portion of them from the CDC's own study showed that they were listed as a COVID death, even though there was no plausible connection, that COVID being the underlying cause of death for them. So what do you put the number at if you were to...
I wouldn't hazard a guess. And again, I think the adult statistics are, from what I've seen, are probably fairly accurate, certainly much more so than the pediatric statistics, at least based on that study. And what are the adult, sorry, what is the number for the adult? I don't know what it is now after five years. Okay. Okay, so relating to the Great Barrington Declaration...
Dr. Bhattacharya, who I've had the great pleasure of meeting, wonderful man, he was arguing before the Great Barrington Declaration that the death toll might be sort of in the region of 20,000 to 40,000. which is quite, this is a piece of the Wall Street Journal. Now, I think he would push back on me and say, he said, it might be, that's like, he didn't say.
authoritatively that that will be the figure but he was certainly arguing that that was a possibility and so with that in mind I kind of I wanted to I wanted to your opinion on whether there's a possibility that people like me and you who are a little bit heterodox perhaps and went against the establishment might have underestimated the effect of COVID and the deaths of COVID. So I think your question...
is not framed properly. It's not the right question. Because it's predicated on an idea, I think. What you're alluding to is, well, maybe it was important to do all these things because look how many people died. But that's the wrong question. The same amount of people were going to die no matter what. That's the point, is that whether it's a million people or not, the point is doing all of these things in free societies
was not effective at slowing the progression of the virus over a long period of time. Okay, fair enough. But all these things, you don't mean just lockdowns and closing down schools? Because, I mean, we could talk about masking, we could talk about vaccines. What do you mean by all these things? Well, vaccines, I would put in a separate category. There is evidence that the vaccine is quite effective for people who are particularly vulnerable, the elderly and others.
But NPI's non-pharmaceutical interventions in a free society where there still was movement around, there's no evidence that this was effective in reducing the overall burden of deaths on society. Again, if you look at places like Florida versus California, just two examples, the amount of excess death.
the percentage of them was no greater in Florida. This is a place, so you have one place, where kids are in school, masks are not required, people are free to go about their business basically in life, and you have another place where children haven't stepped foot in a school building for a year. People are not allowed to move freely. You're not allowed to go to church in any large numbers. All sorts of things are shut down. You must wear a mask basically everywhere you go.
And look what happened. They ended up in the same place. The overall number of deaths, once you control for age differences in the populations, the excess death rates were no better in California. Because. A highly contagious respiratory virus is just simply not effectively contained through these NPIs over a long period of time. So the NPIs, as well as masking, that includes presumably social distancing. Right. What are the other NPIs?
So we would say social distancing, masking, air filtration, such as the HVACs, school closures. Six feet of distancing, which I guess would fall under social distancing. Quarantines. This whole variety. And what they called it was a Swiss cheese. In fact, when you think about a slice of Swiss cheese, what does it look like? Well, there are many holes. And they said,
If we line up all these slices of Swiss cheese, the holes are in different places in each slice, and we're going to stop the virus from getting through. We've got to try all of these things. So the irony of this is they were admitting tacitly that they had no idea what worked and what didn't work. Let's just do everything. Well, the problem with that is that's not an evidence-based...
process or solution to a problem. Let's just do everything and keep doing everything without studying it sufficiently. There was no randomized study to see what was actually working or not working. An infectious diseases physician named Weston Branch Elliman, along with a number of colleagues, ultimately published a study. where they looked at distancing in schools. And this is kind of the high point of my book. At the end, these people really are heroes who did this work because...
They found that in Massachusetts, they were able to look there because the governor there did not listen to the CDC, and he said schools here, if they want, can allow children to be closer than six feet. So they had this wonderful natural experiment where you had some schools that were requiring six feet of distancing, others that were requiring something like three feet of distancing. And when they did the study and they looked at all these schools, what did they find? Lo and behold...
There is no discernible benefit. of having kids at six feet of distancing. That's a real study where you're actually looking at outcomes and what happened. But this was done much, much later in the pandemic. So, again, we had all these measures that were implemented. No, this wasn't... This wasn't put forth by the CDC. They took this upon themselves to do this study because they sensed that something might be wrong and they wanted to see evidence.
our own government, so the people making the policies did not care enough to try to find out what worked. They just wanted to throw everything out there and make everyone do everything. It was only when regular physicians who cared enough, a small number of them, actually went out on their own, oftentimes, and there are examples of this, on their own dime.
paying for themselves. No one was paying them for this. They said, we need to actually try to get real evidence to find out what works and what doesn't work. Can you imagine if you went to the doctor and they said, you know, I'm not sure what's wrong with you. I'm going to give you a stack of...
eight different pill containers. And I just want you to take all of this every day for the next six months. And you say, but doctor, are there any side effects? And the doctor says, yes, there are side effects. But it doesn't matter, just keep taking everything and saying, but do we know which one works and what doesn't? Nope, we don't know, but just do them all together, and hopefully all of them together is going to work. That would never happen.
That would never happen. But that's exactly what happened on a mass scale within the country. You mentioned in passing that there was some efficacy you saw in the vaccine. I was wondering if you could make the case for that, because I think a lot of people who will enjoy this kind of monetization would also be very skeptical to hear there was anything good to take from the vaccines. Well, I'm not an expert.
on the efficacy of them or not, so I don't want to comment too much on that. What I can say is, I did write a number of pieces that looked at myocarditis, particularly in young males, and the evidence was unambiguous, that there was a signal that this was a potential side effect of taking this vaccine. When was that published? I'm not sure. I guess it was at some point once they started, once it was available to Young people so it was you know, so they knew and they were ridiculing
those who were calling it out. Because I remember when we started the discourse, the counter-establishment discourse started to point out cases of myocarditis in young men and it was written off as conspiratorial. But they knew. This was real. So I'll tell you a story. I spoke with a physician who worked in the PICU, that's a pediatric intensive care unit, at a major hospital in the United States. How would you spend 200 million pounds?
I'm Sorrel and I'm back for season two of the insanely lavish Rich Beyond My Wildest Dreams podcast where hilarious guests get their hands on an imaginary £200 million jackpot on Euro millions from the National Lottery. I would buy tickets to go and see Backstreet Boys in the sphere. I'd buy the sphere! What are we talking about? The bougier, the better. I'm trying to do a lunatic with all this money. I'm trying to buy Yorah. So get ready for Confetti Cannons. Champagne. Giant Czech.
and some of the most outrageous ways a person could possibly spend a 200 million pound fortune. Jacuzzi karaoke. Jacuzzi karaoke. You can get that Euromillions feeling every Friday by searching for Rich Beyond My Wildest Dreams on all podcasting apps, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Since when did pride in your country become prejudice? Our thoughts exactly. The Telegraph. We speak your mind.
After the vaccine became available to young people, she noticed that her PICU in the intensive care unit, there were more young adults there. were there with myocarditis than they had seen in an entire year with COVID. And she had mentioned this to someone in an interview. It was with a small publication, maybe a trade publication. And after this happened, She was admonished by her boss. who said, you can never talk about this again. It didn't matter that this was true.
This would give information to the wrong people. Mal-information. True information that goes against the subjective narrative. Exactly. Wow. That doesn't mean the vaccines weren't effective. I'm not commenting on that. What I am saying is there was a signal that was there. And this really is, I think, part of the broader narrative.
You could not question things if you did. Remember, there was a phrase, doing your own research meant you were a moron and a fool. Yes. That this was a bad thing to question things. But remember, the experts themselves were wrong. repeatedly on a whole variety of issues, including at the very base level, the idea that these different interventions, the NPIs, were going to have the effect that they said they would have.
I have a whole section on the models from your homeland, Imperial College, which was incredibly influential. And the way the models that Imperial College built, where they said there would be a certain amount of cases and deaths, were built on essentially quicksand. this stuff they didn't know what they they didn't understand what they were doing with this and i show how the models had such an enormous influence
on the policies because, of course, any rational person would see a model that's projecting, if you don't do what we say, millions of people are going to die very quickly. You have to do what we say. Well... okay, we better do this. The problem is those models were not built on accurate inputs. And I'm not blaming, maybe it would have been impossible to have accurate inputs, but sometimes giving out
Information or making conclusions on incomplete information is more harmful than not putting anything out at all. So I'm thinking as you're speaking, who the hell is responsible for all of this? As Anthony Fauci has been pardoned by Biden. And as you also mentioned earlier in the conversation, Trump was president right at the beginning of the pandemic. I'm sure you're thrilled by the news that anti-Falci was pardoned by President Trump, but Biden, forgive me.
Who do you lay the blame? Whose feet do you lay the blame? Is it Fauci? Should we be outraged that Fauci's been pardoned? I think Fauci very much was a figurehead, but he was not alone. I try not to point the figure at specific people too much, although he certainly deserves blame. It's the larger establishment. It's basically the entirety of the public health establishment within the United States with a small amount of dissenting opinions, but basically everyone else went along with this.
The average doctor. is seeing patients, you know, a clinical physician, a pediatrician in a small town, they're not reading the studies. They don't know jack shit about masking studies. They have no clue. But yet, they might. They might. No. The average- The average small-town pediatrician who's seen patients all day, and I don't blame them. That's not their job. Their job is to see a kid who comes in who has an illness or something. But yet, then of course it's their job to look up masks.
Well, it's absolutely a bad job. Well, most clinical physicians are not reading the details of every single study. They're not. necessarily researchers going. Some of them do, but most of them are not.
They're very ill-informed. They might read the abstract on something, if that. They're not reading through. They're not then going to start clicking on the citations. Oh, this study makes a claim, but I see the citation here in the photo. Let me go down to the end notes now. Let me read that study. Let me read...
They're seeing patients. They don't have time for that. Certainly the case, I would accept that a lot of them will not have the time for that, or some of them at least, and will go to the authoritative. Right. So now you're getting at it. So here's the thing. The problem is... The discussions that took place on things like Facebook and elsewhere was...
I'm going to listen to my doctor. I'm not listening to you, some journalist. Who are you? Or I'm not going to listen to Emily Oster, who's just an economist. What does she know about this? I'm going to listen to my doctor. Your pediatrician or your urologist don't know anything about this stuff by and large. They had no clue. So they relied on the authorities. They relied on Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci, the CDC.
But when you look at what the CDC was actually publishing in its own journal, MMWR, this was not supported by strong evidence. This was not evidence-based public health or evidence-based medicine, what was happening.
So when we talk about blame, I try not to use the word blame too much, but when we think about how to try to correct something like this from happening in the future, The most important lesson in my book, and I get tons of examples of this, there's fun stuff throughout history, is that our intuition... particularly in medicine, is often wrong. And that it makes intuitive sense. Well, wearing a mask, of course that's going to help. That makes sense to me. But what we think makes sense.
often does not make sense and often is the opposite. And the history of medicine is... built with examples of this and I get tons of that from from the peanut allergies in America to having children sleeping on their back to all sorts of things, or on their stomach, as it were. Smoking once upon a time was deemed... Right. There's all sorts of things that make intuitive... Smoking maybe isn't so intuitive, but we...
But we were told that doing certain things are very important for your health. And it makes sense to the average person. Well, of course, oh, a baby, they should sleep on their stomach because they should do this or they should do that. And it turns out we were wrong. That's why we have evidence-based medicine is we have to actually test our intuitions. And the problem was most of the pandemic response was based on intuition and not based on evidence. Hmm. Well, look, I mean...
I can't wait to read the book. We could go deeper and there's so many things to discuss on COVID, but also we need to leave people a reason to read the book. Is there anything important you think that... The audience needs to understand relating to all of this. Ultimately, and I think any great book should be like this, ultimately the book is not about COVID. I purposely didn't have COVID in the title. It's not about the pandemic even. The book is about decision making.
It's about how do people in power How do societies in general and how do individuals make decisions in a time of crisis? Because we will be met with other crises, whether it's a health crisis or whether it's something else, that will continue to come. That's just the nature of the world. And the lesson that my book shows, it's essentially...
extended case study to show how decisions are made. And when you understand the errors in decision-making that I reveal, you then can hopefully understand how to avoid those mistakes in the future. And my dream would be for all the policymakers to see this. But even if they don't see it, as regular citizens, you can adjust how you think about things and how you behave. And this can happen in a crisis or even just in your everyday.
When you are reading an article in the news, I have a lot in the book where I explain and show how to understand when things are and are not supported. That, to me, is the ultimate value of the book. It's not about the pandemic. It's about how do we as a society and as individuals come to the conclusions that we come to and make decisions based on those conclusions. And I try to pull back the curtain on this to show how we work as human beings and make decisions.
well i can't wait to read it and it's out on april 22nd that's right An abundance of caution. I was a little bit angry when I have to reflect on the COVID years. and what we put ourselves through or what the authorities and establishment put us through. Nevertheless, you deliver it in such a way that it's very palatable and always
Great to speak with you. So, David, thank you so much. And is there anything else you'd like to bring listeners' attention to apart from your book? You're on X. Is there anything, any other social media? I have a substack, silentlunch.net. So go to Silent Lunch, and if we have one moment, the name of the substack, Silent Lunch, is because that is what they forced many kids in America to do. They weren't allowed to talk during the pandemic when they ate lunch.
Oh my goodness. So as an homage to the silent lunch that was forced upon children in America. That's the name of the newsletter. Was that a federal level? No, this was not. But this happened in many, many schools where children were not allowed to talk during lunch. Because of the virus. This magically eating. That was okay. But if you talk. Too much virus is going to come out.
I think it's going to... We don't know yet the damage done to that generation of kids, and it's going to play out over the coming decades. I presume that you're going to be following and covering all of that. David Zweig. A pleasure to speak for you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to the Winston Marshall Show. That was David's fire. If you want to support this show, remember all you have.
or follow wherever you get your podcasts from and if you want exclusive content head over to winstonmarshall.co.uk but until next time be well How would you spend 200 million pounds? I'm Sorrel and I'm back for season two of the insanely lavish rich beyond my wildest dreams podcast where hilarious guests get their hands on an imaginary 200 million pound jackpot on Euro millions from the national lock.
I would buy tickets to go and see Backstreet Boys in the sphere. I'd buy the sphere? What are we talking about? The bougier, the better. Time to do a lunatic with all this money. Try to buy Yorah! So get ready for Confetti Cannons, Champagne, Giant Czech and some of the most outrageous ways a person could possibly spend a 200 million pound fortune.
Jacuzzi karaoke. Jacuzzi karaoke. You can get that Euromillions feeling every Friday by searching for Rich Beyond My Wildest Dreams on all podcasting apps. YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.