In his article, Elon Musk’s New Twitter Files Reporter Has Ties to Great Barrington Declaration, Walker Bragman had this to say about journalist David Zweig:
In recent years, Zweig has made a name for himself as a COVID contrarian adopting positions that have brought him into alignment with powerful business interests and the political right, which have been waging a war on public health measures. He even assisted a libertarian think tank with ties to billionaire industrialist Charles Koch in the promotion of The Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial open letter proposing a herd immunity strategy based around mass infection and minimal government intervention. The ideas in the document helped inform the disastrous U.S. COVID response, which has seen limited governmental action and staggeringly high death and long COVID numbers.
Indeed, Mr. Zweig produced a steady stream of content that minimized COVID’s risk to children and fear mongered about any and all efforts to limit the disease. In a pandemic where over 1.2 million Americans died, Mr. Zweig used his voice to mourn the fate of a few Tweets and to support MAHA/MAGA disinformation doctors who proposed using infected children as human shields to achieve herd immunity. Examples of his brilliance, which were published in The Atlantic and New York Magazine, include:
That last article, from June 2021, discussed cases of vaccine myocarditis from Israel, but it didn’t link to the actual report, and it neglected to mention that “95% are considered to be mild cases.”
It also spread blatantly fake information. Although by that point in the pandemic COVID had killed at least 316 children and the flu 10 children, Mr. Zweig wrote, “Pediatric mortality is on par with or less than that from influenza in recent seasons.” This is the honesty and integrity he brought to his writing. While only a single child died of flu that season, the Delta and Omicron arrived immediately after this, spiking pediatric hospitalizations and deaths, especially in unvaccinated children.
Mr. Zweig didn’t care enough to write about any of this, however. He had weightier issues on his mind, and bigger problems to solve. Just read his article Putting Students Behind Plexiglass Isn’t Making Them Safer to see what I mean.
Mr. Zweig’s magnum opus was a book titled An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions. According to its Amazon description:
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.
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.
As SBM readers will recognize, Mr. Zweig is selling the fantasy of the optional pandemic. From his sheltered perspective, school closures were entirely caused by “bad decisions,” not a novel, deadly virus, and wise MAHA/MAGA doctors simply would have decided to keep schools open, as if that’s all it took.
Given that MAHA/MAGA doctors can’t stop measles now, we can discard the fantasy that they would have solved COVID back then. As I argued previously, unless Mr. Zweig can be the first person to make the affirmative case that these doctors have demonstrated great competence in power today, we can automatically discard his counterfactual fan fiction where they were in charge in 2020, and everything turned out just fine.
The obvious truth is that 2020 would have been a worse disaster had advocates of herd immunity via mass infection been in charge. In NYC alone, 74 Dept. of Education employees, including 30 teachers, died in the pandemic’s first two months. Yet, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was predictably unmoved by this suffering. Mr. Zweig pressed Dr. Bhattacharya about COVID’s risk to teachers at the signing of the Great Barrington Declaration. Dr. Bhattacharya said a 1 in 500 risk of death was “very moderate.” Teachers’ health was a sacrifice these men were willing to make, and hundreds of active teachers would end up dying from COVID.
Although Dr. Bhattacharya also breezily dismissed all of COVID’s non-fatal harms, death was not COVID’s only harm it turns out. According to one article on Long COVID in educators:
Ruthanne Grajeda, a paraprofessional who helps teachers at a school for behaviorally challenged students in Wyoming, is one of them. She spent three weeks in the ICU, another nine days in a regular hospital room, and three weeks in a rehab center after contracting COVID last September.
Nearly eight months later, she’s still having trouble breathing at times, and has to carry an oxygen tank with her when she leaves the house. She’s been working part-time at her school ever since.
Dead and sick teachers can’t teach. Many more would have perished and suffered had we let the virus rip throughout schools before anyone was vaccinated as the Great Barrington Declaration proposed, and that wouldn’t have been good for children and their education.
SBM readers will also know that we don’t have to speculate about any of this. We already know what happened to education when MAHA/MAGA doctors helped run the show in Florida. It’s almost as if healthy students learning from healthy teachers wasn’t their top priority after all. Here’s what they delivered:
Predictably, Mr. Zweig didn’t care about any of this either. As always, unwanted news is unmentionable news, and an honest accounting of what happened in schools when the virus was allowed to spread unchecked wouldn’t just undermine his entire pandemic output, but also his core goal of spreading doubt and mistrust about “eminent health officials.”
Even today, Mr. Zweig continues to peddle the fantasy of the optional pandemic and exalt MAHA/MAGA doctors in right-wing agitprop. He was featured in the WSJ’s new “documentary” The Lockdown Dissidents, a masterpiece of the COVID Amnesia Project. In it, Mr. Zweig again likened COVID to a “normal flu season,” and even after a year of glaring malevolence and incompetence from MAHA/MAGA doctors, Mr. Zweig still claims it was an impressive achievement that they “called for” schools to be open in a 1-page Great Declaration in 2020.
However today, Mr. Zweig is no longer fluffing so-called “dissidents.” Rather, he is using his voice to support the people responsible for today’s grim STEM headlines, the doctors who literally confess their “love” for Trump and claim that Kennedy is devoted to the “scientific method“, the men with great power right now. As Mr. Bragman recognized, this is what he always did.
While I lacked the fortitude to read Mr. Zweig’s book, my brilliant podcast co-host, Dr. Wendy Orent, made a great sacrifice and wrote a scathing review titled An Abundance of Bias: New COVID School Closures Book Rewrites History. She wrote:
“I love research,” David Zweig says in the introduction to An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.” That love isn’t evident in his book. At a time when the so-called “legacy media” are chastised for trying for too much balance, for struggling to maintain an appearance of even-handedness, Zweig discards any pretense to objectivity. He detests school closings, so much so he’s devoted an entire book to it. This long and highly repetitive text ranges in tone from apparently sober discussion to a protracted wail. But evidence-free, light on statistics, absent any other viewpoints, and not infrequently wrong, all his arguments amount to the same thing: Zweig is angry that schools closed during the early months of the pandemic. And he wants to make sure you know it…
It is quite remarkable that Zweig, writing an indignant history of Covid-induced school closings in America, chooses to utterly ignore the most child-hungry variants of all, Omicron and all its descendants. The word Omicron does not appear in the entire 464-page book.
Zweig ends his book with a lament for the years of lost childhood, lost to school closings, fanaticism, masks, flickering screens, six-foot rules, forced isolation, forced inactivity. No one will say these were happy years for the world’s children. But children are resilient, a term Zweig hates. He doesn’t believe it. He thinks the harms are permanent, that the damage will follow these injured children forever.
You should read the whole thing. Her review was so good, Matthew G. Saroff wrote a review of her review titled The Joy of a Savage Book Review in which he said:
Wendy Orent has a deliciously, and wholly justifiably, nasty review of David Zweig’s new book on school lockdowns during the height of the Covid pandemic.
If you don’t know who David Zweig is, he’s not only a big supporter of the psychopathic Great Barrington Declaration, he was at the official rollout of the declaration because of his close ties to the principals behind that document.
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Zweig’s pandemic output was very appealing to the organizer of the Great Barrington Declaration, MAHA power-broker Mr. Jeffrey Tucker, who praised him thusly on social media:
David Zweig is what used to be known as an honest reporter with no agenda whatsoever other than to find out stuff. That’s it. Nothing more. He had the decency to show up to the meeting with hard questions, period. In fact, his questions were honest but very, I would say, hard hitting, to the point that I thought he went way too far. The scientists didn’t mind at all of course. Truly, he has a reporter’s mind and just wanted to know what was what.
Elsewhere, Mr. Tucker said he was “grateful for David Zweig’s Abundance of Caution” because it “carefully chronicles the excuses for not opening schools from the beginning, almost day by day, and explodes every myth along the way.” “The reader develops utter confidence in the writer because you know he is ready to go where the evidence leads,” Mr. Tucker concluded. “It’s a great method of doing real journalism, and surely this author ranks among the greatest living practitioners.”
Mr. Zweig even spoke about his book at the Brownstone Institute, an anti-vaxx conspiracy organization founded by Mr. Tucker, who himself promotes rank right-wing conspiracies every day. The Brownstone Institute’s promotion for Mr. Zweig fawned over him:
The famed supper club at a fabulous venue (the real Chinese stuff) with friends of the Brownstone Institute, featuring reporter and famed author David Zweig, whose bestselling book is An Abundance of Caution, on school closures but also the hellscape of the whole Covid period.
Come early for cocktails and meet Brownstone Institute friends, scholars, writers, and benefactors, and celebrate victories and discuss challenges ahead. The food is wonderful and the discussion brilliant. Casual and fun, even if some people come in fancier clothing.
This month we are deeply honored to host David Zweig, a curious and scrupulous journalist whose book is an amazing documentary history of our times. Sweeping and precise, the author is one of the few brave journalists in the country actually to attend the Great Barrington Declaration event…in person!
He has worked on this book for five years, interviewing countless scientists, writers, anonymous bureaucrats, and publishers, all with the driving purpose of trying to figure out what the heck happened to cause this disaster. All the while, he maintained an emotional distance that only a spirit of incredulity grants. The result is spectacular, a page turner that deals with a deeply painful topic but somehow ends up providing an emotional release.
The early reviews have been over the top, almost as if the country had been waiting for such a book. We are thrilled to hear from him and hear his story of the research and writing, and have him engage with our wonderful community on the meaning of it all.
Conversely, Mr. Tucker raged about We Want Them Infected writing:
Here it is, a demonstration of the worst-possible presumption: they wanted us locked down forever, in an endless state of immunological naïveté and used as experimental rats for iterative vaccine development.
“There are plenty of things I could say about your very active role in this and you know very well what they are,” Mr. Tucker said to me in a threatening way. Although all I did was work in a hospital and write a lot, perhaps Mr. Tucker imagines I ordered lockdowns and wants to guillotine me.
I was deeply relieved by Mr. Tucker’s furious, incoherent, drivel about my book because he is, amongst many other things, an outspoken child labor advocate. Unlike Mr. Zweig, who never mentions Mr. Tucker when discussing the Great Barrington Declaration, I have no problem sharing his words. You should watch Mr. Tucker’s video with the School Sucks Podcast and read his article Let the Kids’ Work, which said:
If kids were allowed to work and compulsory school attendance was abolished, the jobs of choice would be at Chick-Fil-A and WalMart. And they would be fantastic jobs too, instilling in young people a work ethic, which is the inner drive to succeed, and an awareness of attitudes that make enterprise work for all. It would give them skills and discipline that build character, and help them become part of a professional network.
Mr. Tucker still feels this way. Mr. Bragman wrote an article titled Leaked Brownstone Institute Emails Reveal Support for Child Labor, Underage Smoking, which quoted Mr. Tucker as saying that he would “fully repeal the 1936 ‘child labor’ law,” because “it is cruel and robs kids of a good life.” Once again, it’s almost as if healthy students learning from healthy teachers wasn’t his top priority after all.
As someone who values education, I would be deeply embarrassed and profoundly ashamed if Mr. Tucker raved about my writing and invited me to speak. In some bizarro universe where that happened however, my talk would be titled Tiny Coffins: The Legacy of the Brownstone Institute.
In contrast, Mr. Zweig had no problem speaking to a star of the School Sucks Podcast about his book on the importance of schools, and he was willing to do so at a moment when the headlines read Florida Governor Signs Law Easing Hourly Work Restrictions on Minors. That’s what COVID education superstar Ron DeSantis has been up to, and he’s not alone. According to a recent article titled Child Labor Violations Rise in US – As Republicans Still Roll Back Protection:
The number of child labor violations has risen fivefold in the last 10 years, but Republicans across the US are continuing to propose and pass legislation that rolls back protections or regulations for workers under the age of 18.
Republicans in Nebraska, Indiana and West Virginia have successfully passed legislation in 2026 rolling back child labor regulations, with legislation led by Republicans pending in other states, including Florida, Missouri and Virginia.
The efforts to roll back child labor protections at the state level, with the ultimate goal of eroding federal standards, were outlined in Project 2025, the rightwing Heritage Foundation thinktank’s controversial blueprint for more conservative government.
Since 2021, 30 states have proposed legislation that would roll back child labor protections and regulations, with 17 states enacting rollbacks
While Mr. Zweig is eager to relitigate ancient battles from 2020, if he is bothered by the current assaults on education- and there are many assaults on education now- he’s kept his thoughts to himself. Once again, I asked ChatGPT which said:
Based on the public record I could find, I could not find any instance where journalist David Zweig has explicitly condemned child labor or written about it as a topic. His recent journalism has focused primarily on COVID-19 policy, especially school closures and their effects on children.
The most likely explanation for Mr. Zweig’s indifference is that while his children’s schools were affected by COVID, no one expects them to drop out of school and work at retail stores and fast-food restaurants. That’s for other people’s children.
He also knows that an honest acknowledgment of the dismal performance of our MAHA/MAGA doctors would undermine everything he said about them regarding COVID. Once again, unwanted news is unmentionable news, and while he worried about the futility of plexiglass regarding COVID, when it comes to our current medical establishment, ChatGPT tells us:
Based on David Zweig’s public record through mid-2026, I could not find evidence that he has publicly criticized the MAHA movement itself, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or the physicians most closely associated with MAHA in any significant or sustained way.
Whatever one thinks about COVID and schools, it’s all in the past. The fight to protect education moves on, and while it is not the main focus of our podcast, Wendy and I have been clear- we don’t think children should drop out of school to work at Walmart and Chic-Fil-A. Anyone who genuinely cares about education wouldn’t criticize us in any way 2026, even if we disagree about 2020.
Given that Mr. Zweig was happy to speak to unapologetic child labor advocates, surely, he should be eager to come on our podcast to loudly denounce them. We will have plenty of polite and civil questions for him to be sure. He can explain why he said that 316 COVID deaths equaled 10 flu deaths. He can tell us why he didn’t even mention the Omicron variant in his book, even though it sent nearly 1,000 children to the hospital every day during its peak and generated headlines such as- COVID Hammers NYC School Attendance Among Students and Teachers. We’d love to hear him make the case that the We Want Them Infected/MAHA doctors he portrayed as pandemic superheroes, have proven their mettle when it comes to handling dangerous viruses, restoring trust, and protecting free speech now that they have power.
But mostly we just want to listen, patiently and without interruption, as he explains in great detail why he has a shred of credibility as a champion of education regarding COVID, when he’s happy to partner up with proud child labor advocates at a time when child labor laws are being rolled back across the country.
Our minds are open, and we have so much to learn from his wisdom and nuance.
Dr. Jonathan Howard is a neurologist and psychiatrist who has been interested in vaccines since long before COVID-19. He is the author of "We Want Them Infected: How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID."
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