“There is no going back to a time before covid made our world crazy. You are right to be mistrustful of trusted officials and respected institutions. Zweig’s writing lays out all the evidence you need to feel this way,” he wrote.
Despite research showing that kids were at minimal risk from the virus, Zweig records what we all now know: we ignored objective science in favour of subjective values, locked down our cities, shut down our schools and threw the kids on laptops pretending they would learn. Baseless fears that children were dying in large numbers lingered even six months into the pandemic, long after anyone with eyes could see the virus wasn’t killing kids.
Gallup released a poll in July 2020, finding that the public thought 40 times the number of people younger than 25 were dying than was actually the case.
“People were dying from a scary new disease, and my family and my neighbours were readily compliant with the governor’s orders to stay home, and stay apart from each other until some unknown time when this thing was going to go away,” Zweig writes, describing the state of his household a month into New York State’s lockdown. “And yet. This virus, which was a terror for the old, posed almost no threat to my kids or their friends.”
A former magazine fact checker, Zweig began digging into scientific studies and calling up established researchers to try and understand how state and federal governments formulated pandemic policies that seemed to ignore scientific evidence while harming his own children. Trusted officials, he found, were failing to adequately explain the uncertainties of published research and closing their eyes to documented consequences.
But the public never learned that pandemic strategies were based mostly on values, not objective science, because journalists had abandoned all pretence of reporting. Instead of scrutinising the scientific literature, journalists with legacy media outlets favoured calling up these same trusted officials. Reporters also platformed a coterie of self-branded experts who managed to claw their way out of scientific obscurity to become overnight authorities on epidemics in the press and on social media....<<<Read More>>>...
