Kerby Anderson

A new book by David Zweig, An Abundance of Caution, confirms what many of us knew as we tried to navigate the government mandates during the pandemic and lockdowns. Some have referred to him as a “data-minded journalist, author, and cultural commentator” who isn’t all that political but has been challenging the authoritarian restrictions we all tried to endure five years ago.

The 464-page,‎ 1.6-pound book may be more than you would want to read, so you might want to dip into an excerpt published in The Atlantic. The premise is easy to understand. We made a huge mistake with the school shutdowns. As early as February 2020, we knew that children were never a significant transmitter of the virus, and we also knew that the virus posed little danger to them.

Here is his explanation: “Without sufficient acknowledgment of the harms of school closures or adequate planning for unwinding this intervention, officials showed that their decisions to close were simply reactive rather than carefully considered. The decision makers set a radical project in motion with no plan on how to stop it. In effect, officials steered a car off the road, threw a cinder block on the accelerator, then jumped out of the vehicle with passengers still in the back. No one was in the front or even knew how to unstick the pedal.”

In his post on X, he argues that his “book is not about the pandemic. It is about the failure of the expert class.” It turns out that the expert class isn’t so expert after all. Teachers’ unions promoted hysteria about the alleged dangers of opening schools. Health officials and school boards rarely challenged the push for school closings.

His book is a cautionary tale about what happens when we believe so-called experts and ignore relevant data.