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Save 25% at tommyjohn.com slash Spotify. See site for details. Today Wingate Elementary School in the Bald Eagle Area School District announced its closing in-person classes for two weeks starting tomorrow. This is after a staff member tested positive for COVID-19 yesterday.
And we begin with breaking news out of Augusta. Spirit Creek Middle School closing down because of coronavirus. We understand one student is positive. Eleven students and six employees are now self-isolating. Our other big story today, Etowah High School stopping in-person learning for the rest of the month.
The high school making news this week after a first day photo went viral showing a big group of seniors close together and they were not wearing masks. Right, remember that the horrible pandemic moment where people were saying you got to stay away from each other, you got to stay home, you got to quit your job, let your business go under, make sure your kids get shots when you're not going to get the virus. If you get the shot, then you get the virus and you get the shot. And then they say I never told you that, wear a mask, don't wear a mask, six feet apart.
Well, by the way, six feet apart means nothing. We never should have told you that. All these people that just actually made everything so much worse after the Chinese virus poisoned the world and they were never declared responsible, but we all know they are. We just want to give you a sense of the school closures and the kids and what people went through and then for a year and a half not around people and almost everyone's grave suffered that I know of. David Swig joins us now. He's an investigative journalist and author. His latest book is An Abundance of Caution is the name, American Schools, the Virus and the Story of Bad Decisions. David, what are your thoughts when you're hearing those news reports? Kids in schools.
Yeah, it definitely brings back some bad memories for sure. What did your research show about closing schools? Is that a good move? No, I take about 450 pages to describe why this was, in my view, probably the most catastrophic consequence other than people dying, catastrophic consequence of the interventions that were put into place. And the sad part about this is this wasn't a trade off. It wasn't like, well, we closed schools, but it saved X number of lives.
There is copious data that I have in my book. This did nothing. All of this was children, many of them, millions, Brian, did not step foot in a classroom for more than a year. And this had zero benefit.
Some never came back. And by the way, they would say, well, even if kids aren't susceptible, the teachers might be. So don't be so selfish. Keep your kid home.
They could be a carrier. Well, unfortunately, that was one of many narratives that were entirely false that were being pushed out during the pandemic. And what I talk about a lot in the book is I show how this notion that kids were these super spreaders that we were supposed to, everyone was to be afraid of them. And if you open schools, there is never any evidence of this at all. And I understand people listening, some of them might think your intuition might tell you that, closing schools, of course, that would help things or wearing a mask in front of your face. Some people, I understand that intuitively that might make sense, but none of the evidence supported that. And what my book is about is showing that our intuitions, particularly when it comes to medicine, are often wrong. Instead, you have to do science.
You have to do experiments. And they didn't do any of them. And from the very beginning, Brian, the end of April, the beginning of May, countries in Europe began opening their schools. Millions of children were back in school in Europe and the education ministers at the EU, the European Union, met in May. And they said, we have, schools have been open here and we have observed no negative impact of this. They met again in June. Same exact determination. Schools have been open here, millions of kids, no negative consequences on the community, not just on kids, but as far as transmission to teachers and everyone else in the community. And you know who reported on that?
No one. And that's one of the things that set me on my path. I ultimately wrote about it in June. Can you imagine this? This wasn't an obscure medical journal or a blog. This is the EU and they met and said, there is no negative consequence of millions of children being in school and our media and importantly, the health officials, everyone ignored this.
It was an astonishing moment. Here is Anthony Fauci, Cut 43, talking about schools. That right now, we have to start implementing both containment and mitigation. And what was done when you do closing the school is mitigation. If you have a situation in which you don't have a real good control over an outbreak and you allow children to gather together, they likely will get infected.
And if they get infected, the likelihood that they will bring the infection home. Right, simple as that. But then again, you heard him say that unless that was an impersonator. But listen to what he said a short while after Cut 44. They always come back and say Fauci was responsible for closing schools.
I had nothing to do. I mean, let's get down to the facts. I mean, do you believe this guy? I mean, look, Anthony Fauci wasn't there with a padlock himself in his hands. But the problem is what Fauci said, the teachers unions, leaders, and a host of other public health officials and pundits and the media at large. They said, we can open schools only when it's safe though. So now they can argue after the fact to say, I always wanted schools open, but it just had to be safe. It was a sleight of hand. All of the things that they mentioned and I tick through them one by one in my book were all of these reasons and excuses.
We need HEPA filters or they need to do this. Six feet of distancing. Almost none of that stuff was done in Europe.
And again, we go back to this original sin. They had millions of kids in school. They didn't have six feet of distancing by and large.
They had three feet or like one meter or none at all. They recommended against masks, the European version of the CDC. They said, don't wear masks in primary school. All these things that we were told in this information bubble in America, these are critical in order to open schools to make them safe. None of those were actually necessary. There was never any evidence they were necessary.
And there was evidence to the opposite that they weren't needed. Well, you know Anthony Fauci said, don't wear masks, right? In the beginning, yes. And then he said three months later said, of course you wear a mask. And then he said, wear two masks.
And then I had Burke, she told me on camera, we should consider goggles because you could get the virus through your eyes. Yeah, I mean, and Deborah Birx, by the way, never intended there to be 15 days to slow the spread. That was actually a ruse. All along, she purposely didn't tell the president, didn't tell the American people. All along, she knew it was gonna extend. And sure enough, after 15 days, you may recall, they then just tacked on another 30 days.
And there was basically crickets when this happened. So the thing that I try to show in my book- Because there were bodies piling up in the New York hospitals and refrigerators and things like that. Yeah, well, the idea that these interventions over the long term were going to have any benefit was ridiculous.
There are tons of studies and data through history that show that this type of intervention is not going to be effective. And I explain why in the book. And the main thing that I try to show at the book is I suspect your audience already has some cynicism about how things work with the media and at large. But what I show is I actually give people information.
They're gonna have the tools to actually see how the gears turn behind the scenes. The book's not about the pandemic in that regard. It's sort of like that's a case study to see, this is actually what happens with the media, how stories. It doesn't mean there's an error in a story or mistakes, but how they are framed within the New York Times, I sort of walk you through.
So that way, I want them to finish reading the book and be prepared for the next. It doesn't have to be a pandemic, just the next crisis, or even just our day to day acrimony in our country and the way the media works with certain powerful institutions. I want you to Robert Kennedy, he's talking about pulling back on the vaccines. Now, believe it or not, they're still mandating in some schools, cut 45. A COVID vaccine, the recommendation for children was always dubious. And it was dubious because kids had almost no risk for COVID-19. Certain kids that had very profound morbidities may have a slight risk, and most kids don't. So why are we giving this to tens of millions of kids when the vaccine itself does have profound risk?
We've seen huge associations with myocarditis and pericarditis with strokes. We need to ask questions and we need to consult with parents. We need to give people informed consent, and we shouldn't be making recommendations that are not good for the population. And firing them or kicking them out of school when you don't adhere to them.
So people say, well, you should ask questions, but you really have no power. And at work, you get fined, especially do you in this city? Right outside the city. Do you see how Cuomo ran this state in this city?
Certainly do. Getting into buildings, getting around subways. He used to send inspectors into restaurants and see if a cook had their mask down. So you could be as defiant and your instincts were right in writing this book and say, I'm feeling we're just being led astray here, but you had no power to stop it. That's one of the things that I talk about in the book is this idea, there really is a tyranny that happened. And perhaps it was well intentioned. I don't wanna ascribe what the motives were amongst the people in charge. But no one can argue that there wasn't essentially a tyranny from the officials from above. When you have millions and millions of healthy children, this has never happened before, who weren't allowed to go to school. While at the same time, casinos were open, bars and restaurants, adults could do what they want.
Gavin Newsom, his kids were in school cuz they're in private school. But all the millions of kids, particularly underprivileged kids, they were out of luck. I mean- It's incredible. People wanna memory hold this, I think, understandably, because it was such a crazy time. But it's really important what I tried to do with this book is to create a record of what actually happened and show, there's lots of behind the scenes kind of bombshells in the book where I show what actually was going on, that the things we thought were happening weren't actually happening. And why would someone benefit by telling us untruths? How would someone benefit from that? I think a lot of it is, and I talk about this in the book, is this psychology of, think about who goes into public health.
Why do you do that? Well, it's because you think there's going to be a benefit of the type of work that you do. And the reality is that over and over again throughout history, we see that our intuitions about what things are going to work are wrong. And you know who's particularly bad at predicting whether interventions will work? Doctors and public health people, and I cite a bunch of studies on this. And they tend to constantly overestimate how effective these things will be. So of course it makes sense.
You have Fauci and all these other people sort of forcing all these interventions on society, even though the actual benefit of them nowhere matched what they said that it was going to be. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. Shop pay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more sales going cha-ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are.
Visit Shopify.com to upgrade your selling today. So as you go through this book, who are the people that you would say their intentions aren't bad, but who do you just, listen, I cannot justify almost anything they did. Well, to me it all does come back to health officials and then secondarily the media. Because journalists by and large, and I have lots of examples of this in the New York Times- No, you couldn't say China virus. They couldn't say lab leak.
Couldn't say lab leak. But what they also did was journalists most basic, basic duty is to ask questions. Be skeptical of those in power and think about traditionally what they're supposed to be pressing back on. The big business, the church, the government, all these large, that evaporated. So you have these lengthy articles in the New York Times and elsewhere where they are, and I give lots of examples of this, where they're quoting quote unquote experts, or sometimes they didn't even give any attribution.
Just as experts say, there was never any investigation. There was never any, well, wait a minute, they're saying we need, experts tell us we need HEPA filters before a child can go back in school. This was made up, and I traveled to the ends of the earth in the book, looking, tracking down this HEPA filter thing, because they literally- Where'd it come, I never heard of it until then. Exactly, this was something, and by the way, this all dates back to Johns Hopkins, their public health school, and all these quote unquote experts were making these claims about things that were required for children to be in school. Meanwhile, you have kids, think about some kid in the Bronx who's dependent on playing football to get a scholarship. He's gonna be the first kid in his family to ever go to college.
Well, guess what? His entire life trajectory now has been changed because that football season was terminated. We know, for example, you look at the grades, they still haven't bounced back yet.
That's right, so much attention has been paid, rightfully so, on learning loss. And there is tons of data showing that the less you were in school, the worse the outcomes were. And now she, Randy Weingarten says, I was all for going back to schools, we know that wasn't the truth.
Listen to her. A full time is gonna depend upon what's going on with physical distancing and what's going on with the variants. And I just hope this is not a rush to put in twice as many deaths in a place where we're really starting to get things reopened. 97% of the schools are open for in-person learning. Not five days a week. About 60% of them are. The real key right now is that about two thirds of our parents, particularly black and brown parents, don't trust it. Everybody yearns for normalcy. You're not gonna have normalcy in the middle of an Omicron tsunami.
She's the worst. There are so many things wrong with that clip. And one of them, and this is a fascinating study that I talk about in the book. People, like in this clip, were citing, well, many black and brown parents don't want their kids in school, we need to listen to them.
Here's something that people don't know about that I talk about in the book. What they found was, once they actually opened schools in different areas where they were closed, guess what? The parents then agreed that schools should be open. In other words, people tended to agree with whatever was happening. So you have lots of black and brown parents in their districts where schools were closed. And they were saying, yeah, we wanna keep them closed.
But once they were open, they're like, yeah, let's keep them open. People tend to, I guess, have more faith in some of our institutions than we realize. But there weren't any leaders, Brian.
People were too cowardly to actually lead and open the schools. All right, David Zweig, congratulations on your book, An Abundance of Caution, How American Schools the Virus and the Story of Bad Decisions. Good job, David. Thanks, Brian. It's outrageous.
Hopefully, we'll never have to go through this again. It is time to take the quiz. It's five questions in less than five minutes.
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