From UnDark, June 20:
Two recent books make an impassioned case that in recent years, politics has tainted both health policy and science.
In April 2020, David Zweig went out with his daughter to meet another parent and child, while dutifully remaining 6 feet apart to follow Covid guidelines. The little group cycled along a dirt trail near the Bronx, the kids chatting happily together. When they got home, Zweig noticed that the girl’s face shone. The next day, he watched her slowly get back to what had become normal during the pandemic, she and her brother, “wilting in the gray light of their school-issued Chromebooks.”
He began to think about how many other families were affected across New York and the rest of the country. The moment spurred him to start researching what was going on with the government’s response to Covid-19, probing the rationale underlying the nationwide school closures.
Zweig, a journalist with a background in fact-checking, was so disturbed that he began writing to school administrators and scientists, questioning the origins of obscure data points that informed policy. The resulting book, “An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions,’’ is a blazing indictment of public health officials, politicians, and journalists alike: During the pandemic, the risks to children from the virus were low and U.S. schools need not have to be shuttered for as long as they were, he argues. Their closure affected more than 50 million students, hit disabled children and disadvantaged families the hardest, and has had long-term consequences.
Zweig’s book, along with Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson’s recent “The Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism,’’ are impassioned accounts contending that in recent years, politics has tainted health policy and science. In both books, the pandemic plays a key part. The events of 2020 and beyond prompt Zweig’s dogged probing of government policy and underlie Russell and Patterson’s wider questioning of the position of experts in society. Their critiques offer illuminating assessments of the role of scientific expertise in public life.
Zweig’s book brings back the confusion of the pandemic’s early days, when nobody knew how the virus spread and panic abounded. New York’s then-governor, Andrew Cuomo, was reassuring citizens in nightly broadcasts in which he promised to “follow the science.” Schools initially closed for two weeks — and in some areas remained closed for almost two years, in sharp contrast to Europe, where schools in many countries re-opened after just a few months.
Across the U.S., children stayed at home, staring at laptops. Those who did not have computers missed out on months of learning. Even when schools reopened, the environment was stifling. Zweig evokes the otherworldly behaviors small children were obliged to adopt. In some cases, toddlers wore masks, while schoolkids had their faces covered all day, with physical barriers on their desks, forbidden to talk during lunchtime. “To be clear, none of these interventions had any high-quality empirical evidence behind them,” Zweig writes.
Some groups suffered more than others. Domestic abuse skyrocketed as children stayed in close quarters with violent relatives; the rate of child suicides rose. Adults caring for kids with severe disabilities went months without respite, and one psychiatrist told Zweig that she had been obliged to hospitalize a parent. “While the children themselves suffered, one of the lesser-told stories was the strain and terrible hardship school closures inflicted on families as a whole,” Zweig observes....
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