At the Washington Free Beacon, policy analyst Christine Rosen reviews a new book by journalist David Zweig on the realities of government responses to COVID.

An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions’ (MIT Press, 2025), she says, probes beneath all the protestations of virtue to ask some simple questions about the bad decision-making and probe the outcomes:

Driven by a curious, skeptical, and delightfully contrarian nature, Zweig tries to determine if the evidence public health and school officials kept invoking to justify their decisions was accurate, especially given the fact that many European countries made dramatically different choices about keeping schools open with access to the same facts. Pouring over the studies and models, he realizes, “I wasn’t misunderstanding the data. The Europeans saw the same studies and evidence that I had seen, and they came to the same conclusion: Open the schools.” Why wasn’t this option given serious consideration in the United States? Why did the initial closures in the spring continue through the next school year?

The answers Zweig uncovers have implications far beyond education policy. “School policies emerge as a window into the larger conversation around COVID-19 and, broader still, 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,” Zweig writes. More damning still, his book is “about a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.”

“The COVID Reckoning Cometh,” June 22, 2025

Much of the misinformation seems to have stemmed from deliberate choices:

He notes how the insularity of the expert class and its expectation of deference led to poor policymaking in the COVID era. American “experts” ignored the evidence on the ground in Europe (and later in states like Florida that reopened schools) in favor of fearmongering. He cites the example of deaths of children in New York from COVID and notes that of the very small number of children who did tragically die, most had underlying health conditions that contributed to their vulnerability to the virus. Yet, as Zweig writes, “when discussing COVID policies for children, American public health authorities and the media would almost entirely ignore this point for the duration of the pandemic.” …

The flawed models and fearmongering statements from experts were uncritically regurgitated by the media, and Zweig rigorously documents its “complicity in creating the juggernaut of misinformation” around schools and COVID. “Much of the prestige media, including, most damagingly, the New York Times, deliberately and repeatedly emphasized supposed dangers to children and, specifically, the role schools would play in potential harm to students and the community,” he notes. “The COVID Reckoning Cometh,”

Some of us doubt that there will be any reckoning, given an entrenched bureaucracy. But, curiously, after the COVID years, the decline of legacy media — which gleefully aided the panic — began to be much more widely noticed.

As the saying goes, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” But in this case, the messengers appear to be saving us the trouble by shooting themselves.