David Zweig Doesn’t Need the NYT to Vindicate His Covid Reporting

CLAY: We are joined now by David Zweig. He’s a journalist with The Atlantic and New York Magazine. He also has been doing a phenomenal job covering the mask insanity that has been going on all over the country. And, David, I want to start with this question for you. The New York Times came out after two years of basically lecturing everybody about the importance of masks, and they tried to sort of finesse the lying here by saying, mask mandates don’t work based on how people wear masks. Did you have some sort of vindication or feel some form of vindication when that story came out where the New York Times finally acknowledged what you’ve been reporting based on the data for a long time?

ZWEIG: (laughing) Yeah. Well, I mean, I don’t need the Times or anyone else to vindicate what I’m doing. But I will say this. It’s rewarding to see… Well, it’s both frustrating and rewarding to see some things that I have reported on at this point more than a year ago gaining more attraction and attention in the mainstream media and, by extension, among sort of quote, you know, “regular people” who are, you know, reading or watching these news sources. So, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the expression, “Pioneers perish and settlers flourish.” So, as the pioneer, I think I was too early (laughing) for a lot of people on this stuff.

BUCK: David, I want to ask you… So, you write for The Atlantic, and not to make any assumptions but, you know, you have a lot of Democrats and liberals who read your work. So, they may not listen to me. You know, they may not listen to Clay because of what we say on a daily basis and all the rest of it. Could you, like, get together with all the libs, all the Democrats that you know and just be like, “Guys you really have to stop with this mask thing on the planes”?

Is there, like…? How do we get them…? I just flew over the weekend, there was a triple masker on my plane who looked to be in her thirties. This has gotten truly bizarre. The data that you’ve shown… I mean, I always tell people about the — I’m sure you know about the — what was it, the Spanish school system where they had 5-year-olds that were masked and 4-year-olds who weren’t and… I mean, they run trials all over the place. Are people coming over — I mean, are people in New York and D.C. and Los Angeles seeing the light here or not?

ZWEIG: I think it’s slowly getting toward that, you know, anecdotally, you know, it’s sort of, quote, regular folks sort of, you know, liberal strongholds, I think slowly, slowly are, you know, finally coming to their senses on some of these things. Though, as you know, not everyone, when you’re seeing your triple masker on your flight. I mean, I would say that there does appear to be decent evidence that someone wearing a very well-fitted mask, a high-quality mask may — may — reduce the likelihood of getting affected.

But it depends how long they’re wearing it, you know, what type of environment. If you are very, very worried about getting infected and you wear an N95, maybe a face shield and you’re in a grocery store for 15 minutes, that might be enough. But the point that I think Leonhardt was making in his article — and it’s one that I’ve made for more than a year now — is, there is a difference between masks and mask mandates. So, it’s not just about people, you know, not wearing them properly.

It’s just human beings are not the same as a lab test. And, unfortunately, what has happened is — not just for masks but for a whole variety of different interventions that the government has imposed on us — that they base them oftentimes on just, you know, on a study of mannequins in the lab or, you know, something you do in a petri dish, you know, relating to, you know, certain effects of the vaccine when you’re looking at antibodies rather than looking at whether people are going to the hospital or not.

That they’re using this sort of marker of a certain effect rather than the effect itself. So that, to me, is the biggest failure of the CDC and of public health officials is that instead of actually studying these things — like, doing a large trial of, you know, school kids wearing masks in some districts and not in others, instead of doing proper trials — instead they’re just pointing to these kind of lab studies or these very, very cherry-picked observational studies where you can find, you know, a hundred studies that say something different. For every hundred that say, you know — that say one thing, you find the other.

CLAY: David, you’re working on a book about the decision to shut down schools in March and to keep them closed for many people require remote learning. And, by the way, let me mention this to your point on studies. Orange County just south of L.A., virtually no masks required; L.A. requires them. Where I live in Nashville, kids in schools in Nashville had to wear masks. Kids in Williamson County, directly south where we live did not. There was no statistical difference in either of those places where you have bordering counties, based on mask requirements, mandates, and not.

ZWEIG: Exactly right.

CLAY: Where will, historically, as you work through on your school analysis — I’m arguing, and I think Buck agrees, this is the worth public policy failure since at least Vietnam. All the experts saying, “Hey, we have to shut down schools. We have to ensure that these kids are learning remotely. It’s not safe to do it.” Are you in agreement there — and the reason why I’m asking this question is, everyone basically acknowledges Vietnam was a colossal failure now. The best and brightest got it wrong. Is this going to be a modern-day Vietnam in your mind as people continue to see the impact of shutting down schools and how disastrous it’s been for so many kids?

ZWEIG: Yeah. I’m glad to hear your thoughts on that. I agree a hundred percent, and that’s what prompted me to get involved in this two years ago. I started doing the research, talking to experts outside the U.S. (chuckles) and very, very early on it was clearly that the way the risk was presented to children was not correct, and very early on we saw that opening schools did not lead to a rash of outbreaks all over the place.

It did not impact the overall community rates throughout Europe when they opened schools. So very much so in my mind — and what I am prepared to argue in a very detailed manner — is not only that this was an enormous, catastrophic failure of the United States government and our public health apparatus, but I want to explain why it happened. Because that’s the really…

You know, it’s less about trying to beat people over the head to prove that this was a catastrophe. I think that’s fairly obvious, and there have been some other reports who have done some really great work showing the harms. To me what’s more interesting is, you know, how did this happen? Why did it happen? So, but, to your point about Vietnam, you know, the thing that I’m not certain about is how this is going to be viewed.

CLAY: Historically.

ZWEIG: Now, remember, Vietnam, right, there were tons of protests and things like that, and we had that here but much less so. And what I worry about is that regardless of what evidence comes out, that if the sort of, quote, “establishment” doesn’t acknowledge this, that it may not be viewed in that manner, which would be a grave mistake. So hopefully my book can be, you know, a bulwark against that.

BUCK: David Zweig of The Atlantic. Dave, when is the book coming out?

ZWEIG: Oh, not for a very long time. But that’s okay. We’ll keep in touch until then.

BUCK: We’ll have you on. Thank you, sir. Appreciate your work on this.

ZWEIG: Thanks for having me. Take care, guys.

CLAY: He’s been doing fantastic work. That’s David Zweig. And I hope that his book will help to alter the trajectory of how we talk from a historical perspective about the failure here.