Thursday’s CBS Mornings Plus featured a remarkable segment about a new book from reporter David Zweig about the wholly political behavior and unscientific actions of keeping schools shuttered long-term during the Covid pandemic, perpetuated by so-called public health experts, certain politicians, and teachers unions.
Once again, co-host Tony Dokoupil showed disgust with this period of time and the damage it’s continued to inflict, but co-host Adriana Diaz seemed annoyed and took umbrage at Zweig arguing the media played a role in harming American children.
Dokoupil began by noting that, back in 2020, Americans were forced to accept “a new reality,” including “the big one we all had to accept, closing schools for a long time, an indefinite period.”
“Experts, at the time, said that decision was made to keep our kids and stop the spread of this deadly disease...But a new book argues that schools were safe to reopen way, way earlier than many of them. The book is called An Abundance of Caution. It was written by investigative journalist David Zweig, who argues the decision to shut down schools was made while ‘ignoring or dismissing real world evidence.’...Follow the science, trust the science. That’s what we were all told,” he added.
Zweig replied he was and remains in a unique position because he has “both challenged the established position, but I did it from within establishment media.”
He then got to the real heart of the matter about why some schools lost an entire year to the farce that was distance learning: “[U]nfortunately, because our culture in our country is so politically acrimonious and divided, what we find is that and what I talk about in the book at length is that much of the response, led by our public health establishment, aided by the media, was very politically motivated.”
The reporter also called out the lunacy of the fact that, while schools were closed, “adults down the street could be having a glass of wine,” to which Dokoupil concurred as having been “wild” and along with the “loss of access to learning,” children were trapped in “environment that’s sometimes dangerous.”
“Right. Child abuse skyrocketed. You have a kid who is kept home with a monster. Why? Because teachers and educators are the first line of defense who can see when abuse is happening. That was taken away from our children,” Zweig replied.
Asked why this happened despite the initial guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics that schools reopen, Zweig politely as he could on a corporate, liberal, legacy network to slap them across the face for choosing to put defeating Donald Trump ahead of America’s children (click “expand”):
They did and so, the AAP — the American Academy of Pediatrics — came out with guidance. They basically said no matter what, let’s get kids in school. It’s so important. They’re at basically zero risk. They’re not going to be super spreaders. And don’t even worry about six feet of distancing. If you can — three feet, that’s fine. Just get them into the classroom. Shortly thereafter, Donald Trump tweeted in all caps, you know, OPEN THE SCHOOLS IN THE FALL, with a bunch of exclamation points. Immediately after, the AAP reversed its guidance. Gone was the idea of no matter what, get them in the classrooms. Gone was this idea of don’t worry about six feet of distancing. Instead, they replaced it with listen to the experts and we need a lot of money. Otherwise, the schools can’t open. And the other piece is, not only what was in this guidance, but who the co-authors were. And it was the two largest teacher’s unions.
Diaz then came in with an attempt to defend the ruling class, citing a clip from Dr. Tony Fauci telling CBS Mornings last year that his profession wasn’t actually wrong because the only thing worth debating was “how long” schools should have been closed, falsely adding they weren’t “shut...down completely.”
“So, you have said that health officials made errors in their assessment of the data. What errors? What did they get wrong? And how did they get it wrong, because these are top scientists,” she wondered from a position of sympathy.
Zweig upped the heat by saying “much of my book is about the failure of the expert class and one of the most stark examples — kind of the original sin, if you will, is — at the end of April, in the beginning of May, millions of children started going back do school in Europe” and “there was a meeting of the education ministers at the EU...and they said we have observed no negative consequences of schools reopening” with confirmation a month later.
Zweig set Diaz off with this final point about the media’s culpability: “They told everybody schools are open. Millions of kids are in. There’s no negative consequences and you know who covered that in America? This is huge news. This wasn’t in an obscure blog post. This wasn’t in a medical journal. This was the EU. No one. No one covered it.”
Diaz interjected this wasn’t true, leading Zweig to call her out for this “gotcha” (click “expand”):
DIAZ: No, CBS News covered it.
ZWEIG: Oh, you did? Amazing.
DIAZ: I have an article right here. Yeah, we did. I’ll show it to you.
ZWEIG: You covered the —
DIAZ: “Millions of kids around the world adjust to —”
ZWEIG: Fantastic.
DIAZ: “— the reopening of schools.”
ZWEIG: Fantastic. Finally.
DIAZ: But maybe your point was this was not widely covered.
DOKOUPIL: But, no. The —
ZWEIG: This was not widely — I mean, that’s was a good gotcha you had on me, but —
DIAZ: This wasn’t meant to be a gotcha. It was just —
Dokoupil rescued the segment from morphing into something out of CNN Thunderdome (aka CNN NewsNight) by asking Zweig about an observation from his book that “The New York Times had an article that said ‘Cases Could Soar in Communities If Schools Reopen Soon’ on the very same day that the British Medical Journal — the prestigious journal in the UK wrote an article — published an article: ‘Children are not super spreaders. Time to go back to school.’”
The CBS co-host gave his own take: “The disconnect between what was happening there and what was happening here — I mean, we’re still dealing with the consequences.”
After dismissing the article Diaz gave him as not actually related to the subject at hand, Zweig concluded the success of European school reopening “was largely ignored” and took aim at Fauci:
Dr. Fauci said we should get kids back in school, but only when it’s safe — with this special qualifier. Except when it’s safe was a series of contrived, bogus reasons that didn’t have any science behind them when the kids were already in school without masks or distancing or anything with no negative consequences.
To see the relevant CBS transcript from April 24, click here.
