An Abundance of Caution

Featured in The Atlantic, New York, the New Yorker, On Point/WBUR (NATIONAL NPR), CBS Morning Plus, CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper, The Free Press, The Hill, Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey, and more.


“An Abundance of Caution takes the reader on a journey that starts long before Covid, tracing the origins of existing epidemiological playbooks on pandemic mitigation and showing how they were distorted into the public health policies implemented during the pandemic. It weaves through the political realities of the moment and offers a scathing indictment of media stenography and conformity…There is some solace to be taken in the growing consensus that school closures and in-school mitigation measures left a trail of ruin through children’s social skills, mental health, and education—if only because it means there might be sustained efforts at healing those wounds. But An Abundance of Caution lays bare how the experts had the knowledge and the data to make the right decisions early on; that the media had enough information to assess new guidelines with a critical eye; and that politicians who actually cared had the authority and the tools to ensure that children would be largely safe and healthy. The data on the well-being of the young Americans who lived through the pandemic and its disruptions of the standard journey from childhood to adulthood will reveal over time the degree of the disaster. But that it was a preventable disaster can no longer be questioned, as David Zweig’s essential book demonstrates.”
—Commentary


“An Abundance of Caution, by the journalist David Zweig, documents the poor evidentiary basis for the prolonged school closures and attendant follies such as masking requirements and social distancing. Mr. Zweig distinguished himself throughout the pandemic by his willingness to question the assumptions of self-identified ‘Covid hawks’…By recounting his own experiences as a father of school-aged children trying in vain to convince his local school district to consider other options, Mr. Zweig movingly conveys the dumbfounded disillusionment many Americans experienced during the pandemic.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“It is a scrupulously researched, painfully detailed examination of why extended school closures were so misguided and why it was so tough for public officials to course correct…While the education world is today full of handwringing about distrust in institutions, experts, and the media, Zweig’s damning account suggests this distrust is both understandable and hard-earned. As he makes all too clear, we’re dealing with the aftermath of long years during which public officials and experts failed abjectly, while the media championed destructive policies and ignored or belittled those who were asking about the emperor’s lack of clothes. The experience shattered the public’s already fragile trust in schools, experts, and media. Rebuilding that trust will be tough, absent an acknowledgment of what went so wrong. That makes Zweig’s magisterial contribution not just an overdue exercise in truth-telling but also, potentially, a crucial first step in that restorative journey.”
—Education Next

“Author David Zweig doesn’t want the catastrophic policy failure that caused this lasting damage to get memory-holed. In his new book An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, he set out to hold leaders and the media accountable.”
—New York Post

“Powerful and necessary.”
—the Washington Free Beacon

“Five years after the first school closures, Zweig’s third book, An Abundance of Caution looks back on what he considers the questionable deliberations surrounding COVID at almost every level. While it takes the pandemic as its subject, Zweig notes that the book is about something much broader: ‘a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.'”
—The 74, America’s Education News Source

“Harrowing and revelatory.”
—the Washington Examiner

“An Abundance of Caution posits that Trump’s flagrant mishandling of the COVID crisis gave cover to the rampant (but less obvious) dissembling, posturing, and about-facing of élite institutions and public-health experts, which Zweig diligently itemizes.”
—the New Yorker

“Zweig intelligently catalogues a number of underlying factors that positioned the American expert class to make all the wrong decisions while trying to make the most of the crisis, putting it to the service of their political and social agendas and, not incidentally, their careers.”
—The Dispatch

“The tragedy of this country’s pandemic school closures should not be forgotten. Thanks to Zweig’s remarkable book, it won’t be.”
—City Journal

“A blazing indictment of public health officials, politicians, and journalists alike…an impassioned account contending that in recent years, politics has tainted health policy and science.”
—Undark