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Quote: "School closures…don't only affect children. … Their closure en masse was the rarest of public policies, one that knocked society off its axis, and the decisions that set it in motion were made incredibly quickly―and without a notion of their impact or when things would return to normal. This book is an anatomy of that historic decision-making process and the many that would follow in its wake regarding schools during the coronavirus pandemic. … We see how incentives that were misaligned with the interests of the public often drove decisions. We see how authority figures' influence was channeled through the media and, in turn, how the media influenced the authorities and regular citizens. We also see how the nature of news, and the muddling effect of the media's penchant for anecdotes and the spectacular, obscured mundane and nuanced reality. Lastly, we witness how ideological tribalism and groupthink overrode long-established values…."1
Title: An Abundance of Caution
Subtitle: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions
Comment: The subtitle and excerpt, above, indicate that the book is entirely, or at least primarily, devoted to the bad decisions during the pandemic that related to American schools. Since some of the worst decision-making at the time was that which affected children, this limitation may actually exaggerate how bad decisions were in general, though they were certainly bad enough.
Author: David Zweig
Comment: Zweig is one of the few mainstream journalists during the pandemic who didn't swallow the government's propaganda line, including hook and sinker, and I recommended two of his articles at the time2. He was also one of the journalists given access to the Twitter files3.
Date: 2025
Summary: The book is divided into four parts and, since I haven't read it yet and Zweig doesn't explain the book's structure in the preface or introduction, I'm going to have to guess, based on the titles of the parts and their chapters, what they are about:
I'm unsure what Zweig has in mind in this part of the book, especially by the reference in the title to "the illusion" of the PP. If the PP had been consistently applied during the pandemic, many things that did happen would not have happened, such as the shutting down of schools. There was no evidence that shutting down schools for an extended period of time, such as a school year, would be harmless, or even less harmful than the tiny risk to children from the coronavirus. In addition, if the so-called lab leak hypothesis is correct, the PP surely should have ruled out the "gain-of-function" research that may have created the specific coronavirus that leaked from the lab, in which case there would have been no pandemic at all.
The Blurbs: The book is blurbed favorably by Marty Makary8, Nate Silver and Matt Taibbi.
Disclaimer: I haven't read this book yet, so can't review or recommend it, but its topic interests me and may also interest readers. The above remarks are based solely on a sample of the book.
Notes: