Our interview with David Zweig

Letting the evidence tell the story

Please pardon our long absence! We’ve been busy working on our documentary “15 Days…” and also taking time talking to some of our favorite people.

Today, we’re excited to share our interview with journalist David Zweig, one of the most important evidence-based voices to have emerged during the COVID era. He's written on so many different topics, ranging from technology in the classrooms to his newest piece on Substack last week called When a Renegade Church and a Zealous County Health Department Collide about Santa Clara, California, County Health Department that took extraordinary lengths to enforce COVID restrictions on a church that was having in-person meetings during the lockdowns.

David has written for The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New York Times, New Yorker, Wired, Wall Street Journal, The Free Press, which is one of my favorites and is working on his third book, An Abundance of Caution, an investigation into America’s school closures during the pandemic, which is what our documentary is about.

We invite you to watch our interview with David. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows below.

NM: So I just wanted to talk about some of the stories you've covered over the past couple of years. Your voice continues to be so starkly different from most mainstream media voices. What was your awakening?

DZ: At the beginning of the pandemic, I think like most people, I was concerned. I was definitely on board with trying to stay home. And, we were wiping groceries down initially, which looks silly now. But at the time I certainly wasn't knowledgeable about any of the information coming out. So I merely was doing what I was told or listening to some mainstream sources. So with that limited knowledge base, it seemed reasonable in my mind to be more precautionary in that regard toward the virus very quickly. However, after that, I'd say even in the beginning, even in March, I mean, I started kind of dabbling in some of the research and reading some of the evidence that was coming out of China and elsewhere.

But I would say by April, I was very convinced that what was going on, at least in particular related to schools, was a mistake. And the reason I was convinced was that we had an amazing example of other places that were opening schools, namely Europe, countries that in a lot of regards, not all, are very similar to our own.

And at the end of April, beginning of May, we're talking about tens of millions of kids going back to school. How could it be possible that all of those kids are going back and none of the kids in America were going back? That's an extraordinary divergence. And so I began doing a lot of research. This is what I do as a journalist, as a writer.  I'm a curious person. And I began talking to experts around the world, began reading the relevant studies and scientific literature. And that kind of launched me on the path.

NM: Was there one voice or one expert that really resonated with you or a publication that you felt was really doing a great job back then?

DZ: I think it was really the sort of compendium of all of this evidence. I mean, there was stuff out of China, out of Iceland, out of Italy. There were studies coming out of France. Aggregating everything together, it became very apparent that children were at extremely low risk of the virus. And simultaneously it was very apparent about some of the harms that were already being incurred and the harms that would be incurred moving forward, denying something on the order of 50 to 60 million children in America the ability to go to school for an extended period of time. So I think one of the things that gets confused a lot is people say it was scary. We didn't know. People need to think about the timeframe. There's a very big difference between a week or two weeks in March, April, May, June, and then on and on from there with these types of policies, with interventions. It matters a lot what the time frame is, and it matters for two reasons.

One is implementation.

Science shows that over time, people’s ability to comply with really challenging guidelines and interventions reduces dramatically over time. So we know the benefit or at least assumed benefit of some of these interventions like closing schools, was going to reduce dramatically over time. So that's one thing. And the second thing is we know that the harms were going to continue to accrue over time.

So you have both sides of the ledger, as time goes on, it's less and less effective to implement some of these interventions and the harms of those interventions go up. So it is not my argument that on Day One nothing should have been done. The argument I think that needs to be made and that I am prepared to make over and over (that I'm writing an entire book about) is that very quickly those two things began to shift.

But yet the policy in our country, as well as a lot of the mainstream narrative, did not shift along with the actual reality of the circumstance.

NM: Did you understand at the time why the reality wasn't shifting? What did you think?

DZ: The reality you mean as far as the policy? 

NM: Yeah. I had a conversation with a school board member here in New York City about two years ago, talking about the teachers unions. And he was like, wow, he's like so many parents are talking about the teachers unions. I've been on the school board for five years and no parent was even aware of teachers unions until this year.

Like suddenly everybody has something to say and they're unhappy. And it was just this big moment of awakening. And it was interesting to know that other people had been as asleep as I was. So I'm just wondering – what did you think was going on?

DZ: I think at the time it was challenging to even address that in my own mind about the “Why,” instead, where I was almost exclusively focused on was the “what” is happening and what should happen. The why is, almost entirely what my book is about. Trying to understand the anatomy of a decision.

But at the time it was far too complex to think about that and I was far more engaged with just trying to learn the “What.” What was actually happening, what was the evidence developing, What was the evidence we already had? What makes sense here? What's going on? And the divergence between the United States and much of Europe and how they treated children during the pandemic, as you well know, is extraordinary.

It's just a chasm as wide as an ocean. And that's something that's fascinated me for the past three years.

NM: So one of the things I thought was really interesting, You used to be a fact checker and this was a great quote from your 2012 article, the basis for your book Invisibles. The article is called “What Do Fact Checkers and Anesthesiologists Have in Common?” I love this. 

You said, “In a culture that favors sensation, the fact checker is an anomaly, perhaps even anathema. He is the brakes on editors and writers racing toward deadline intent on dazzling readers at the expense of edifying them. He is the schoolmarm tsk tsking. He is the public defender for the unrepresented, the downtrodden, the forgotten—the facts.”

“As we drudge through yet another election season, half-truths, out-of-context claims, and blatant lies befall us daily in political ads and speeches, and through the media outlets that recirculate them. While we get occasionally furious, mostly, it seems as a culture we've accepted that we're being lied to. To survive one must be a cynic. And not just in the political sphere, of course. With so much content in sensational blogs and dubious sites, where the veracity of the text (and photos for that matter) can't be trusted, with corporate spin doctors obscuring the truth about every scandal, most of us are left wondering what to believe. In this environment, highly regarded national magazines are one of the last bastions of rest for a mind perpetually on guard for BS, for they employ fact checkers. Yes, errors big and small* leak through, but in practice every fact—from a Russian dissident's age, to the driving time from Montpellier to Paris, to a Madonna quote, to the proper oven temperature for baking a famous chef's bread—is checked.”

DZ: So the first half of that sounds pretty great. And the latter portion of it, I think, is questionable. So here's the interesting thing. There is a debate between Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray on one side and Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg on the other side (The Munk Debate “Can you trust the mainstream media?)

And what's interesting is it's true that, sort of high end glossy magazines, The Atlantic, The New Yorker do employ a team of fact checkers. Malcolm Gladwell rightfully pointed that out and to a lesser degree, newspapers and other well-funded organizations have some degree of fact checking though with newspapers, it's a very different process than weekly or monthly magazines.

Here's the thing that that isn't true anymore. That sort of misses the forest for the trees, which is you can get individual facts checked and they can be correct. But what that doesn't account for is the larger narrative that's going on. So while an article may be factually correct, it may still be misleading in that it's leaving out the questions it's not asking or the people who it did quote and the people chose not to quote.

So that's something that's much larger than fact checking, these sort of macro decisions about what gets covered, what doesn't get covered. And then of the topics covered who the “experts” are that you're going to be interviewing and how the evidence is going to be presented. Fact check organizations that are around now have some sort of political component to them.

They're missing the larger thing where they say, there's the pants on fire in these other things. I forget there's at least two or three websites that do this. Those don't take into account oftentimes the larger context that I'm describing.

NM: How do these stories get covered in the mainstream media? I know that I've texted a producer at a local news affiliate and they're like, I would love to cover the story, but I'm not sure my bosses are going to allow me to. How do those things happen from the top down?

DZ: News organizations are made up of people. Individual people making decisions and choices along the way. There's obviously the old expression, “if it bleeds, it leads.” So that's one piece of it. That news focuses on the sensational. It focuses on the scary, the anomaly. It doesn't focus on the banal. They're not going to write a story about how schools stayed open and everything turned out okay.

That's a far less exciting story to write than there's an outbreak at the school somewhere. Then that becomes this huge thing. And what that does is when you have this focus that's just inherent to the kind of function of news. When you have a focus on these anomalous events, on these specific, scary incidents, that then creates a sort of like recency bias in readers and viewers’ minds where, well, this is the last thing I heard about was this outbreak in this school that that implants in their minds, but they didn't hear about where the 10,000 schools where nothing happened. It's just a function of how news tends to operate.  Journalists are often chasing a story that's going to be exciting and sensational, and that includes things that scare readers and viewers. I'm sure I'm not immune to that either. But for me, I tend to nerd out and just want to keep drilling further and further down to actually look at the evidence rather than simply accepting what an expert says about something.

That’s really the lowest form of evidence – an expert opinion.  So that should be the very last thing that anyone looks to as evidence for something being true or untrue.

NM: And yet, with all the noise on the Internet, everybody's looking for the one oracle that can tell you what you should do. Is it safe? So it's really a challenge to get them to delve deeper and where you always kind of like against the grain.  How did you come to this? I would think it's kind of lonely at times.

DZ: I think I've been accused of being a “contrarian.” And I mean, if that's where the evidence has led me, then so be it. My motivation is not to be reporting things that are contrary to some narrative that's not that's not what motivates or interests me. Rather, I'm interested in trying to find out when I believe what the evidence shows to be the truth in one way or another.  And if that ends up being  contrary to what most people are saying, then so be it. I don't like being “different” on its own or I certainly don't like having people be mad at me, but I'm willing to accept it if that's what it needs to happen. I wrote a column for my college newspaper, and I mean, even back then in college I got hate mail, which is why I've been used to this for a long time.  You have to have thick skin and you have to just follow where you think things are going to lead you. So that's what I've done. But that's very different from courting controversy. That's not what interests me. 

And in fact, I'd much prefer for people to celebrate me and think I'm doing a great job. That's much better to me than having people dislike me. There'd be something wrong with someone if they genuinely enjoy being argued with or disliked again. It's just simply that I'm willing to tolerate that if that's where my research takes me.

NM: There is such a strong current of cancel culture that lone voices or voices that question the mainstream narrative often end up on the wrong side of things. And you've somehow been able to really artfully and just with the incredible work that you've presented and still maintain a mainstream presence. I think anyone in New York City would be comfortable sharing pretty much any of your articles with the most progressive, left-leaning friends we have.

That's really what's interesting. There aren't many journalists in the last couple of years that have been able to maintain that.

DZ: I'm not the only one. But there are not many voices, or certainly not as early and as loud as mine. I don't think toward schools and ancillary issues with children and the pandemic that were still writing for mainstream publications. I work with editors who are great. I work really hard to present information that is sourced and backed up extensively, meticulously, and that doesn't work for every editor. But thank God there are at least a few who– I'll send them an email and say, here's what I've got. And I have a list of studies and research, a robust evidence base behind an article or idea I want to write about and explore.

And there are plenty of people that it doesn't matter what evidence you present, but fortunately that's not the case for everyone. And the editors I've worked with, I've been really fortunate. None of the stories I've written, none of them have ever had any sort of major retraction or need to be pulled down. It doesn't mean I don't make mistakes.

I'm sure I make mistakes. Everyone does, But I try to be as meticulous as I possibly can. And I think over time that that just reinforces the commitment my editors have had to me, that they know if I'm pitching something to them, they know that it's backed up. I love reading scientific papers and a whole variety of topics.

Obviously during the pandemic, I've been looking specifically into COVID-related things, but for a long time now, I've read academic journals. I like reading them and then trying to translate the material for a regular reader. And I'm also always willing and eager to reach out to people who have an expertise in these different areas and ask them for help.

I have a long list in my metaphorical Rolodex and my phone experts in a variety of different areas and I reach out to them all the time saying, Hey, have you looked at this study? What do you think about this? And I think that's a really big part of my reporting is I always ask for help from other people just to make sure I don't try to do it on my own and generally people who have an expertise in different fields are usually very happy to talk with me, whether on the record or off the record, just to work through whatever particular study or evidence that I'm looking at to discuss it. So I love that. That's even more fun than writing.

NM: Do you have a writing schedule? Do you get up at a certain time every day?

DZ: I have two kids and I'm very involved in helping you take care of them. So my mornings are initially spent just helping to get two kids out of bed and getting them off to school sometimes and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, depending on my wife's schedule because she works, as well.

There's a lot of driving around to dance classes and things of that nature. So my writing schedule tends to happen during the middle of the day, although I end up also working very late at night as well. And that's what you have to do as a parent unless you have a different type of arrangement in your family.

So the writing happens, but it also gets pushed around depending on what the other obligations are.

NM: This is a good time to talk about your reporting on kids, because I think that a lot of the stories that you've written have been kid focused, whether it was “The Science of Masking Kids Remains Uncertain.” And what did you think about that headline by the way? Do you think that was an accurate headline for that story?

DZ: Yeah, I think that's okay. The science was uncertain.

NM: Okay. Yeah. I love the article. I feel like whenever I share…

DZ: A little weak to you is what you're going to say. Yeah, I get it. But look, sometimes magazine editors want to really have the headline explode. And other times, if you're writing about something that's very sensitive, which I often do, then editors may be a little more hesitant and may want to have a headline that's a little softer and let's let the what's the evidence in the article do the work.

Those are decisions that are out of my control generally.

NM: What was the response you got to that article- I'm assuming that's the story that most people read?

DZ: There have been a lot of milestones along the way. I think that that's the one for New York Magazine that's really the first big piece in a major publication that really dug in and explicitly questioned the wisdom and the evidence base behind the masking rules for kids in America.

There may have been others, but as far as I'm aware, this is the first or certainly one of the first really big pieces. I've had just an endless amount of people over the last couple of years reach out to me, DMing me on Twitter or texting me, finding my email and emailing me and just saying, “Hey, I want you to know, once your article came out, it gave me something to understand what was going on and something that I could use when I was having arguments or just discussions with people. Thank you for doing that.”

I hadn't seen anything like that until then. So it's very, very rewarding for me to spend all this time doing the research. I had to suffer reading through all the CDC studies, the hairdresser study, and the other stuff from the CDC, and then running through in a very systematic fashion to say, well, what is this evidence base, actually?

And so I went through it. It's rewarding because it actually had a benefit for people who were trying to learn about the issue, who were questioning things on their own. But obviously people have jobs, and this is my job. So I'm glad that they felt that they got value out of the work that I put into it for them.

NM: I feel like we lost all sense of context and I think you've been really good about bringing the context back. Your stories are not sensational, but the subjects and the way you ask your questions are very provocative, for sure. I think the first article that I became familiar with really kind of got me thinking. It made sense, but I hadn't really considered it before. It was about hybrid schooling and the wisdom of that.

DZ: The hybrid school thing is just a total disaster. And I hadn't seen anyone write an article about this until I did. I said, Well, wait a minute, what's the evidence for this? Is this actually beneficial? And there are a lot of reasons why it may superficially appear to be something that would reduce transmission, but actually but in actuality not do anything of the sort.

I think the evidence has borne that out over time that there is absolutely no epidemiological benefit to the hybrid schedules. 

The one instance that I can point to where my reporting had a direct impact on policy was when I wrote a piece about summer camp guidelines and no one had questioned the guidelines. And in fact, there had been a lot of reporting to the opposite where they said the new guidelines are out.  Here's what the experts say. No one asked well, does this make sense? And I interviewed a couple of really highly credentialed, prominent physicians who said this is completely insane to be forcing little kids to wear masks in the July heat while they're playing soccer or tennis forever. Almost immediately after the article, Rochelle Walensky, the head of the CDC and I think a few others were being questioned with quotes being pulled directly from my article– what about these draconian measures and such? And very shortly thereafter, they changed the guidelines to not require masking outdoors. So that's like the one instance, at least off the top of my head, that I often think back to where there was like you could really see a cause and effect from one article. 

NM: I worry that this is going to be like an ongoing thing– it's going to go away in trickles and come back in floods. I'm still seeing kids being masked on the streets. I was reading one of your very early articles about not using your kid as a billboard –

DZ: Oh, wow.

NM: Yeah, that was really great. I went all the way back. What you said is:

“To one degree or another kids will always be an extension of their parents. How they look and conduct themselves in the world reflects on their parents’ values and tastes. Typically, the younger the child the stronger the reflection is. So it’s especially incumbent on parents of very young children to respect their personhood as much as is reasonable.”

DZ: Wow. I'm so impressed with you going back into my catalog. It's funny to see the connections from reporting from a decade or more ago and how some of the themes I think still resonate and are relevant to contemporary issues.

NM: I see parents walking around outside with three year olds who are still masked.

DZ: There are a couple of things here. One is a policy on the sort of like public level, whether it's in schools or municipalities. Then there are policies within private institutions.  If your kid is taking an art class or something like that. And then the third thing is separate from policy – people's personal preferences and culture and what people are going to choose to do.

So those are sort of three different pieces, I think, to the masking conversation and probably on the broader conversation about whatever varying public health interventions and measures, I think it's important to think of it in three pieces because they're all because each one is different from the other.

NM: Yeah. I mean, these residual policies in children's spaces, which I've written about a little bit, is really very damaging because the longer it continues, the more normal it feels. So it's kind of like it's being woven into our in a way which worries me. 

So just transitioning to The Great Barrington Declaration. How were you involved, if at all?

DZ: I had been corresponding with Martin Kulldorff, one of the authors of the Declaration. We were just communicating with each other. And he said, hey, I'm thinking about having an event or doing something where I could have journalists come and meet with me and some other scientists and experts to talk about pandemic response.

Martin Kulldorff invited me to this event. I was like, great, I have an opportunity to interview him. And oh, there's some guy named Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford and Sunetra Gupta from Oxford. I'm there! There was no question in my mind that sounded fabulous. Just to be able to interview these highly credentialed, really smart people who've been working in public health for decades and who had a different opinion just was an amazing opportunity.

I'm always interested in hearing people's views on things, particularly people who are highly credentialed and work in this space and where they're saying something that's different from what you're hearing from everyone else. Well, wow, what do they have to say and why are they saying it? What evidence is there behind the claims they're making or the things that they're advocating for?

So all that was incredibly interesting to me. I had no idea there was going to be a “declaration.” I thought I was just going to interview them. And then it was only when I was there that I found out they were writing up this formal document. But it was fabulous. It was a great experience.

NM: Did you feel like you had any kind of negative blowback for being at the Great Barrington Declaration signing?

DZ: No worse than I get from all the other articles I do. There are people who periodically still mention it on Twitter as if that's some sort of burn or something. “You were at the Great Barrington Declaration.” I'm like, “Yes, yes, I was. Thank you.”  I can't worry about that stuff. I need to just report on what I find interesting, what I find to be credible and go from there.

If people are going to complain or disagree with me, that's okay. That's part of the game. If you want to write and have lots of people reading what you're writing, don't complain when you get some people who are mad at you or whatever. That's just what it is like. You’ve got to move on from that.

NM: Take the good with the bad! Last thing– I have a question about this article that you self-published on your Substack about the church in Santa Clara County. Can you tell us a little bit about that story and also why you chose to put it on your Substack.

David Zweig @davidzweig

1. THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES: HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE – By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy – By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed – By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*

DZ: When I was working on the Twitter files, I met some other writers, Lee Fang and Leighton Woodhouse and Michael Shellenberger. They all have substacks and I've been toying with the idea of doing it. It's fun to do something on my own. I certainly think I could have sold this story quite easily somewhere else.

I think it's just a blockbuster story. It is about a church in California that defied the lockdown rules/various pandemic orders that were put out by the county public health department. There are two lawsuits that are underway. And that that incredible part about this story is that the county government had this really just extraordinary surveillance campaign against the church and its members, everything from doing stakeouts from an adjacent property to once they had a restraining order, they then were empowered to actually go into the properties that they're monitoring –private prayer groups, to using cellular mobility data to track how many people were going in and out of the property on a on a daily basis. 

So it was just like a breathtaking operation to monitor everyday citizens over a long period of time– many months. Beyond the legal perspective. It just from the citizen perspective, certainly seems like an incredible invasion of privacy and also an infringement on a variety of other rights.

This isn't to say that everyone should be able to do whatever they want at all times. That's not the argument I make in the piece, nor would I ever make that argument. I think there is a place for different public health measures in our society. This particular story, I think, is just an incredible example of just egregious overreach of a public health authority to a point where it really infringed on these people's privacy in a profound way.

NM” And it was really touching, poignant. Many of the people who were attending services at the time were in a bad place, some of them were suicidal. And really, this was the only place where they felt they could be with other people and feel restored. Nothing else was available to them.

DZ: Every public health intervention, just like every medicine, has some potential downsides. The church story to me echoes the school story in a lot of ways, which is the notion that trying to mitigate the spread of a virus and having that mission supersede all sorts of other aspects of life is very misguided. There is not enough acknowledgement of that, an understanding about the various drawbacks and harms of some of these mitigation measures.

There's a real inability, I think, of a lot of the people in charge to have an understanding of the wide range of values and ways of life in our country. How for some people going to church is the most important thing in their lives, and it offers them a support system that they are not able to get elsewhere.

And there needs to be an acknowledgment of how important that is for people's health and for their well-being. And again, we're not talking about people screaming and demanding that they want the barber shops open on March 17th. We're talking about this church. This church was prevented from having anyone meet together indoors – actually they weren't prevented. They were supposed to not do this for seven months.

That's just wow– an extraordinary stretch of time for someone. If this is a regular part of their life. This is something you're doing every Sunday for decades and all of a sudden it's turned off. It certainly seems wildly outside the realm of what's reasonable when it went on for months and months and months on end, particularly so when malls were open, liquor stores were open, casinos were open.

So I found myself incredibly empathetic toward these people who I interviewed and why going there was so meaningful and important to them.

NM: It's a great story. All of your stories are. Thank you so much. How's your book coming along?

DZ: Well, it's slow. I'm doing these articles at the same time, so it's coming along. I'm having a good time with it, but it's going to be a while longer. My hope is that maybe I'm just rationalizing this to make myself feel better. My hope is that rather than having the book come out, that the later it comes out that will actually have some advantages to it as well, that people will be able to look back with a little bit more of an objective eye toward what happened.

I think some distance can sometimes be beneficial. So I'm hoping and again, maybe I'm just saying this to rationalize, but I'm hoping that when it comes out, whenever it is in a year from now or something, that that actually might work to its advantage. That certainly for people maybe who wouldn't be receptive to some of the messages in there initially [might be] with a little bit more distance.

And I think we've seen that with some of these things now, things that were totally unacceptable a year or two or three years ago, now people are saying, Oh yeah, maybe that wasn't the best idea. So I think and hope that will be the case when it does come out and it's not just a cataloging of what happened.  Rather, it is an anatomy of a decision of how these decisions were made and this sort of really panoramic view of society and why all these things happened the way they did.

NM: I agree. I think a little bit of time and distance should help. I'm hoping the same is true when “15 Days…” comes out because it's taking a while. 

Well, thank you so much for joining us. I wish you all the luck with your book and your many important projects.

DZ: Thanks, Natalya.