Book review: An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, by David Zweig

posted: May 21, 2025

tl;dr: Every Generation COVID kid, and everyone who cares about them, should read this book to understand how badly they were screwed...

David Zweig’s An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions is likely to stand as the definitive book on the U.S.A.’s response to COVID-19. Colossal mistake number one was creating the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the first place, a topic covered in Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race. But equally as damaging to people, especially children, was colossal mistake number two, the response to COVID-19. David Zweig dives deep into that topic in An Abundance of Caution, analyzing the science (or lack thereof) and politics behind the decisions that were made to drastically alter life for everyone in the country. And depending on how evidence emerges on the long-term efficacy and safety of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (I am writing this the same week that former President Joe Biden and Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams announced their quick onset prostate cancers), colossal mistake number three may have been the mRNA COVID-19 “vaccines”.

Zweig’s thinking is highly aligned with my own. The cover photo of An Abundance of Caution is almost the same as the one I chose for my Kids in cages post, except my photo has kids in it and the ridiculous desk barriers are fully transparent (Zweig’s school district used even worse desk barriers which blocked views to the side and distorted the view out the front). I can’t say if Zweig has been reading my blog, but here are the posts I wrote which Zweig explores in much more depth in his book:

A bookcover, with the title, subtitle, author's name and a blurb superimposed on a photo of an empty schoolroom with widely spaced desks with barriers on top that prevent sideways views and distort the view out the front

Kids in cages: Contains the aforementioned photo and discusses the hugely negative way we treated kids during the pandemic. It also mentions how I relied upon the Oxford Center for Evidence-Based Medicine to learn that COVID-19 was not going to be anywhere near as deadly as other scientists, politicians, and the media were claiming, and that the virus’s impact was highly age-dependent with kids affected hardly at all.
Living with the virus: After the panic over the initial emergence of the virus, I wrote this post stating that we in the U.S.A. would learn to live with the virus and that we wouldn’t emulate China by trampling individual rights and implementing authoritarian measures. Zweig felt the same at the time. Boy were we both ever wrong.
My kind of company, part two: I describe how the networking and Internet technology I helped develop over the course of my career made remote school and work possible, and how it probably would not have even been attempted if the COVID-19 pandemic arose a few decades earlier, meaning life necessarily would have been much more normal.
Reality is more accurate than a model of reality I describe the flaws with computer modeling and the importance of relying instead on real-world evidence. Given how inaccurate computer models have proven to be, and how easily they can be tuned to deliver the desired results, I will never believe any computer model about any complex system, including the climate. Sorry.
Parsing Francis Collins’s comments on what happened in D.C. Zweig includes one of the Collins quotes I discuss in depth, in which Collins publicly confesses that the only thing U.S. public health officials cared about in crafting their policies was the virus, and that kids, the economy, and everything else were treated as “collateral damage”.

Zweig is a true investigative journalist, who actually looks for the evidence behind claims being made by public officials. A huge percentage of other journalists don’t bother working so hard: they just re-word government press releases and quote their preferred government officials, then twist stories to match their political views. Zweig documents many instances of this, with Apoorva Mandavilli of The New York Times being one of many whose errors Zweig exposes (she also infamously claimed that the lab leak theory for the origin of COVID-19 was somehow “racist”).

Zweig is not afraid to name the scientists, politicians, and journalists who were wrong. The errors and scandals he exposes are too numerous to mention in this brief review. He dives deep into the reasoning behind policies that had such a negative impact on children. The “six feet of distancing” rule, which differed dramatically from the three feet or one meter used in Europe and which had a major impact on U.S. schoolchildren, forcing them into hybrid schedules, is but one example. Unfortunately there are many others.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the U.S. response to COVID-19 is how we rejected the evidence from other similar first-world countries, especially those in Europe, who chose a different path. We could have learned from Sweden and other countries but chose not to. Zweig tries to explain this pathology in the American psyche. As Zweig summarizes, “the reality is that evidence is irrelevant when political, professional, and social forces all point in the other direction.” Expert opinion should be at the bottom of the hierarchy of knowledge, and we should value real-world data over theory. Yet in the U.S. we do the opposite, to our great detriment.

Huge kudos to David Zweig. An Abundance of Caution is a must read for anyone who cares about children and wants to understand how the U.S. completely bungled the response to COVID-19.