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David Zweig
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An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions Hardcover – April 22, 2025

by David Zweig (Author)

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A searing indictment of the American public health, media, and political establishments’ decision-making process behind pandemic school closures.

An Abundance of Caution is a devastating account of the decision-making process behind one of the worst American policy failures in a century—the extended closures of public schools during the pandemic. In fascinating and meticulously reported detail, David Zweig shows how some of the most trusted members of society—from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists to eminent health officials—repeatedly made fundamental errors in their assessment and presentation of evidence. As a result, for the first time in modern American history, millions of healthy children did not set foot in a classroom for more than a year.

Since the spring of 2020, many students in Europe had been learning in person. Even many peers at home—in private schools, and public schools in mostly “red” states and districts—were in class full time from fall 2020 onward. Whatever inequities that existed among American children before the pandemic, the selective school closures exacerbated them, disproportionately affecting the underprivileged. Deep mental, physical, and academic harms—among them, depression, anxiety, abuse, obesity, plummeting test scores, and rising drop-out rates—were endured for no discernible benefit. As Europe had shown very early, after they had sent kids back to class, there was never any evidence that long-term school closures, nor a host of interventions imposed on students when they were in classrooms, would reduce overall cases or deaths in any meaningful way.

The story of American schools during the pandemic serves as a prism through which to approach fundamental questions about why and how individuals, bureaucracies, governments, and societies act as they do in times of crisis and uncertainty. Ultimately, this book is not about COVID; it’s about a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.
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  1. Print length
    464 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    The MIT Press
  4. Publication date
    April 22, 2025
  5. Dimensions
    6.45 x 1.44 x 9.3 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0262549158
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0262549158
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The%20Amazon%20Book%20Review
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now

From the Publisher

An Abundance of Caution is indispensable reading for preventing the next catastrophe.
Abundance of Caution is a uniquely rigorous, incisive, and must-read account.
The ill-fated school closure policies during the pandemic.

Editorial Reviews

Review

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

Review

“An Abundance of Caution is a book the world badly needed. David Zweig writes crisply, with a rare combination of journalistic rigor and empathy. But his book is unsparing in revealing how frustratingly predictable many of the mistakes made during the pandemic were—and how partisanship was used to suppress the pursuit of science and undermine the public interest. As much as some might hope to forget the pandemic, An Abundance of Caution is indispensable reading for preventing the next catastrophe.”
—Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight and author of Silver Bulletin

“This book is important. It tells a disturbing story. Faced with the erosion of its legitimacy and authority, the scientific community needs to engage seriously with Zweig’s analysis.”
—Paul Romer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, and Director of the Center for the Economics of Ideas at Boston College

“For those interested in the failure of evidence-based medicine and public health to protect our children during prolonged COVID school closures, An Abundance of Caution is a uniquely rigorous, incisive, and must-read account.”
—Jeffrey S. Flier, MD, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Former Dean, Harvard Medical School

“A powerful analysis of the largest public health intervention in modern history. Using a clear, scientific approach, Zweig asks piercing questions that shed light on medical dogma propagated by groupthink.”
—Marty Makary, MD, Johns Hopkins surgeon and author of Blind Spots

“Through both his reporting and his congressional testimony, David Zweig was one of the only journalists brave enough to tell the truth about the ill-fated school closure policies during the pandemic. His book is a meticulously researched history of unpopular, scientifically unsupported, socially catastrophic policy decisions.”
—Matt Taibbi, investigative journalist, bestselling author, and publisher of Racket News

Product details

About the author

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David Zweig

David Zweig

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David Zweig is a writer, lecturer, and musician based in New York. His latest book is An Abundance of Caution, a searing

indictment of the American public health, media, and political establishments' decision-making process behind pandemic

school closures. His previous nonfiction book, Invisibles, about the power of embracing anonymous work in a culture

obsessed with praise and recognition, has been translated into five languages and made numerous "best of" lists. His 2009

novel, Swimming Inside The Sun, a modernist bildungsroman about identity and self-consciousness, was called a "terrific

debut from a talented writer" by Kirkus.

Zweig also released two critically acclaimed albums, All Now With Wings and Keep Going. Both albums charted on college

radio playlists and garnered accolades for Zweig, with the press calling him a "symphonic pop prodigy."

Zweig has testified twice before Congress as an expert witness on school policies during the pandemic. And his investigative

reporting on pandemic policies has been cited in numerous Congressional letters and a brief to the Supreme Court. He has

been invited to lecture at universities, academic conferences, and corporations around the U.S. and the world. As a freelance

journalist, his pieces have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street

Journal, The Free Press, and, most often, his newsletter, Silent Lunch.

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Top reviews from the United States

  • CS
    5.0 out of 5 stars 100% worth reading
    Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2025
    Verified Purchase
    A must-read for anyone looking for answers about the covid response, especially in schools. Well researched, engaging, and thoughtfully laid out. Once I started reading I found it very hard to put it down. I suspect this is the first of many books like this.
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  • Reader
    5.0 out of 5 stars Magnificent.
    Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2025
    Verified Purchase
    Indispensable.

    Perhaps the most important book for understanding policy that you'll ever read. The writing is crisp and dispassionate, but this is an exquisite look at one of the worst decision-making processes in history, when a bunch of smart people with basically good intentions got together and inflicted catastrophic harm on the most vulnerable children in America, in exchange for no corresponding benefit.

    There is a temptation to discuss the tragedy of the US covid response as a matter of hindsight--that everyone did the best they could with the information at the time. On the other side, there is a push toward conspiracy theories about evil motives. Zweig brilliantly avoids both traps and instead shows, blow by blow, how a culture of hysteria and poor media function led Americans to essentially ignore all available evidence when it came to kids and covid.

    The book is masterfully reported and makes the science accessible and you get to see the science as it unfolded--and the media that, at every turn, covered it in the worst way possible.

    In 1972, David Halberstam wrote The Best and the Brightest, an exploration of the Vietnam War calamity. This book does the same thing for the most tragic failure of the covid response.
    49 people found this helpful
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  • Barry Eisler
    5.0 out of 5 stars Riveting, Fascinating, Essential
    Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2025
    Verified Purchase
    This past April, I attended a talk by David Zweig hosted by Lee Fang, a journalist I follow on Substack. I hadn't heard of Zweig's book, and TBH given the subject matter I was expecting something of a dry presentation.

    It was anything but.

    With passion, humor, and tremendous insight into human nature, Zweig laid out the evidence not just for what had gone so horrifically wrong in the American response to Covid, but also why. None of it was judgmental or accusatory; instead, though there was some righteous anger in the mix, it was clear Zweig had no interest in finger pointing and instead was driven to depict and document what had gone wrong only to improve the odds of getting things right next time.

    I’ve now finished listening to the audio version of the book and it completely tracks with what I learned at the April book talk (the narrator, Jonathan Yen, is also great). Multiple aspects of the American pandemic response—most of all, school closures—were the result of panic and magical thinking, and willfully ignored voluminous evidence from other similarly situated countries (and even similarly situated American states).

    Years ago I read about how, when planning a mission, the Pentagon determines the minimum assets and conditions needed to proceed. For example, planners might determine that four helicopters is the minimum; fewer than four available means an automatic order to abort. So if the mission starts with five and loses two to equipment failure or whatever, the mission is automatically aborted. These decisions are made in advance because planners have learned from experience that on the day of the mission, with substantial resources invested and everyone’s blood up, it will be tempting to revise the minimums and proceed based on new assumptions. These on-the-fly approaches are unduly dangerous and tend to result in failure and unnecessary suffering, or worse.

    Which is not a bad summation of what happened in response to Covid.

    What might therefore help for next time would be a checklist, prepared before panic starts its caustic work on reason--a checklist against which policy proposals can be evaluated. This book is filled with them: as just one example, the notion that before changing a policy such as "kids attend school," the proposed new policy must be based on actual evidence, not on vague wishes. I therefore hope it will be widely read by anyone likely to be involved not just in future pandemic responses, but in any significant policy undertaking.

    I also hope the book’s publisher will consider a more compelling cover. I think I understand why they went with what they went with—it’s a photo of an empty classroom, with semi-transparent plastic and cardboard screens separating each desk from all the others. But especially at thumbnail size (which is the size anyone buying in an online store will see), it’s not easy to see what’s depicted. I initially thought it was voting booths or something. And even if you can immediately understand the image, it’s inert. I know the point is that the classroom is empty, but humans are wired to care more about humans than about rooms, and I think something that more actively and intimately portrays a critical theme of the book—we conducted a vast, harmful social experiment on our children—would more effectively communicate that this book is anything but dry and technocratic. The experiment didn't make children disappear, as suggested in the cover photo; in fact it made them suffer unnecessarily. I'd welcome a cover depicting or suggesting that.

    I offer this feedback to the publisher as someone whose own books have occasionally been saddled with inert and sales-deadening covers (if you’re curious, search for “Barry Eisler Connexion Fatale”). This is an extraordinary book and deserves to be packaged in a way to appeal to the widest possible audience.

    I know "must-read" gets overused, and maybe I'm guilty of the overuse, too, because I'd use the same description for Scott Horton's "Provoked" and for Annie Jacobsen's "Nuclear War: A Scenario." But if you'd like to see better policymaking in the future, especially when the stakes are highest, then yes, An Abundance of Caution is indeed a must-read.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • Amazon Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Important book to understand what Covid did to our social trust and our public education system
    Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2025
    Verified Purchase
    Well worth your time in trying to understand the collapse of trust in experts snd sociopolitical “leadership.” He focuses on the breakdown in educational policy and high costs in children’s development that we suffered and continue to suffer. Mass hysteria and irrational tyranny are fair descriptors.
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  • Joseph Marine
    5.0 out of 5 stars American journalism at its best
    Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2025
    Verified Purchase
    This was an outstanding book by a journalist who has delved deeply into the topic and produced an extremely well documented and referenced overview of the American public school closure debacle during the covid pandemic. As a physician and parent of three school-age children at this time, it was deeply disturbing the watch this disaster unfold in real time. It was American politics at its worst. With the publication of this book, no one will again be able to argue that "we didn't know." It will serve as an excellent first draft of the history of this tragic time.
    A quote:
    "There was a certain willful dishonesty and fantasy to the idea that making children sit alone, staring at screens, isolated in their homes, for hours each day, for weeks, and then month after month after month was going to be anything other than a tragedy for many children. Even those who apparently didn’t suffer academically still lost something socially and psychologically."
    12 people found this helpful
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