What do you say when an NPR reporter casually admits that her colleagues told her to suppress one of the most important stories in our lifetime for ideological reasons?
A few things. First, of course, they did. This happens every day and is the basic cause of the media bubble most people still live in. And, contra many centrists, it is not merely the result of "groupthink," but a self-conscious impulse to create a simple narrative that will push people to believe falsities in the service of an ideology or power structure.
Link to full transcript of her conversation with David Zweig:https://t.co/VBgFHpIGzA
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) May 6, 2025
As is often the case, the discussion is both erudite and infuriating, because an intellectual discussion of a vital story--a discussion that should be seen as revealing absolutely damning information about how the government and the media grossly misled people and caused incalculable damage on our society and children--the central fact is treated so casually.
The admission that we were misled, intentionally, is treated as a curiosity, not a cause for self-reflection and a mea culpa and promise to do better.
The conversation in question centered on David Zweig's new book on pandemic policy, in which he outlines just how badly COVID policies were implemented and how awful the media coverage was.
I began to observe some things that didn't quite make sense, and that's what set me off on my path. And what I'd love to chat with you about today is that what most of us in the public believed to be the circumstance was not actually what we were told was happening.
And that's what I try to explicate in my book, is that we were living in a very misinformed sort of media bubble in much of the United States.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so you actually said three really important things there. What we believe to be, was happening, was not what we were being told. This was specific to certain parts or certain media bubbles in the United States.
Those are, so are you saying that outside those particular bubbles, and you can identify them in a minute, people had a more accurate sense as to what was going on?
ZWEIG: Yeah, I think that's right. Absolutely.
Huh. Gee whiz, those of us who were harassed, slandered, censored by the government and insulted by the media were the ones telling the truth, while "news" outlets like NPR were lying through their teeth and trying their best to destroy those of us who were doing the real work.
Yep. That about sums it up.
Forgive me if I post some long quotes, but I think the points are important--Zweig is outlining how facts that should be anything but controversial or difficult to get were suppressed in America. The most important facts in the world at that time.
So very early, I guess in April, I began to wonder what exactly was happening with the schools. There didn't seem to be a long-term plan, and similarly, I began to poke around to try to get more evidence to figure out what actually was the risk to children, what actually might be the benefit of some of these interventions.
I wasn't seeing enough evidence being printed in the media, so I have a lot of experience with science journalism, with reading academic articles, with talking with scholars. So just for my personal benefit, I was working on another book at the time, totally unrelated to this. I just needed to try to poke around and figure out what was going on.
I began talking with experts, most of them in Europe. And what became very obvious, very early, was that one, children were at incredibly low risk, not zero, but a risk on par with many things that they face in any given day. It wasn't an unusual risk to them.
And number two, and this is the real turning point for me, at the end of April and beginning of May, countries throughout Europe began reopening their schools. And 22 of them began reopening. We're talking about millions of children here. This is not a small one room schoolhouse in the mountains of Tibet. We're talking about millions of kids. The EU education ministers met virtually in May.
And they said, after these schools that have been reopening, millions of kids, we've observed no negative consequence of reopening these schools. I want everyone to just pause on that for a moment. Millions of kids in countries that are very similar to America in many regards, no negative consequence.
This was not in an obscure medical journal. This was not in a blog post. This is the EU. And this information was virtually non-existent, unavailable in America. I remember listening to the video feed of this meeting, and it was almost like a mirage, like I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Why wasn't I seeing this splashed across the headlines everywhere?
This was the news, ostensibly, we were waiting to hear. Because there was a large concern, once it was acknowledged that kids weren't at great risk. The other thing is kids may be putting teachers and then more broadly, the community at risk. Yet here we had empirical evidence, millions of kids in school, no observable increase in cases in the community or among teachers after schools opening.
And this information was basically ignored in America.
Not ignored. Suppressed. Many of us worked our butts off to get these facts out there and keep Americans informed, and it cost many people their reputations, their jobs, and they became targets of harassment by some of the most powerful media and government people in the world.
All for telling the truth. The story isn't just that the media got it wrong. The real story is that they worked hand in glove with people doing some of the most harmful, even evil things, and still retain their power and prestige while the wreckage they left behind hasn't even been repaired.
They still have their power. Who cares what damage they did?
Predictably, Chakrabarti tries to lay all the blame for the failures in 2020 on Trump--it is HIS fault that things went off the rails! This is a typical strategy in a modified limited hangout. When you can no longer cover up inconvenient facts, find a scapegoat. "I was misled."
BS. And Zweig rightly pushes back, not because he likes Trump, but because the official modified narrative is just as false as the previous one.
That Trump, of course, was viewed as such an odious and unserious figure throughout his tenure, specifically at the beginning of the pandemic. But let's not forget. Deborah Birx was a serious person, as was Dr. Anthony Fauci, and they very much were platformed in leading the American response to the virus.
They, of course, initially, Trump, as you may recall, went along with this. We had 15 days to slow the spread, which was the official slogan. So despite all of Trump's failures, and there were many, the people who run the public health establishment in our country, they are the ones who set us on a path where there was no plan for the schools.
We did have plans from the CDC that were mentioned, explicitly, by people from the CDC. There was one made in 2007 and then a revision in 2017, that we were ostensibly following. It had nothing to do with Trump. This is what Deborah Birx and others, that people within the CDC were saying, these are our guidebooks.
This is how we're going to go along with things. Moreover, there were models from places like Imperial College of London, IHME, which is in Washington State and other places that we were basing our pandemic response on. So one of the things that I think is really important to get across, that I talk about in the book a lot, and that I want your listeners to understand, is that Trump becomes a very convenient kind of foil here, where, you know, the villain in the story, but those may be contextual reasons, but not excuses for the decisions that were made by our public health experts.
Trump's major failure during COVID was not in the policies he pursued--his worst decision was to initially trust the public health officials who set the policies, and he never was able to separate himself from them. The policies were nominally "his," but by a few weeks into COVID, he realized that they were snakes in the grass. His failure was his inability to crush Fauci and Birx. And, you will recall, NPR and every other outlet in the Pravda Media savaged him whenever he deviated from the failed policies that Chakrabarti is not trying to lay at his feet.
Zweig, in the conversation and in his book, shows how so much of the Pravda Media defined the "right" policies as rejecting anything Trump said. That's was their guide star, and the result was a conspiracy of silence or even embracing the suppression of the truth. If the truth helps Trump in any way, it must be suppressed and "debunked."
And doctors around the country, along with lots of regular people, and even former CDC officials, began reaching out to me, after some of my articles were coming out. And they would say, thank you so much for writing this. I want you to know, I agree with you. I think this is really harmful.
Having schools closed, I don't think there's strong evidence that this is beneficial, particularly not over a long period of time. I don't think masking two-year-olds is beneficial. They're not doing it elsewhere and on. But all of this is off the record. And people were afraid. And I asked a prominent pediatric immunologist at a top university hospital, one of the people who had reached out to me and said, what are your colleagues saying about this?
And he said, oh, I don't talk about this at work. Total third rail. And on top of them self-censoring, many of them were explicitly told by their administrators, you are not permitted to say anything that goes against the CDC or Anthony Fauci or others within public health, other public health officials.
So we had an information environment. In some ways, there was this manufactured idea of a consensus. We were told over and over, this is what the, quote, experts believe. Oftentimes in New York Times articles, it was unattributed. It would just say, experts believe, and that's why when we go back to what I mentioned about the millions of kids in school in Europe, I suspect some of your listeners may be saying, that's Europe.
They controlled the virus over there. No, that's not the case. When you look at it on a city by city, town by town basis, which is the way to look at this, not on a continental basis or countrywide basis. There were zillions of cities that matched the demographics and population density of cities within America, and they had case rates that were above, below and the same as their counterparts in America.
For me, this is the money bit of the conversation, and it infuriates me that Chakrahbati is so casual about this:
CHAKRABARTI: David, I just want to add a little transparency-based anecdote here from our own experience about like this feeling that you just can't have certain conversations in 2020 because there was a point in time where I wanted to actually do a show on the Great Barrington Declaration.
ZWEIG: I was there.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And I wanted to do a very just a rigorous analysis of what the basis of the recommendations from the Great Barrington Declaration, what the basis was and do what you said, try to bring some evidence to scrutinize it positively or negatively.
And for folks who don't remember, I guess David, you could actually explain even better, but the Great Barrington Declaration was this, was a group of professionals who met and said there's a different way to approach pandemic control. But the key thing is Francis Collins very quickly, it was discovered later, wanted to squash the declaration, saying it was like a bad idea.
The reason why I bring it up is these political pressures. There was one person in particular that was a colleague of mine, who just said, we cannot talk about it. That even talking about it in a rigorous objective manner is spreading misinformation.
I'll never forget that.
ZWEIG: Hairs on the back of my neck just stood up.
Think about that. Right there, on national radio, a journalist admits that her entire profession was dedicated to suppressing the truth or discussion about genuine scientific disagreements in a rigorous way was taboo.
You must stick to The Narrative™.
How many people's lives were ruined because our "journalists" and the entire elite were so focused on destroying Trump that they were willing to sacrifice lives, children, families, and people who just wanted to tell the truth?
Our entire medical system is still trying to recover from COVID. I had a discussion with my doctor yesterday and it turned to how COVID destroyed so much that in 4 years, things are still a mess. Her husband, a cardiologist, tells her stories of patients who never came in for 3 years and are now desperately ill because COVID policies prevented or discouraged preventive care. Cancers were missed, heart disease went untreated, diabetes ravaged people, and so many other horrible things resulted.
Droves of doctors and nurses retired, and the people who are left are overwhelmed. And nobody trusts the medical profession because we were lied to.
Oh, well, at least it makes for an interesting NPR discussion. And, somehow, let's figure out how to make Trump, not Fauci, Pharma, and Pravda the real villain.
David Zweig is an investigative journalist based in New York. His book is An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.
