How do we track what happened to that kid who could have gotten into college and instead is doing something else now?

We don't know exactly the kids who were lost, who just stopped going to school entirely.

David Zweig is a journalist and author of an abundance of caution, American schools, the virus, and a story of bad decisions.

This was a world-altering event where our society favored older people and other groups

to the detriment of children.

And there was no benefit for this.

They were sacrificed for nothing.

We, in America, had a scientific culture during the pandemic that favored

theory over evidence. It's quite an extraordinary moment. This is American Thought Leaders,

and I'm Yanya Kellogg. David Swagg, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Thanks for having me. I'm going to start by reading you a quote from the head of NIH during the COVID pandemic, Dr. Francis Collins.

It's a part of a quote.

He said, we wanted to be sure people motivated themselves by what we said because we wanted change to happen in case it was right.

But we did not admit our ignorance.

That was a profound mistake.

Your book in a sense is charting, a sort of accounting of that mistake.

Now what do we actually know about the costs of what happened, the impact of what happened

today?

How much time do you have?

I mean, we know a lot and one of the important things, probably the most important thing that

I tried to achieve with this book was to show what we knew at the moment

during that time. Initially, there were many, many people within public health and otherwise who

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