“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,” Hanlon’s razor advises us. But then again, as another saying goes, “never say never.”

In trying to wrap my mind around the self-inflicted catastrophe that was America’s COVID-19 lockdown regime, imposed five years ago this spring, I’ve been inclined to assume that public health leaders deserved something close to a free pass for those surreal first few months — that given the panic and the fog of war, people such as Anthony Fauci were entitled to some measure of grace as they adapted to a fluid situation. But in his harrowing and revelatory new book, An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, journalist David Zweig details how swiftly national COVID-19 policies diverged from the broadly accepted protocols enshrined in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s pandemic playbook toward an indefinite lockdown model seemingly inspired by China’s heavy-handed mitigation efforts. “The arrival of a new infectious virus was not unprecedented,” he writes. “But the response to it was.”

With Zweig’s young children languishing in front of screens at home week after week and fading prospects of getting them back into classrooms, in spring 2020, the professional researcher and fact-checker started digging into school closure policies around the world, scouring studies and speaking with epidemiologists and other public health specialists, particularly in Europe. What he learned was as baffling as it was frustrating: Many of the so-called studies the New York Times and much of the American media breathlessly cited were based upon computer modeling built on assumptions that were iffy at best, and evidence seemed to suggest that not only were children typically less vulnerable to COVID-19 than to some years’ more virulent strains of influenza, and........

© Washington Examiner