BUCK: We want to talk to you about a pretty amazing article here by David Zweig. He’s a journalist with The Atlantic, the Free Press and New York Magazine. We’ve got his latest up at ClayAndBuck.com, his latest article there, which says, “Why Spending Time with Kids Might Actually Help Protect You From Covid.” That was just from a few weeks ago. There’s some really fascinating findings in here. David, we appreciate you coming on. I’m not sure that many folks in the New York Magazine world are listening to Clay and Buck, but they should be.
ZWEIG: (laughing) Well, it’s always good to talk with you guys. Glad to come on.
BUCK: We appreciate it. So, here. I wanted to get to… There’s a part of your piece — and I was just talking to Clay about it in our commercial break, that I just find fascinating — in which you’re getting into a lot of studies. And I don’t want to… You know, you’re the guy who wrote it and you’re the expert on the data you’re citing. But it seems like there is a suggestion here that some of us were making early on in the lockdowns — and I mean very early, like 2020 spring — that locking people away and social distancing by changing our normal human interactions. We changed the exposure at a mass level that our immune systems had to coronaviruses that are common colds, and that then may have had a negative impact on how people’s immune systems handled actual covid, the coronavirus 19. Am I broad strokes correct on that and can you take us deeper into it?
ZWEIG: Well, you were very prescient. You are correct (laughing) what you just described, and, yeah, I wrote this piece for New York Magazine and on two different studies, and what I thought was interesting is that they both sort of complemented each other. One of the studies was what we would call an epidemiological study where they looked at the prevalence of a disease — in this instance covid — amongst a population. And they found that people who lived with or had high exposure to young children had a dramatically lower incidence of severe covid than similarly matched people. So it’s not like they just took young parents and said, “Oh, they have, you know, less severe covid than old people who live alone.”
No. They matched it for BMI, for diabetes, for, you know, age. They matched them. And, nevertheless, all things being equal, people with exposure to young children had a significantly lower incidence of severe covid than the same type of person with all the same medical history, whatever, who didn’t have that exposure. And the second study that I wrote about which complements it well is a biological study where they didn’t look at the incidence of disease in a large population. Instead, they looked at — within the VA system — people who had tested positive for two of the four common cold coronaviruses that are really circulating around.
They had a lower incidence of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid; so, when you look at these two studies together, it paints a very, very persuasive picture that being exposed to kids in particular and their common colds, indeed — (laughing) as you apparently knew way back when — is protective against severe covid. And what I mentioned in the article, very gently, is, you know, this does call into question a lot of our covid policies relating to kids, because they, from the very beginning, had this idea that kids were these dangerous viral vectors for everybody, and it turns out the people with exposure to kids were less likely to be severely ill from covid.
CLAY: Okay. I want to build on this, David — and you’ve done a lot of tremendous work looking at data and writing about it —
ZWEIG: Mmm-hmm.
CLAY: — even if sometimes it may upset, I bet, some of the people who are regular readers of your product, and I’m actually going to ask another question about that a little bit later. But the big takeaway I had here was we told grandparents in particular — these are people who are in their 60s, 70s, maybe 80s, who have a limited amount of time that they could spend with their grandkids — that the absolute safest thing they should do was stay as far from their grandkids as they possibly could. Many people listened and isolated themselves from their grandkids for years.
Some people are still crazily doing this, and in reality, that was actually worse for their health. That’s an unforgivable sin to me, because one of the great things in life is being close, I’m told — I hope to get there one day — to your grandkids and being able to experience them. And when you’re in your 60s, 70s and 80s, you don’t have that many years left. So, some people have given away years of their life and family experiences for something that actually was harmful to their health, the exact opposite of what our public health apparatus told them. I’m summing that up for everybody out there listening. This is what those studies would say. How just infuriating is that?
ZWEIG: (sigh) Well, I mean, yeah, I’ve a lot of thoughts in that I will add this qualifier, which is that if you were an old person or someone particularly vulnerable to, you know, becoming very ill from covid, if those elderly people — you know, in their 80s — managed to isolate themselves from everyone — not just little kids, but from everyone — and did not get covid until they were vaccinated, then, you know, at a population level they were better off. So, it was not entirely unwise or unwarranted. It was reasonable for elderly people to isolate themselves if — and this is a giant if: IF — it was isolation from everyone and they were able to hold out with these sort of, you know, (crosstalk) vaccinated and get that protection.
CLAY: Basically, you had to become a hermit.
ZWEIG: What’s that?
CLAY: Basically, you had to become a hermit if you were going to get any benefit at all, but also, this doesn’t, David —
ZWEIG: Correct. Right. (crosstalk)
CLAY: Sorry to cut you off, but also this doesn’t analyze mental health, which I would imagine for elderly people who often get isolated became really bad, I would imagine, for them as well.
ZWEIG: I think a lot of what the evidence shows, however, though, is that that didn’t happen. A lot of the narrative, at least as I perceive it as someone who’s been studying and writing about this for almost three years, is that older people and adults in general were, in many cases, living their lives normally, or at least exposing themselves to all sorts of different people. But there was this bizarre — if I can use this word — almost fetishization of children as the dangerous viral vectors.
CLAY: Yeah.
ZWEIG: So if someone did that, if you had an elderly person who was still going to their weekly bridge game or, you know, going to the supermarket and all this other stuff, but was particularly afraid of their grandchildren, the evidence shows that that was woefully misguided.
BUCK: David?
ZWEIG: Yeah?
BUCK: No, I just want to jump in because. Because the one thing that an argument that I’ve been making now for almost three years is that we never actually did a lockdown in this country, that a big portion of people were still going to jobs — you know, the critical jobs that had to be done — and people were still interacting overwhelming. There were very few people who, for any length of time, truly separated themselves from the rest of humanity in a way that would really protect them from getting the virus.
ZWEIG: You’re 100% correct, and I also would argue — and this is a large part of the book I’m working on, which focuses on American schools during the pandemic but I kind of cast my net wider because it’s all connected, which is it actually was very classist-based policies we had where the people, if you’re a working-class person, a cashier at a supermarket, an electrician or a plumber who’s going into people’s homes, they weren’t able to just sit home and do their work on a Chromebook in their home office and watch Netflix and do whatever. They were still engaged in society. So the policies that were advocating for and put in place — you know, which to me I find ironic, is that, you know, liberals tend to be associated with having more concern about the working-class and lower-income people.
Yet these policies very, very specifically harmed those people or put them in the greatest way of harm while the, you know, quote, “laptop class” was able to continue to do their, you know, white collar work from home and they could isolate to whatever degree they felt like they needed to based on their anxiety levels while, you know, the electrician, he was still going into people’s homes. So I think that’s you know, I’m sure you obviously have been aware of that as well. So it’s just like one more piece of this broader, you know, mosaic of, you know, unintended consequences and sort of, you know, bad incentives (laughing) with a lot of these policies.
CLAY: Yeah. And, in particular, David, you could point to the poorest kids among us also bore the greatest cost in terms of remote schooling.
CLAY: Like, the poorer you were, the more likely you were to remain remote schooled for longer periods of time. So, while you’re claiming to care about equity, we actually ended up with the least equitable outcome imaginable when it comes to educational experience throughout covid as well, which I think is probably the biggest sin of all the sins associated with our covid response. Last question for you, David.
ZWEIG: All right. Yes.
CLAY: You’ve been on with us several times. You are not traditionally someone who would, you know, be on a show like this, right? Your magazine probably does not regularly reach a lot of our listeners.
ZWEIG: (laughing)
CLAY: I think that’s fair to say. Right? We’re cross-pollinating a little bit here.
ZWEIG: Sure. Yeah.
CLAY: What is the response inside of your media ecosystem to what I would say are your inconvenient truths in reporting on covid? And what do you think about the way, for instance, many people in media are responding to what Elon Musk is releasing as information about covid censorship? And certainly what we’re seeing come out of the Biden administration relating to Facebook or Instagram or any of these other platforms. Are you surprised by the way that is being received and how has your work been received?
ZWEIG: I’m not surprised at all. Unfortunately, by the way, you know, a lot of the Twitter Files reporting — you probably saw — and I was one of the people who was at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco and I released my own. I sort of did the first big sort of files reporting related to covid and content moderation on the platform.
CLAY: Yes.
ZWEIG: And I think the thread, the last time I checked, had more than 60 million views. And to my knowledge, it was never covered by any of the sort of, you know, (crosstalk) prestige media.
CLAY: How does that happen, by the way? Like, who is making that calculated decision at the New York Times, at the Washington Post?
ZWEIG: Mmm-hmm.
CLAY: “We’re not going to cover this and treat it as actual news.”
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: So, they’re so biased. They don’t even recognize there’s a bias involved. They just think it’s reality or objective. David, great work on this. ClayAndBuck.com, guys, the piece for New York Magazine is linked there if you want to go read it right now; we recommend you do. David, excited to hear about your book. Please come back and talk to us more about all this stuff, okay?
ZWEIG: Always enjoy talking to you guys. Thanks for having me.
BUCK: Thank you.
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