David Zweig on Schools, Science, and the Media's COVID Failure
About this episode
David Zweig discusses his book on the failures of COVID policy regarding American schools and children.
Episode Summary Investigative journalist David Zweig joins Anish Koka and Anthony DiGiorgio to discuss his book An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, The Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions — a heavily cited account of how public health authorities, the media, and a politically homogenous expert class got COVID policy badly wrong, especially for children. The conversation covers why U.S. media coverage was uniquely alarmist compared to the rest of the world, how Americans overestimated child COVID mortality by as much as 40 times, the role of "technological solutionism" in making school closures possible when they never would have been before, and what it would actually take to rebuild public trust in institutions that squandered it. The episode opens with a discussion of MidJourney's foray into medical imaging and what it reveals about AI hype cycles in medicine. Resource: David's Book: https://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Caution-American-Schools-Decisions/dp/0262053993 Chapter Markers 00:00 Welcome and intro: David Zweig 01:14 MidJourney enters medical imaging — hype or breakthrough? 05:35 Incidentalomas, cash-pay scanning, and who bears the cost 08:55 Ultrasound physics and…
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