City Journal is a publication of the neoliberal Manhattan Institute. The Manhattan Institute was founded in 1978 by former CIA directory William J. Casey and Friedrich Hayek fan Antony Fisher.

We have a child who was in elementary school at that time, so we were acutely aware of many of the different policies schools were adopting, and the discussions that were going on at least locally. We were relatively lucky I think in that our school adopted a very rational policy at least to us at the time, balancing risks and benefits of closure for a limited time.

I haven't read the book. But my thoughts about the essay:

1. I think the review at least — if not the book — sort of overstates the state of research at the time. I agree that there was a kind of frustrating groupthink about different policies, immune to evidentiary rigor, but overall a lot was in flux and even things that were "well established" relative to other COVID research were not really so well established relative to the scientific literature at large. Papers came out purporting to show one thing or another, that would get dismissed weeks later. I think the literature about childhood transmission was correct but in the environment at the time, it wasn't entirely clear that was the case until a little later. Or at least the boundaries of the childhood immunity weren't clear.

2. From what I heard about some of the school closures locally, the fear wasn't so much about childhood transmission, it was about teacher-to-teacher transmission, or about the possibility of children transmitting the virus to teachers latently. There was a lot going around about the idea that someone could transmit the virus without being affected themselves, and the fear was the teachers — many of whom are in mid adulthood themselves at least — could get infected even if the children were fine. There were also questions about the age effect, in terms of how much risk of transmission there was at different childhood ages. Aside from the human cost in an absolute sense, this would leave schools devastated in terms of personnel for later on, at a time when many of them were struggling to find teachers as it was.

3. I agree with the review that the way that scientific narratives were falsely built in the scientific and media communities was sort of frustrating, and I think in some ways the hubris of that time, dismissing concerns from people more right-leaning, maybe kind of fueled some of the problems we still have today. But part of the problem with having a president who was, frankly, incompetent is that it undermined trust in their concerns. It's a variant of the "boy who cried wolf", played out in political leadership. If you have someone who is recommending drinking bleach and all sorts of other things, are you going to have faith in them questioning school closures, when it is politically expedient for them to make that recommendation? The review kind of overlooks all of the other bad advice circulating on the right at that time, including many of the ant-vax consipiracies that eventually developed. I'm not raising this to criticize the right — I think they were correct on many points, just as the left was incorrect on many points — but I don't agree with the review's focus on criticizing the left for political bias, when just as many concerns could be directed the other way. I think there was a strange bias from the media at the time, that never really went away in some ways, but I think the question for me is less "why didn't they listen to Trump?" and more "why couldn't they have been more independently skeptical and rigorous in their evaluation of the evidence and conflicts of interest?" Maybe that's the same thing at some level but for me it's not, in that I can answer the first question easily, but not the second.

So we're trying to eliminate school closures as a public health measure in future pandemics. Will we somehow blame Biden administration, even though the school closures happened in 2020, during Trump's first term, or is this some kind of justification for punishing federal career scientists that Trump doesn't like?