We've been ostracised for telling the truth about how the liberal elite got Covid so wrong
Five years on from the pandemic and yet Covid and the measures used to respond to it still, it seems, have the capacity to shock.
Stephen Macedo, a liberal academic at Princeton University, has just spent months examining how the Western political class got its response to the pandemic so wrong – an endeavour that has made him an outlier among many of his peers.
Macedo, 68, a professor of politics, says he was 'shocked on a daily basis' by information that he and Frances Lee, a professor of politics and public affairs at the university, unearthed throughout the writing process.
'I have often not been able to believe what I've been reading,' says Macedo. Among the most perturbing was a plan published by the World Health Organisation in 2019, months before the pandemic started, followed by a report by Johns Hopkins University (JHU) later that year, in which both were were 'sceptical about a whole range of non-pharmaceutical interventions [NPIs, i.e. face coverings and social distancing],' Lee explains. A 2011 UK government pre-pandemic plan had reached similar conclusions. And yet these 'interventions' formed a central part of the response to the pandemic in Britain and the United States.
Along with Lee, Macedo has become a loud voice in the effort to challenge how the 'laptop classes' defined our pandemic response, and got it badly wrong.
In their book, In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, published on Tuesday and described by The New York Times as 'an invitation to have a reckoning', the two men argue that, in the face of a global emergency, democracy and free speech failed.
We meet at Princeton, in New Jersey, on a grey spring day, earnest undergrads clutching coffee cups passing along the cherry blossom-lined streets.
Macedo and Lee explain that their goal is 'not just to look back for looking back's sake' but to reflect on where the liberal political class veered off course, and set out the change of approach that is required ahead of the next global emergency.
The JHU analysis warned that 'public health officials would need to advise politicians that there's a poor evidence base here, and that they shouldn't go out and make promises for results that may not pan out, and that they needed to weigh the costs' of simply shutting everything down – from isolating humans, who are social creatures, to closing businesses, and the risk of learning delays for children being kept out of school.
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