We've been ostracised for telling the truth about how the liberal elite got Covid so wrong

Yahoo

05-05-2025

It is more than five years since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, and yet 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 crisis 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 of their book, In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us.
'I have often not been able to believe what I've been reading,' says Macedo. Among the most perturbing facts was a 'pandemic preparedness' plan published by the World Health Organisation in 2019, months before the coronavirus outbreak, followed by a report by Johns Hopkins University later that year, in which both sets of authors 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, which is published on Tuesday and has been described by The New York Times as 'an invitation to have a reckoning', Macedo and Lee 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.
The authors 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 they believe is required ahead of the next global emergency.
The Johns Hopkins analysis, they point out, warned that the evidence base for controlling a future pandemic was 'poor' and that politicians should be careful not to promise results 'that may not pan out'. It also advised them 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.
But despite being written just months earlier, the report 'seemed to afford little interest at the time the pandemic struck'. Border closures, contact tracing and quarantine were 'not recommended under any circumstances in the context of a respiratory pandemic [but] these very recent documents don't seem to have been consulted,' says Lee, 56. 'The evidence base was weak at the beginning of Covid, and it's weak now.'
As mask-wearing spread across Britain and some households even began cleaning newly bought groceries, for fear of catching Covid from the air or even their shopping, governments in the UK, US and beyond disregarded what surely should have been considered essential literature, and elevated scientists to policymakers.
A paper written by epidemiologist Neil Ferguson of University College London in March 2020 projected that, without a lockdown, 2.2 million people would be dead by August. Lee describes the report as 'powerfully influential', saying it was 'heard around the world'. Though at that stage Ferguson was 'a long-time mathematical modeller who had some longstanding views on the efficacy of NPIs that were not necessarily embraced by the whole of public health,' he became a defining voice of the UK – and global – pandemic response.
Along with measures such as mask-wearing, 'follow the science' became gospel within Boris Johnson's government. This mantra, too, was 'profoundly misleading', Lee says, given the 'lack of a scientific base for the policies that were adopted'.He adds: 'Science can never tell us what to do. It can inform decisions, but policy choices always involve value judgments.' That catchphrase – which essentially allowed political leaders to defer decision-making responsibilities to a narrow cohort of academics – served their interests, 'because it was a way for them to avoid being held accountable'.
At the time, there appeared to be a singular response to the crisis. Where was the debate over what was working, and what clearly wasn't? Any such nuance was swallowed up by the 'wartime mentality', says Macedo. The mindset was, 'We have to defeat this thing: if we fight them on the beaches, if we fight them hard enough, we can do it… The debate became excessively polarised and moralised.' Between premature policy consensus, unwillingness to re-examine decisions and excoriation for those who did speak out, there ensued a 'moral panic – that those with doubts were somehow morally deficient,' says Lee.
It is clear now, Macedo continues, that 'there was not sufficient respect for dissent. We would have been much better to have asked the sorts of questions that dissenters were raising'.
Failure to do so 'hurt us, which hurt our policy responses, which hurt our ability to course-correct over the course of the pandemic as we learnt more, and had greater reason to course-correct'. Had those frank discussions taken place, the entire outlook both during Covid and in the years after – from deaths to economic woes – could have looked altogether different.
Ninety-three per cent of people in the UK backed the first lockdown, with similar numbers supporting NPIs including social distancing of two metres, washing hands for 20 seconds at a time, and isolating if they or a family member had symptoms.
Macedo acknowledges that the apparent certainty of such protective measures in what was then a fearful climate made it easy to get swept up in groupthink: 'I was rolling along with it,' he recalls. Lee, meanwhile, 'could think of a whole lot of reasons at the time we were sent home from the university [in March 2020] why this might not work. You're trying to co-ordinate the whole of society?' she laughs. 'I didn't think this was reasonable.'
Covid measures were meant to benefit the masses, yet a clear class component persisted. 'People making the policies were educated elites, journalists, academics; we could be doing this on our laptops,' says Macedo. 'A lot of work was done by educated classes, and so there's a blindness there. If you don't have to work outside the home, then it's easy to forget all the people who do.'
Where there was divergence from the measures taken up by most of the West (Italy's early lockdown also provided a blueprint for many countries, the academics note), backlash followed. Republican states such as Georgia and Florida reopened quickly after the first lockdown, and didn't pursue such strict measures again (Democrat-leaning states, on average, shuttered for two and a half times as long). But by the time of the vaccine rollout in late 2020, there was 'really not a difference in the Covid mortality rate across red states and blue states', says Lee.
The pair worried that highlighting pandemic errors would leave them 'ostracised; we'd never publish a book, nobody would listen. And we've had a little bit of that from some places', says Macedo. Since its initial release in the US, in March, academic friends 'who have been my mentors for years and who have always read everything I wrote, and commented… they just seem to be either totally uninterested, some of them, or worried [about voicing an opinion]'.
Reception has overall been largely positive, they add, from publications on both sides. Yet even where there is acceptance that things could have been handled differently, there is a lack of interrogation into what went wrong, and why. 'You would think there'd be an intellectual interest in these questions; the reputational stakes are high here,' according to Macedo. 'But the longer people are dug in, the worse it is.' There remains, he feels, 'a kind of reluctance. But cracks are opening.'
One area where the dial has shifted is the lab leak theory. Was it too quickly dismissed? 'There's no question about that,' says Macedo. In January 2020, scientists described the genetic sequence of the virus as tantamount to 'a recipe for creating Covid'; emails between Anthony Fauci (then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), Francis Collins (former director of the National Institutes of Health) and Jeremy Farrar (director of the Wellcome Trust) described the leak of a Sars-like virus from a low-security lab as a 'likely explanation'. By the next month, however, the notion was being described as a 'racist conspiracy theory'. Why? The belief among public health figures was that 'it'll be bad for international harmony; it'll be a distracting debate. The scientists in the Slack messages [exchanged between those discussing the matter] say, 'imagine the s--- show if anybody suggests that the Chinese originated [it] in a lab, even by accident''.
To Lee, 'it's so interesting that there is not much public outrage' about what is, at best, surely deeply questionable decision-making. (Organisations including the CIA now openly support the lab leak theory.) Macedo calls the situation 'very strange. We don't purport to fully understand it… but it does seem to us that that debate has been singularly one-sided.'
Of concern to the academics now is that, in the face of another global threat – pandemic, killer comet – it is all but inevitable that closed-minded thinking will take hold once again. 'There needs to be a wider reckoning here so that we make broader decisions next time,' they say.
The big decisions must involve some public deliberation too, Macedo says, given that it was the public being 'asked to make sacrifices'.
They are hopeful that their book 'provokes a kind of rethinking' and hopefully leads to a 'willingness… to acknowledge mistakes that were made, and to do better'.
In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee is published on Tuesday
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