Latest news with #InCovid'sWake:HowOurPoliticsFailedUs
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
We've been ostracised for telling the truth about how the liberal elite got Covid so wrong
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 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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Yahoo
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Did our politics fail us during Covid?
There are lots of stories to tell about the Covid pandemic, but most of them, if you drill down, are about politics. It's about who made the decisions, who set the priorities, who mattered, who suffered the most, and why? Frances Lee is a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University and the co-author of a new book called In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. It's a careful book that treats our response to Covid as a kind of stress test for our political system. Lee and her co-author Stephen Macedo look at all the institutions responsible for truth-seeking — journalism, science, universities — and examine how they performed. Were they committed to truth and open to criticism? Did they live up to the basic norms of liberalism and science? Were we able to have a reasonable conversation about what was happening — and, if we weren't, why not? The book isn't really an attempt to grade our Covid policies. There are no villains in their story. It's more about the quality of the debate and deliberation that surrounded those policies. Which is more than just an academic exercise. The conceit of the book is that it's worth knowing what broke down during our response to Covid because those same things might also break down when the next crisis arrives. So I invited Lee onto The Gray Area to talk about what she learned and what she thinks are the most important political lessons of the pandemic. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. How would you characterize the debate we had in this country about our response to Covid? Well, it was a fast-moving crisis, and so it's not surprising in retrospect that the debate was truncated. But it is surprising, as we looked back and did the research for this book, the extent to which the decisions that were made in the early going of the pandemic departed from conventional wisdom about how to handle a pandemic and violated recommendations that had been put on paper in calmer times about how a crisis like this should be handled. Countries around the world sort of scrapped preexisting pandemic plans in order to follow the example set in Wuhan, and then in Italy, with Italy having the first nationwide lockdown and improvising along the way. There wasn't a scientific basis for the actions that were taken, in the sense that there was no accumulated body of evidence that these measures would be effective. It was hoped that they would be, but there was a lack of evidence. If you go back and take a look at a report that was prepared by the World Health Organization in 2019, just months before the pandemic broke out, that document goes through each of the proposed 'non-pharmaceutical interventions,' meaning the measures that are taken to keep people apart in the context of an infectious disease pandemic, like masking or social distancing, business closures, school closures. Across the board, the evidence base is rated as poor quality. Several such measures are recommended not to be used under any circumstances in the context of a respiratory pandemic. Among those were border closures, quarantine of exposed individuals, and testing and contact tracing. And then all those measures were of course employed here in the US and around the world in the context of the Covid pandemic without any kind of reckoning with the reasons why those measures were not recommended in the pre-pandemic planning. Let's get into the core of your critique, which is about the decision-making process. You quote a health official in the book, who said, 'I simply could not tolerate the notion of having 10 percent, 1 percent, or even 1/10 percent of Americans die a preventable death.' So what's wrong with saying, as a matter of policy, that the most important thing is to save lives at all costs? I believe that that's a quote from Deborah Birx. She was the coordinator of the Coronavirus Task Force. She was not able, she said, to do a cost-benefit analysis where she could calculate how much a life was worth. I mean, that's a very understandable response and attitude. But you have to remember that as policymakers were faced with the kinds of measures that were being employed to control the spread of a disease, lives are on both sides of the equation. Let's begin with one of the first measures taken, which was the shutting down of so-called nonessential health care, and it was defined quite broadly. There were a lot of cancer treatments that were canceled and regarded as nonessential depending on how advanced the cancer was. So you're trading off future risks to life to preserve health care capacity now. When you are exacerbating inequalities, when you are depriving people of education that has long-term health effects, you're trading the present for the future, and these are very difficult choices. The reason why we do cost-benefit analysis is in order to be responsible as policymakers. You can't only focus on one threat to human beings when we're facing many different threats. But you're also arguing that health officials were intolerant of criticism and skepticism. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just trying to be as fair as possible to the people in the fire at that time. I can imagine that one reason for that intolerance is that they really were in a tough position. I'm not here to defend any particular people or decisions, but do you have sympathy for the predicament that these people were facing? Well, I do have sympathy. I also know, and experts should be cognizant of this as well, that they have their limitations. We have our limitations, and there's always a risk of hubris. They should have acknowledged the possibility of failure, that these measures wouldn't work as well as they hoped that they would, and that should have been factored into their decision-making. It's not just lives versus the economy. It's also the question of how many lives are you even saving? Are these policies workable for society? There was a lack of evidence based on that. And so you can't just make policy affecting the whole of a society on a wing and a prayer — and to a great extent that is what they were doing. An important part of the argument is that there was a disjunction between what health officials like Anthony Fauci and Birx were saying in private and what they were saying in public. Can you give me examples? Well, in her memoir, Deborah Birx is quite frank, that two weeks to slow the spread was just a pretext and it was just an effort to get Trump on board for initial closures and that, 'As soon as those closures were in place,' she says, 'we immediately began to look for ways to extend them.' I think one of the more devastating noble lies that was told during the pandemic was to go out there in spring and summer 2021, even into the fall of 2021, with the vaccine mandates and tell people that if you get vaccinated, you can protect your loved ones from catching the disease from you, that you will become a dead end to the virus. They did not have a scientific basis for making that claim. The vaccine trials had not tested for an outcome on transmission. We also knew that a systemically administered vaccine, meaning a shot — it's not a nasal vaccine — doesn't prevent you from contracting the virus and for it proliferating in your nasal cavity so that you can transmit. That was known. And so you shouldn't have gone out there and just reassured people that this would work and you'd be able to protect your loved ones. Everybody found out in rather short order, that getting vaccinated for Covid didn't prevent you from getting Covid and also from transmitting it to others. If you were in one of those rooms making these decisions about what to tell the public, what would you do if you were faced with a choice where you could either mislead the public with a 'noble lie' that you were absolutely convinced would save thousands of lives, but you also knew that if the public were to learn about the lie later, it would shatter trust in scientific institutions for maybe a generation? This is a very important question. The question I return to is: What is the basis for believing that these measures would work? You have to be able to accept uncertainty. If you're a scientist, there's a lot we just don't know about the world. To a great extent, the more expertise you develop, the more you learn about what we don't know. And so you have to come to terms with your ignorance as a policymaker, and so you may be wrong about what you think is going to work. Under those conditions, now you're trading your future credibility for measures that will be suboptimal and may not have nearly the effectiveness that you hope for. That, I think, is the greater failing to not confront the limits of our knowledge. So here's where I think we see failures in other truth-seeking institutions. Where were the academics? Where were the journalists asking hard questions of policymakers during that time? Critical thinking got suspended during the pandemic. And so then government officials, including public health officials, are not being held accountable in the way they should be to justify themselves. Do you think Covid shattered the delusion that there's a value-free science, that we can make policy choices like these based on science alone? One should not think that it is possible for science to settle political questions in the way that politicians talked about the Covid response, that they were just 'following the science.' That was never responsible rhetoric. It was never a responsible way to make policy. You have to come to terms with the reality of politics, which is diverse values and diverse interests, and that when you make policy choices, there are always winners and losers. And you have to see that with clear eyes and you try to make as many winners as possible and you try not to harm people unnecessarily. But you can't blind yourself to the effects of the choices that you make by pretending like there was no choice at all. It's interesting to me that there are no real villains in this story, at least not in the story you tell in the book. The book Steve and I have written is not a muckraking book. We're not accusing officials of nefarious motives or corruption. It's not about the 'Plandemic.' It's more a story of folly than villainy. What's the most important takeaway from all this? The acknowledgement of uncertainty, the willingness to keep learning. And then resist that impulse towards moralized antagonism, dismissing the perspectives of people you disagree with on the other side, politically. Resist that. Listen to them and try to evaluate what they say on the merits. And don't assume that you have nothing to learn from people you think are bad people. What we saw in the pandemic was society sort of turning on itself. Democrats blaming Republicans, Republicans blaming Democrats, all these different divides, where the root problem was that we did not have the technology to control or stop this crisis. All we could really do is mitigate it. And acknowledging our frailties as human beings, that's difficult. It's much easier and more comfortable just to blame the bad things that are happening on the people you don't like anyway. We saw an awful lot of that. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Vox
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Vox
Did our politics fail us during Covid?
There are lots of stories to tell about the Covid pandemic, but most of them, if you drill down, are about politics. It's about who made the decisions, who set the priorities, who mattered, who suffered the most, and why? Frances Lee is a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University and the co-author of a new book called In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. It's a careful book that treats our response to Covid as a kind of stress test for our political system. Lee and her co-author Stephen Macedo look at all the institutions responsible for truth-seeking — journalism, science, universities — and examine how they performed. Were they committed to truth and open to criticism? Did they live up to the basic norms of liberalism and science? Were we able to have a reasonable conversation about what was happening — and, if we weren't, why not? The book isn't really an attempt to grade our Covid policies. There are no villains in their story. It's more about the quality of the debate and deliberation that surrounded those policies. Which is more than just an academic exercise. The conceit of the book is that it's worth knowing what broke down during our response to Covid because those same things might also break down when the next crisis arrives. So I invited Lee onto The Gray Area to talk about what she learned and what she thinks are the most important political lessons of the pandemic. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. How would you characterize the debate we had in this country about our response to Covid? Well, it was a fast-moving crisis, and so it's not surprising in retrospect that the debate was truncated. But it is surprising, as we looked back and did the research for this book, the extent to which the decisions that were made in the early going of the pandemic departed from conventional wisdom about how to handle a pandemic and violated recommendations that had been put on paper in calmer times about how a crisis like this should be handled. Countries around the world sort of scrapped preexisting pandemic plans in order to follow the example set in Wuhan, and then in Italy, with Italy having the first nationwide lockdown and improvising along the way. There wasn't a scientific basis for the actions that were taken, in the sense that there was no accumulated body of evidence that these measures would be effective. It was hoped that they would be, but there was a lack of evidence. If you go back and take a look at a report that was prepared by the World Health Organization in 2019, just months before the pandemic broke out, that document goes through each of the proposed 'non-pharmaceutical interventions,' meaning the measures that are taken to keep people apart in the context of an infectious disease pandemic, like masking or social distancing, business closures, school closures. Across the board, the evidence base is rated as poor quality. Several such measures are recommended not to be used under any circumstances in the context of a respiratory pandemic. Among those were border closures, quarantine of exposed individuals, and testing and contact tracing. And then all those measures were of course employed here in the US and around the world in the context of the Covid pandemic without any kind of reckoning with the reasons why those measures were not recommended in the pre-pandemic planning. Let's get into the core of your critique, which is about the decision-making process. You quote a health official in the book, who said, 'I simply could not tolerate the notion of having 10 percent, 1 percent, or even 1/10 percent of Americans die a preventable death.' So what's wrong with saying, as a matter of policy, that the most important thing is to save lives at all costs? I believe that that's a quote from Deborah Birx. She was the coordinator of the Coronavirus Task Force. She was not able, she said, to do a cost-benefit analysis where she could calculate how much a life was worth. I mean, that's a very understandable response and attitude. But you have to remember that as policymakers were faced with the kinds of measures that were being employed to control the spread of a disease, lives are on both sides of the equation. Let's begin with one of the first measures taken, which was the shutting down of so-called nonessential health care, and it was defined quite broadly. There were a lot of cancer treatments that were canceled and regarded as nonessential depending on how advanced the cancer was. So you're trading off future risks to life to preserve health care capacity now. When you are exacerbating inequalities, when you are depriving people of education that has long-term health effects, you're trading the present for the future, and these are very difficult choices. The reason why we do cost-benefit analysis is in order to be responsible as policymakers. You can't only focus on one threat to human beings when we're facing many different threats. But you're also arguing that health officials were intolerant of criticism and skepticism. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just trying to be as fair as possible to the people in the fire at that time. I can imagine that one reason for that intolerance is that they really were in a tough position. I'm not here to defend any particular people or decisions, but do you have sympathy for the predicament that these people were facing? Well, I do have sympathy. I also know, and experts should be cognizant of this as well, that they have their limitations. We have our limitations, and there's always a risk of hubris. They should have acknowledged the possibility of failure, that these measures wouldn't work as well as they hoped that they would, and that should have been factored into their decision-making. It's not just lives versus the economy. It's also the question of how many lives are you even saving? Are these policies workable for society? There was a lack of evidence based on that. And so you can't just make policy affecting the whole of a society on a wing and a prayer — and to a great extent that is what they were doing. An important part of the argument is that there was a disjunction between what health officials like Anthony Fauci and Birx were saying in private and what they were saying in public. Can you give me examples? Well, in her memoir, Deborah Birx is quite frank, that two weeks to slow the spread was just a pretext and it was just an effort to get Trump on board for initial closures and that, 'As soon as those closures were in place,' she says, 'we immediately began to look for ways to extend them.' I think one of the more devastating noble lies that was told during the pandemic was to go out there in spring and summer 2021, even into the fall of 2021, with the vaccine mandates and tell people that if you get vaccinated, you can protect your loved ones from catching the disease from you, that you will become a dead end to the virus. They did not have a scientific basis for making that claim. The vaccine trials had not tested for an outcome on transmission. We also knew that a systemically administered vaccine, meaning a shot — it's not a nasal vaccine — doesn't prevent you from contracting the virus and for it proliferating in your nasal cavity so that you can transmit. That was known. And so you shouldn't have gone out there and just reassured people that this would work and you'd be able to protect your loved ones. Everybody found out in rather short order, that getting vaccinated for Covid didn't prevent you from getting Covid and also from transmitting it to others. If you were in one of those rooms making these decisions about what to tell the public, what would you do if you were faced with a choice where you could either mislead the public with a 'noble lie' that you were absolutely convinced would save thousands of lives, but you also knew that if the public were to learn about the lie later, it would shatter trust in scientific institutions for maybe a generation? This is a very important question. The question I return to is: What is the basis for believing that these measures would work? You have to be able to accept uncertainty. If you're a scientist, there's a lot we just don't know about the world. To a great extent, the more expertise you develop, the more you learn about what we don't know. And so you have to come to terms with your ignorance as a policymaker, and so you may be wrong about what you think is going to work. Under those conditions, now you're trading your future credibility for measures that will be suboptimal and may not have nearly the effectiveness that you hope for. That, I think, is the greater failing to not confront the limits of our knowledge. So here's where I think we see failures in other truth-seeking institutions. Where were the academics? Where were the journalists asking hard questions of policymakers during that time? Critical thinking got suspended during the pandemic. And so then government officials, including public health officials, are not being held accountable in the way they should be to justify themselves. Do you think Covid shattered the delusion that there's a value-free science, that we can make policy choices like these based on science alone? One should not think that it is possible for science to settle political questions in the way that politicians talked about the Covid response, that they were just 'following the science.' That was never responsible rhetoric. It was never a responsible way to make policy. You have to come to terms with the reality of politics, which is diverse values and diverse interests, and that when you make policy choices, there are always winners and losers. And you have to see that with clear eyes and you try to make as many winners as possible and you try not to harm people unnecessarily. But you can't blind yourself to the effects of the choices that you make by pretending like there was no choice at all. It's interesting to me that there are no real villains in this story, at least not in the story you tell in the book. The book Steve and I have written is not a muckraking book. We're not accusing officials of nefarious motives or corruption. It's not about the 'Plandemic.' It's more a story of folly than villainy. What's the most important takeaway from all this? The acknowledgement of uncertainty, the willingness to keep learning. And then resist that impulse towards moralized antagonism, dismissing the perspectives of people you disagree with on the other side, politically. Resist that. Listen to them and try to evaluate what they say on the merits. And don't assume that you have nothing to learn from people you think are bad people.
The Hill
14-04-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Covid failures under the microscope, Stephen Macedo says pandemic shuttered both dissent & business
Stephen Macedo, professor at Princeton University, talks about his new book, "In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us."
The Guardian
05-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘A case study in groupthink': were liberals wrong about the pandemic?
Were conservatives right to question Covid lockdowns? Were the liberals who defended them less grounded in science than they believed? And did liberal dismissiveness of the other side come at a cost that Americans will continue to pay for many years? A new book by two political scientists argues yes to all three questions, making the case that the aggressive policies that the US and other countries adopted to fight Covid – including school shutdowns, business closures, mask mandates and social distancing – were in some cases misguided and in many cases deserved more rigorous public debate. In their peer-reviewed book, In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee argue that public health authorities, the mainstream media, and progressive elites often pushed pandemic measures without weighing their costs and benefits, and ostracized people who expressed good-faith disagreement. 'Policy learning seemed to be short-circuited during the pandemic,' Lee said. 'It became so moralized, like: 'We're not interested in looking at how other people are [responding to the pandemic], because only bad people would do it a different way from the way we're doing'.' She and Macedo spoke to the Guardian by video call. The Princeton University professors both consider themselves left-leaning, and the book grew out of research Macedo was doing on the ways progressive discourse gets handicapped by a refusal to engage with conservative or outside arguments. 'Covid is an amazing case study in groupthink and the effects of partisan bias,' he said. Many Covid stances presented as public health consensus were not as grounded in empirical evidence as many Americans may have believed, Macedo and Lee argue. At times, scientific and health authorities acted less like neutral experts and more like self-interested actors, engaging in PR efforts to downplay uncertainty, missteps or conflicts of interest. It's a controversial argument. Covid-19 killed more than a million Americans, according to US government estimates. The early days of the pandemic left hospitals overwhelmed, morgues overflowing, and scientists scrambling to understand the new disease and how to contain it. Still, Macedo and Lee say, it is unclear why shutdowns and closures went on so long, particularly in Democratic states. The book argues that in the US the pandemic became more politically polarized over time, after, initially, 'only modest policy differences between Republican- and Democratic-leaning states'. After April 2020, however, red and blue America diverged. Donald Trump contributed to that polarization by downplaying the severity of the virus. Significant policy differences also emerged. Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, moved to re-open physical schools quickly, which progressives characterized as irresponsible. Yet in the end there was 'no meaningful difference' in Covid mortality rates between Democratic and Republican states in the pre-vaccine period, according to CDC data cited in the book, despite Republican states' more lenient policies. Macedo and Lee also favorably compare Sweden, which controversially avoided mass lockdowns but ultimately had a lower mortality rate than many other European countries. The shutdowns had foreseeable and quantifiable costs, they say, many of which we are still paying. Learning loss and school absenteeism soared. Inflation went through the roof thanks in part to lockdown spending and stimulus payments. Small businesses defaulted; other medical treatments like cancer screenings and mental health care suffered; and rates of loneliness and crime increased. The economic strain on poor and minority Americans was particularly severe. Covid policies escalated into culture wars, amplifying tensions around other social issues. Teachers' unions, which are often bastions of Democratic support, painted school re-openings as 'rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny' and 'a recipe for … structural racism', the book notes, despite the fact that minority and poor students were most disadvantaged by remote learning. These measures also had a literal price. 'In inflation-adjusted terms,' Macedo and Lee write, 'the United States spent more on pandemic aid in 2020 than it spent on the 2009 stimulus package and the New Deal combined' – or about what the US spent on war production in 1943. Yet of the $5tn that the US Congress authorized in 2020 and 2021 for Covid expenditure, only about 10% went to direct medical expenses such as hospitals or vaccine distribution, according to the book; most of the spending was on economic relief to people and businesses affected by shutdowns. Ten per cent of that relief was stolen by fraud, according to the AP. The pandemic was an emergency with no modern precedent, of course, and hindsight is easy. But In Covid's Wake tries to take into account what information was known at the time – including earlier pandemic preparedness studies. Reports by Johns Hopkins (2019), the World Health Organization (2019), the state of Illinois (2014) and the British government (2011) had all expressed ambivalence or caution about the kind of quarantine measures that were soon taken. 'We take a look at the state of the evidence as it was in early 2020,' Lee said. 'It was clear at the time that the evidence was quite unsettled around all of this, and if policymakers had been more honest with the public about these uncertainties, I think they would have maintained public trust better.' The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a wargaming exercise in October 2019, shortly before the pandemic began, to simulate a deadly coronavirus pandemic; the findings explicitly urged that '[t]ravel and trade … be maintained even in the face of a pandemic'. Similarly, a WHO paper in 2019 said that some measures – such as border closures and contact tracing – were 'not recommended in any circumstances'. 'And yet we did all of that in short order,' Macedo said, 'and without people referring back to these plans.' He and Lee also believe there was a strong element of class bias, with a left-leaning 'laptop class' that could easily work from home touting anti-Covid measures that were much easier for some Americans to adopt than others. Many relatively affluent Americans became even wealthier during the pandemic, in part due to rising housing values. At the same time, the laptop class was only able to socially isolate at home in part because other people risked exposure to provide groceries. Stay-at-home measures were partly intended to protect 'essential workers', but policymakers living in crisis-stricken major metropolitan areas such as New York or Washington DC did not reckon with why social distancing and other measures might be less important in rural parts of the country where Covid rates were lower. Lockdowns were intended to slow Covid's spread, yet previous pandemic recommendations had suggested they only be used very early in an outbreak and even then do not buy much time, Macedo said. Policymakers and experts often embraced stringent measures for reasons that are more political than medical, Macedo and Lee argue; in a pandemic, authorities are keen to assure anxious publics that they are 'in charge' and 'doing something'. In strange contrast, policymakers and journalists in the US and elsewhere seemed to take China as a model, the book argues, despite the fact that China is an authoritarian state and had concealed the scale of the outbreak during the crucial early days of the pandemic. Its regime had obvious incentives to mislead foreign observers, and used draconian quarantine measures such as physically welding people into their homes. When the WHO organized a joint China field mission with the Chinese government, in February 2020, non-Chinese researchers found it difficult to converse with their Chinese counterparts away from government handlers. Yet the WHO's report was 'effusive in its praise' of China's approach, the book notes. 'My view is that there was just a great deal of wishful thinking on the part of technocrats of all kinds,' Lee said. 'They wanted there to be an answer – that if we do X and Y, we can prevent this disaster. And so they're kind of grasping at straws. The Chinese example gave them hope.' She noted that Covid policymakers might have been better served if there had been people assigned to act as devil's advocates in internal deliberations. Lee and Macedo are not natural scientists or public health professionals, they emphasize, and their book is about failures in public deliberation over Covid-19, rather than a prescription for managing pandemics. But they do wade into the debate about Covid-19's origin, arguing that the 'lab leak' hypothesis – that Covid-19 accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than spontaneously leaping from animals to humans – was unfairly dismissed. The Wuhan Institute studied coronaviruses similar to the one responsible for Covid-19, had a documented history of safety breaches, was located near the outbreak, and is known to have experimented on viruses using controversial 'gain-of-function' methods funded by the US, which involve mutating pathogens to see what they might look like in a more advanced or dangerous form. Perhaps because Trump had fanned racial paranoia by calling Covid-19 the 'China virus' and rightwing influencers were spreading the notion that it had been deliberately engineered and unleashed on the world by China, many scientists, public health experts and journalists reacted by framing the idea of a lab leak – even an accidental one – as an offensive conspiracy theory. Dr Anthony Fauci and other top public health figures were evasive or in some cases dishonest about the possibility of a lab leak, Macedo and Lee say, as well as the fact that a US non-profit funded by the National Institutes of Health allegedly funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute. Since then, though, the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have cautiously endorsed the lab leak theory, and the discourse around Covid has softened somewhat. The economist Emily Oster sparked immense backlash by arguing against school closures in 2020. Now publications such as New York Magazine and the New York Times have acknowledged the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis, for example, and there is growing consensus that school closures hurt many children. The reception to In Covid's Wake has been more positive than Macedo and Lee expected – perhaps a sign that some of their arguments have penetrated the mainstream, if not that we've gotten better as a society at talking about difficult things. 'The reception of the book has been much less controversial [and] contentious than we expected,' Macedo said. Yet the wounds fester and debates continue. Some readers of the New York Times were furious when The Daily, the newspaper's flagship podcast, recently interviewed them, with subscribers arguing that the episode was not sufficiently critical of their stance. And some coverage of the book has criticized it for underplaying the danger of the disease. Macedo and Lee said that a few of their colleagues have expressed concern that their critique could fuel political attacks on science – a worry that crossed their minds too. 'Our response is that the best way to refute criticisms that science and universities have been politicized is to be open to criticism and willing to engage in self-criticism,' Macedo said. 'We need to make sure these institutions are in the best possible working order to face the challenges ahead. And we think that's by being honest, not by covering over mistakes or being unwilling to face up to hard questions.'
