Latest news with #Macedo
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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Telegraph
05-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
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.
Bloomberg
10-04-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Macedo on Authentic Restaurant Brands' M&A Strategy: Choppin' It Up
Authentic Restaurant Brands wants to be national but it's going to get there by being regional across the country, CEO Alex Macedo tells Bloomberg Intelligence. In this episode of the Choppin' It Up podcast, Macedo sits down with BI's senior restaurant and foodservice analyst Michael Halen to discuss the company's unique strategy of acquiring strong regional brands and helping them improve sales and profits instead of supercharging unit growth. He also comments on the M&A market and why it's become increasingly difficult to scale up national brands in a cost-effective way.
Yahoo
06-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Billionaire televangelist slashes price on $14.6M Florida condo amid scrutiny over church wealth: report
The wealthiest religious broadcaster in the world is looking to offload his luxury condo in Florida. The beachfront residence of Brazilian billionaire televangelist Edir Macedo in the ultra-exclusive Porsche Design Tower Miami is now listed for just under $14.6 million after a price cut, according to public real estate records. Macedo, founder and bishop of the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God), is no stranger to lavish living or controversy. His net worth is estimated at $1.8 billion, ranking him 1,901st on Forbes' real-time billionaire index. By comparison, Kim Kardashian's net worth is $1.7 billion. Palm Beach, The Wall Street Of The South, Has A Hot Luxury Real Estate Market The Porsche Design Tower, a $560 million architectural marvel completed in 2017, is famous for its car elevators that transport luxury vehicles directly into private condo garages. In 2013, The Real Deal reported that "nearly two dozen of the homes — 22 — under contract will belong to billionaires."The tower has a mandatory homeowners association with monthly fees ranging from $4,277 to $12,069. Macedo's neighbors over the years have included international celebrities like Lionel Messi, Colombian pop star Maluma, Mexican actress Thalía and Andrea Romanello Ferdinand, daughter of Patrick Romanello, who The New York Times reported was "alleged to be an associate of the Bonanno crime family." Read On The Fox Business App But the Florida condo might not be the only real estate Macedo's family holds in the U.S. According to a property intelligence database reviewed by watchdog group the Trinity Foundation, another Sunny Isles Beach condo worth $9.6 million is linked to the family. Yet, according to the Trinity Foundation's research, the Miami-Dade County property appraiser lists only a shell LLC as the owner with no names publicly attached. The Trinity Foundation, a nonprofit that investigates religious fraud, has long tracked Macedo's financial activities. "Macedo's empire includes media companies, banking interests, and international real estate," the group noted, citing his control of Brazil's Record TV network and Banco Renner. The Universal Church isn't just active in Brazil. It operates worldwide, including in Portugal, Mexico and the United States. The church even built a modern version of Solomon's Temple in São Paulo, Brazil. Despite its clear wealth and power, the church's "Contact Us" page on its U.S. website claims "the Universal Church does not provide financial aid programs."Their 24/7 livestream available on the Universal Church's website currently offers "Blessed Water" for sale, which purports to heal everything from depression to cancer. According to the Trinity Foundation, the organization also owns four private jets and a helicopter, assets rarely seen in the nonprofit religious world. Macedo's empire has had legal troubles. In 2008, he and nine of his associates were charged in Brazil with laundering roughly $2 billion. As reported by The Associated Press, "The church allegedly used fake companies to launder the money, moving the assets abroad and then returning them in the form of loans used by Macedo and his accomplices to buy businesses, prosecutors said." Brazilian courts ultimately did not convict Macedo or his co-defendants. More issues surfaced in 2019, when authorities in Angola charged four leaders of Macedo's church with financial crimes, including money laundering. According to Ver Angola, the fallout led to the expulsion of 22 Brazilian church members by Angolan immigration Fox Business On The GoThe Universal Church of the Kingdom of God did not immediately respond to FOX Business' request for article source: Billionaire televangelist slashes price on $14.6M Florida condo amid scrutiny over church wealth: report Sign in to access your portfolio
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.'
