The Covid-19 pandemic was a disaster. We can all agree on that. But are we willing to ask and figure out why? 

The fact that “there have been so few academic conferences and university symposia” devoted to Covid-19 suggests the answer is no. This is “astonishing,” Stephen Macedo and Francis Lee point out in their new book, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. Yet “the profound impact of Covid and the policies and emergency measures deployed to combat it” would seem to warrant retrospective analysis, if not rigorous debate.

We need a reckoning, Lee and Macedo argue. Educated elites and public health authorities, scientists, universities, and journalists need to acknowledge their failures “to live up to the basic norms of liberalism and science” and their unfair treatment of “reasonable dissenters.” Progressives, in particular, “need to have a sober look in the mirror.” 

To its credit, this book is not about “owning the libs.” Lee and Macedo are liberal democrats who sympathize with the same progressive elites they exhort to self-examination. “People were dying, and scholars and public health officials cared deeply about saving lives. They operated from the best of motives.” Progressive elites often acted the way they did because “they could see that the leadership in the Trump White House was erratic and deeply flawed.” Still, Lee and Macedo criticize the intense moral loathing and intolerance on both sides of the aisle. They are weary of the inability among Republicans and Democrats to see that people can reasonably disagree about complex scientific issues. Polarization preexisted Covid, of course—it’s one of the reasons science became so politicized during the pandemic.

So, what is this book about instead? First, this book is about how elites, when faced with policy making during a crisis, can better recognize the interests, values, and needs of non-elites. Public health officials, journalists, university professors, and scientists “tend to come from well-off positions in society and can be oblivious to their class biases.” During the pandemic, educated elites advocated, endorsed, or developed policies that weren’t a detriment to their own work and livelihoods—but that threatened to devastate working-class households. Elite, white-collar jobs smoothly transitioned online. Time at home was spent renovating or “ordering wine” and feeling good about the rising value of their homes. These, along with “reduced daily commuter costs,” were the privileges of the laptop class. Meanwhile, “all of these activities were only ever possible because other, less privileged people, were exposing themselves daily to the virus and doing all the in-person work that was necessary to make the laptop class comfortable.” Low wage “essential” workers, even many over the age of 65, had no other choice but to risk their health. Minority-owned businesses were permanently closing. And black and Hispanic populations were experiencing “higher levels of personal stress and financial strain.” Had Covid policies disproportionately harmed “the rich, big business, White people, top earners, and other advantaged societal groups” those policies probably “would not have been adopted and maintained with the same degree of ease.” If elites are more aware of their class biases moving forward, the policies they develop or endorse could help, rather than harm, the little guy they promise to protect.

Elitism is not the only reason experts failed to weigh the costs of Covid policies. Debate around the costs of Covid policies was either truncated or altogether missing. Namely, experts who were proponents of “suppression strategies” and “social distancing” non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) often failed to engage in “good faith” debate with reasonable dissenters. These experts preferred to condemn colleagues who warned of the economic and ethical costs of these Covid policies or to slander those who proposed alternative strategies. And experts were not the only ones short-circuiting debate. Now we know, thanks to Missouri v. Biden and Murthy v. Missouri, during the Biden Administration, White House officials and officials from the CDC, the FBI, and other federal agencies pressured social media platforms to block Covid content that didn’t maintain the status quo. That is, platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, removed content that entertained the possibility of the lab-leak theory or pointed out that non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as lockdowns, masks, and social distancing, had never been known to eliminate a respiratory virus. 

Silencing dissenters was and is troubling. Any pandemic plan will come with its respective costs and benefits. As the authors emphasize, “the most difficult question for pandemic management was always how to strike a balance across harms from Covid and harms from Covid policies. The answer to this would never be easy, but that’s just the point. It needed to be grappled with fairly and honestly.”

Lee and Macedo didn’t write their book simply to discuss the policy errors during Covid. They wrote it because they are worried about the health of our democracy. The project of self-government faces serious danger if we can’t tolerate dissenting scientists, journalists, and academics who present evidence or raise legitimate concerns that “run counter to prevailing narratives.” Such intolerance threatens the things we need and hold dear in a free society: the ability to pursue the truth regardless of where it leads and the right to disagree with each other civilly and reasonably. The core message of Lee and Macedo’s book is that “several tenets of basic rationality evaporated under the stress of the Covid onslaught.” The worst consequence that followed was “the failure to weigh the expected costs of policy against the expected benefits.” But there were other consequences too. 

Public trust in scientists declined, and distrust in healthcare providers deepened. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Pre-Covid pandemic plans warned that when the government infringes on people’s civil liberties in the name of public health, it can give people, even those who need medical aid, an incentive to disregard public health authorities. Enforced mandates can also hinder public cooperation and sow distrust. The best way to protect the public, then, is to work with the public. Unfortunately, though, we didn’t see much of that during the pandemic. Our leaders simply failed to treat us as self-governing adults. They relied more on fear-mongering and deception than on honest communication.

Perhaps the most troubling example of this was the way the scientific establishment obscured the definition of herd immunity. Before Covid and in the early stages of the pandemic, most scientists didn’t contest that “natural infection and recovery contribute importantly to population-level immunity to disease.” The consensus was that getting sick and recovering from a virus is one of two ways to acquire immunity. The other way is to get a vaccine. This was common sense.

Then, after June 2020, the World Health Organization changed its definition of herd immunity. The November 13 definition, Lee and Macedo note, “focused entirely on vaccination.” Natural infection and recovery were out of the picture. Why the change of definition? Well, there was a change in approach to the virus. Public health officials and scientists “declared war” on Covid—something that hadn’t been done before. In this context, “war” meant containing and eventually eliminating the spread of Covid. It meant preventing Covid infections, even among healthy and low-risk populations. And if war meant preventing natural infection (and recovery), then the population was left with one immunity option: vaccination. The authors speculate that WHO changed the definition of herd immunity to help persuade the public that vaccination was the only way to end the pandemic. This message about herd immunity and vaccination was misleading.

It’s no surprise that Republicans and Democrats reacted very differently to that message. What comes as a surprise, though, are the results of their opposing approaches to the virus. Lee and Macedo found that “states that pursued more stringent non-pharmaceutical interventions in efforts to contain the pandemic did not achieve lower Covid mortality rates. States that saw better vaccine uptake, however, had significantly lower Covid mortality.” In other words, before the vaccine, Democratic states that mandated stricter travel bans, longer stay-at-home orders, and longer school and workplace closures did not see fewer Covid deaths than Republican states that tried to get back to normal life as quickly as possible. Once the vaccines rolled out, Republicans were more hesitant to get vaccinated, and Republican states didn’t mandate the vaccine. Several Democratic states did. As a result, “the more highly vaccinated (more Democratic) states suffer[ed] less disease and death than the less vaccinated (more Republican) states.” Whereas vaccines were strong predictors of Covid mortality, NPIs were not.

It’s worth pondering this. Were the pandemic restrictions, mandates, and closures, which disrupted the lives of millions of Americans, all for nothing?

The answer is complicated. The pharmaceutical intervention, the vaccine, “seem[ed] to matter a lot more for Covid mortality than the non-pharmaceutical inventions.” However, that doesn’t necessarily mean NPIs and pandemic restrictions were useless. The authors cite various studies, from America and across several countries, such as the United Kingdom, that found that NPIs and pandemic restrictions “reduced Covid infection rates.” Still, these studies and others have yet to find that NPIs and pandemic restrictions lowered overall Covid mortality rates. It’s perplexing, I admit. One would think lower transmission of disease translates to lower death rates from that disease. Why is there a “disjuncture between the effects of restrictions on Covid infections and Covid mortality”?

I am less interested in the answer and more interested in the phenomenon the “disjuncture” reveals. Science is messy. Facts aren’t straightforward. And we can’t always separate values from facts. Even if someone proves that NPIs, when used in “x” way, can prevent deaths from disease, the question of their economic, social, and ethical costs will remain. After all, should minimizing deaths take priority over all other aspects of life?

Lee and Macedo don’t dwell on the broader questions their book raises about modern science and its relationship to liberalism. And this is precisely why their book deserves attention. It serves as a crucial introduction to the challenges the West has set itself up for. Science and liberalism were born of the same mother. But as Lee and Macedo demonstrate, that doesn’t guarantee they will make for agreeable siblings.