In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us

by Stephen Macedo, Frances Lee

What our failures during the pandemic cost us, and why we must do better

The Covid pandemic quickly led to the greatest mobilization of emergency powers in human history. By early April 2020, half the world’s population—3.9 billion people—were living under quarantine. People were told not to leave their homes; businesses were shuttered, employees laid off, and schools closed for months or even years. The most devastating pandemic in a century and the policies adopted in response to it upended life as we knew it. In this eye-opening book, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee examine our pandemic response and pose some provocative Why did we ignore pre-Covid plans for managing a pandemic? Were the voices of reasonable dissent treated fairly? Did we adequately consider the costs and benefits of different policy options? And, aside from vaccines, did the policies adopted work as intended?

With In Covid’s Wake, Macedo and Lee offer the first comprehensive—and candid—political assessment of how our institutions fared during the pandemic. They describe how, influenced by Wuhan’s lockdown, governments departed from their existing pandemic plans. Hard choices were obscured by slogans like “follow the science.” The policies adopted largely benefited the laptop class and left so-called essential workers unprotected; the benefits and harms were distributed unfairly. Extended school closures hit the least-privileged families the hardest. Science became politicized and dissent was driven to the margins. In the next crisis, Macedo and Lee warn, we must not forget the deepest values of liberal tolerance and open-mindedness, respect for evidence and its limits, a willingness to entertain uncertainty, and a commitment to telling the whole truth.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Science, History, Health, Audiobook, Medical

392 pages, Hardcover

First published March 11, 2025

Reviews

[Dillon Colagrosso · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is ridiculous and can’t be trusted. These professors are simply pointing fingers and providing very few solutions. Their only offer for an alternative solution is to allow more of the general public to have an input on non-pharmaceutical strategies, which is absurd. The general public can’t be trusted with making mature, informed decisions on infectious diseases.

This book is for the ignorant and emotionally immature who failed to handle the simple, good measures to save lives and prevent significant suffering during the COVID-19 pandemic.

[AI · Rating 1 out of 5]

Recommended listening: If Books Could Kill podcast, https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast....

[Kari · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is full of misinterpreted science on the Swedish response. It is nothing more than MAHA science. It would never make it through the scientific review process if submitted to a medical journal.

[Andy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Alas, this is still not the book that explains the COVID pandemic. The authors demand clarity of thought and language from organizations like the WHO, and they are right to do so. Indeed, they do bring up many good points. But then their arguments are mired in inflammatory rhetoric and fuzzy logic.

Nerd addendum:
Oversimplifying, the gist of the book is that:
We had a pandemic plan before COVID. It was developed over many years, across multiple presidential administrations, and included input from a wide array of disciplines. Overall, although it included some role for non-pharmaceutical-interventions, the plan concluded that trying to contain a respiratory virus (with social distancing and such) was likely to have high cost and low benefit. Nevertheless, somehow that plan got "binned" by the "educated elites" and "unelected public health experts" who decided to use their power to implement a lockdown policy, emulating China. These "elites" then lied about herd immunity, masking, the origin of the virus, etc., while censoring all dissenting voices. The courageous authors are now exposing this fiasco.

-The incessant use of "elites" is annoying. The authors know this is a right-wing buzzword because they quote people like Ron DeSantis using it that way. Seriously, public health practitioners are an "elite class" of progressives running the world, making policy to put down the working man, blah, blah, blah? That's an extraordinary claim one would have to back up with some evidence. The pandemic plan was developed under Republican and Democratic presidents. Trump was president when it got discarded as policy at the national level in the US. How is this the fault of progressive academic elites????

-Giving the authors the benefit of the doubt that we had this amazing plan and that it was just chucked out the window, how did that happen? If giants of public health like DA Henderson (Smallpox: The Death of a Disease - The Inside Story of Eradicating a Worldwide Killer) were critiquing lockdown policy at the time, how were they overruled? In the book, the explanation is "panic" among policy makers. Who precisely was in these discussions? Do we have records of that?

-"Public health" is properly explained sometimes in the book as focusing on the Social Determinants of Health. Good. But then "public health experts" are consistently blamed for completely ignoring all the social determinants of health (poverty, social isolation, crowding, etc.). If true, this gigantic non sequitur requires explanation. The authors do give some good quotes of famous public health experts like Tom Frieden reversing positions on policy. This goes along with some kind of groupthink, as the authors say, but it doesn't fit with public health elites setting the policy. It implies somebody else setting the policy and then the public health experts went along with it. Who is the someone else?

-It's implied that the people calling the shots are the leaders of the NIH (Fauci, Collins) because they control all the grant money for medical scientists. But those people are basic science experts, not public health people. And their influence is brought up mainly in the context of the lab leak idea, which is a red herring in terms of the plan and managing an existing pandemic.

-The term "unelected" is often used when referring to public health officers. This is unnecessary. Police officers are also unelected. But we don't all add "unelected" every time we talk about them. This is just more political rhetoric. We can't elect every single person in government. Hardly anybody in America votes as it is (like 10% in local primaries). The relevant thing is whether they are competent. Do they produce good outcomes, etc.? If the point of the "unelected" rhetoric is to say that your local millionaire lawyer Congressman and the billionaires who back him will be more representative of the average American's wishes and know epidemiology better than the local public health official, well LOL.

-Much is made of evidence that prolonged lockdowns did not help much, whereas the vaccine did indeed save lives, and the Red/Blue differences in mortality are explained by this because Republicans tended to avoid the vaccine. Okay, but again why? Operation Warp Speed to develop a vaccine as fast as possible was Trump's baby. Why did Republicans reject it? How did the "progressive educated elites" make all that happen? Wasn't vaccine development part of the original plan? If so, why did we keep that part after throwing out the rest?

-The lab leak story is relevant to primary prevention of a pandemic. Regardless of whether that was the origin of COVID, we should have better regulation of lab safety (See Pandora's Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, And A World At Risk). Sure. Whatever. On the other hand, if COVID was, like SARS, from China's industrial "wildlife" trade, then we should have better regulation of that. Were those things in the plan?

-This book mentions the investigation of the 1976 Swine Flu fiasco The Epidemic that Never Was, policy-making & the swine flu affair,. That report gives an account of decision-making in Washington along with the evidence available then in real time. One could describe the problem then as panic and "let's do something" at the top of the CDC because they were afraid of another 1918 flu pandemic. But even they didn't do massive lockdowns. But for COVID, we did. A report like that one for 2020 would be good.

-To explain why the "academic elites" pushed for dropping the old plan, this book gives a lot of weight to a couple of studies of 1918 non-pharmaceutical-interventions and to some scientists who do mathematical modeling of epidemics. These are the architects of COVID social distancing and prolonged lockdown. This all seems far-fetched to me. The experts who made the plan already looked at these studies. Academia is described as a bunch of sheep who conform to the conventional wisdom and punish dissenters. Why did they rapidly abandon the conventional wisdom then in March 2020? Then again, in Michael Lewis's book on the pandemic ( The Premonition: A Pandemic Story) the guys who wrote the paper about St. Louis vs. Philly in 1918 weren't peripheral to the pandemic plan; they were central to that process. So which is it?

-I haven't fact-checked the whole book, but I have read the papers about 1918 restrictions. Reasonable people could look at them and find evidence to say "let's do 15 days of lockdown to "flatten the curve" when the epidemic hits our town." This book seems to agree with that. So the issue isn't even the quality of those papers.

-There are lots of graphs to make the general argument that prolonged lockdowns didn't help much in the long run for saving lives and so that's a fiasco because the lockdowns had so many costs. But we don't get follow-through on the costs. Sweden, for example, is referred to a lot because they imposed few restrictions. Well, then it should be easy to show that their economy did way better and they have less depression and learning loss, etc. than other countries. Where's all that evidence? It's not okay to spend the whole book lambasting people for ignoring the costs of lockdown policy and then ignore the costs of lockdown policy in your assessment. You need all 4 squares of a 2X2 table to say much of anything.

-We really did have all kinds of problems dealing with COVID: lack of PPE, no surge capacity in hospitals, etc., etc., etc. All this gets short shrift in the book. Presumably stocking up on PPE was part of the plan. What happened with that? What are the lessons learned from that?

-I could go on, but I'm tired. Again this is a shame. The authors do go over important errors of hubris that were made by various public figures, as well as important bad outcomes that were likely preventable. These need to be admitted and discussed so lessons can be learned. I just find their explanations unsatisfactory.

Note: To clarify, I'm not saying I agree with their assessment of the science. My argument is that even if you accept that, their political narrative doesn't hold together. Please see comments below for information on fact-checking of this book to see if they got the facts right.
Part of what I am trying to do with these negative reviews is to point out how to detect balderdash. In this case, I was trying to show that even without external fact-checking, the reader could still tell there was something fishy.

[Samuel Armitage · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will likely serve as the one of the first to examine how academia and the elite lost the trust of the general public and political class they ought to serve. To me the core arguments of the book was:
* That an "elite laptop class", those who had the wealthy and privilege to be able to work from home and could afford to get essentials delivered, dictated a policy of sacrifice that asked little of them but a lot from the less privileged whose voices were marginalized.
* Key leaders took over control of the narrative about how "settled" the science was on various issues around the pandemic and weaponised science as an institution against their fellow scientists who disagreed with them.

To make this argument, Macedo and Lee show how previous pandemic plans made in the United States, the UK and WHO highlighted that non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) like masking, stay at home orders, contact tracing, were considered too costly to implement from both an economic and societal perspective. But the success that the World Health Organisation claimed that China achieved in their January lockdowns meant all these plans were thrown out the window. Decision makes were needed to be seen "doing something", when Covid spread to Italy, who also showed a nationwide lockdown could be achieved in the west, the precedent was set with only Sweden sticking to the original pre-Wuhan science.

Despite limited evidence that measures such as lockdowns, masking and contact tracing would be an effective intervention against a respiratory virus, official persisted in using them. When dissent began to emerge from other prominent voices in their field, like the "Great Barrington Declaration", they would be quickly dismissed as "fringe" and slandered in the media and by their fellow scientists. The authors allege this came from a place where scientific leaders did not believe the public could handle a public debate about the cost of NPIs and instead dismissed sentiments with terms like "following the science" and "the science is settled" while using methods that were neither proven at the time, or have been subsequently validated.

The failure to "red team" response measures, to consider the ethical challenges in what they were asking of people, to consider the learning lost, funerals missed, dying family members left lonely and isolated, increased drug and alcohol use and other flow on effect that we're still coming to terms with the massive increase in wealth inequality as the result of central bank policy. The deadliness of the virus was far less than originally communicated, that it was asking significant sacrifices of the youth as a result and that they were being asked, at the expense of older people with co-morbidities.

For political leaders to claim they were merely “following the science” was a dodge of responsibility. Covid policymaking required policymakers to weigh trade-offs and make choices among competing goods.

I had no idea that Africa was forced into harsh lockdowns for little benefit:

More than 40 million additional people in Africa in extreme poverty by late 2021 when compared with 2019. Some 4.5 million children removed permanently from education in Uganda alone. The last twenty years of development gains wiped out, according to Ayoade Alakija, co-chair of the African Vaccine Delivery Alliance. Huge increases in child marriage, especially in Nigeria.… According to the International Labour Organization, 40 per cent of domestic workers, street vendors and waste pickers are still earning less than 75 per cent of their pre-Covid earnings.… As a December UNICEF report put it, children around the world face the biggest crisis in the organization’s history.

What the authors argues should have done was that scientists and political leader communicate clearly with the public about what their goals are and encourage open legislative debate, rather than the top-down executive action that we got instead. That changing course on policy can be a good thing if it is found to be effective and not to be so worried about losing credibility, because by hiding the uncertainty, credibility has been serious damaged.

Beyond elites checking elites, and more importantly, we also needed to balance the values, interests, ideologies, and preoccupations of elites and professional classes with those of less highly educated and privileged ordinary citizens.

Macedo and Lee fear that elites have taken the wrong message, what was needed was greater control of information by social and political intuitions, to further shut down debate. This book is an appraisal by elites (two Princeton professors), for elites and the "laptop class" of their performance during the Covid response and it's a very confronting picture that is painted.

If you wanted to have a discussion about how the Covid responses could have been done better, without attracting the conspiracy theorists, this is probably the book that will help guide you through the research done before and what we've found after about what was tried and how well it stacked up.

[Kenny · Rating 1 out of 5]

Authors interpret data incorrectly the entire book and it's easy to look up. I think they should have hired someone to help with a medical background

[Sally D · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is propaganda.

[Melissa Stacy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a phenomenal book! So important, necessary, and vital.

All the stars!!

[Timothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for everyone, but especially anyone involved in planning for the next pandemic. The book looks at how politics, not logic shaped the global response to the pandemic and raises questions about the efficacy of non pharmaceutical interventions (which had been dismissed long before the pandemic), how elites combined to stifle inquiry, and how they failed to consider the effects of lockdowns. Thoroughly researched and well written.

[Anita Geisler · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone in the medical profession caring for children, I witnessed first hand (and continue to see) the devastation to kids. In real time I had scratched my head about the draconian school closures. This book methodically, with the use of discovered emails, lays out how the narrative took precedence over the science. It lays out how Groupthink took hold in government, the media and academia. The book documents how our democratic government manipulated platforms and pushed out what ostensibly was propaganda. I have seen the downhill consequences of these measures that went directly counter to pre pandemic policy. Excellent and well researched read.

[Courtney Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. Mind blown. Full disclosure, I definitely was a follower of all Covid protocols and dismissed naysayers as difficult, probably due to my own risk status. This book, written by two self-professed liberal progressives, unveils conflicts of interest, deliberate lies and coverups, and suppression of legitimate concerns of which many turned out to be correct and/or true. Our preventative actions during 2020 and beyond had little positive effect, and what’s worse, scientists knew that they wouldn’t earlier than 2020. I hate to admit that if this book wasn’t written by two academics who label themselves as liberals I wouldn’t quite know the purpose behind it. It saddens me that my own admission shows how polarized we have become. Great read. Well written and well sourced. Best of luck resisting the tinfoil hat after reading it!

[Shane · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is full of conveniently misinterpreted data, false representations of the data, and bunk science. The authors are not virologists or immunologists, they are political science professors who are clearly right wing and hell bent on being apologists for trump and the republicans mishandling of the pandemic. If your goal is the same you will love this book. If you care about science, and facts and have even a high school level of knowledge on how to interpret data you will find it as offensive as I did.

[Raghu Nathan]

The book’s opening line declares that the world’s fear in March 2020 will remain long remembered. I think it captures the essence of the Covid-19 crisis because everything that followed afterwards had the imprint of that fear. Governments around the world told people to stay at home, closed schools for months, asked us to wear masks, not crowd together, but maintain safe distancing from one another. Fear kept even family members from the comfort of a hug. Downtown areas got emptied and businesses were closed, sometimes for good. Did this help contain the pandemic? Did it help in bringing down the Covid-19 mortality rate? What financial burdens did these practices impose on communities and nations? Many scientists considered these measures draconian and unnecessary and suggested alternative approaches. Did our democracy tackle this dissent with maturity or respond in a knee-jerk fashion? Macedo and Lee’s book provides a critical examination of these questions. The authors draw important conclusions relevant to handling future crises or pandemics. The book’s strength lies in the authors’ courageous defiance of established Covid-19 narratives. I would summarize the gist of the book as below:

The US had planned for respiratory pandemics well before 2020 and prepared a comprehensive report. When Covid-19 struck, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) abandoned these plans for no valid reason. The WHO recommended that the world follow the Wuhan containment model. The CDC accepted it and imposed draconian measures of lockdowns without enough consideration of the costs. Scientists who opposed these measures and suggested alternative approaches were subject to vilification and censure. Blue and Red states in the US followed differing degrees of the stringent Wuhan model. But it did not affect Covid's mortality. The elite laptop class that imposed the Covid policy ignored its costs because it did not affect them. The world’s poor paid the price for the WHO and CDC’s Covid-19 policy. Sufficient justification existed for investigating a lab-leak origin of the virus. But the authorities demonized scientists who suggested it and forced the ‘proximal origin theory’ on society - that it originated in the Wuhan market from bats. Authorities encouraged misinformation and disinformation if it helped in enforcing their Covid policy. Similar practice existed during the Vietnam and Iraq wars. We shall explore these issues in more detail here.

One mantra which was oft-repeated by the medical czars, politicians, scientists and the journalists was ‘follow the science’ as the response to Covid-19. They advised us to follow all the draconian restrictions of distancing, masking, and closing businesses and schools. Epidemiologists termed them ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions’ or NPIs, for short. But the science did not endorse it. The World Health Organization (WHO) and Johns Hopkins University prepared documents before 2020 about the efficacy of a wide range of NPIs in response to a future respiratory pandemic. They show experts doubting a wide range of NPIs, such as testing and contact tracing, masking, border closures, lockdowns, stay-at-home orders and business and school closures. The report emphasized uncertainty about the benefits of almost all NPls and raised concerns about their potential societal and economic costs. The documents reveal class bias within many NPIs. These measures benefit the remote working ‘laptop class’, disadvantaging the poor. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, doubted whether the Chinese response in Wuhan would work in non-authoritarian societies. He questioned its feasibility. Dr. Donald Henderson and Dr. Adel Mahmoud, along with other experts, warned against a hasty decision regarding NPIs because of their costs and uncertain benefits. They also insisted on open and honest communication with the public about hard facts. One hard truth we know, from science and history, is that containing or suppressing the virus was impossible.

The pre-2020 US report questioned the reliability of mathematical models for pandemic prediction because these models lacked real-world testing on a scale as large as the Covid-19 pandemic. Dr. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London, received much media coverage for his mathematical models and their projections. Without the NPIs, Ferguson’s model predicted about 510000 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million in the US, followed by the collapse of national health care systems. The authors cite the poor track record of Ferguson’s models prior to 2020. In 2006, Ferguson forecasted 150 million deaths around the world during the H5N1 outbreak. In 2009, the UK government, using Ferguson’s model, projected 65000 deaths in Britain in the H1N1 swine flu, as against the eventual deaths of 457. During the mad cow disease crisis in the UK, Ferguson’s model theorized thousands of deaths from the spread of the BSE virus among British sheep. No such outbreak occurred among the sheep.

Not everyone in the US accepted the ‘Wuhan containment model’. Many scientists and epidemiologists desired protection for high-risk individuals alongside relaxed policies for lower-risk groups. Older people and essential workers like grocery clerks, janitors, transportation workers were at high risk. Children and people under 18 were at low risk. In October 2020, 47 experts signed the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), which opposed the prevailing policy consensus. It posited that immunity would arise from the infection’s spread and recovery, or vaccination. Then, the risk to everyone, including the vulnerable, would fall. According to the GBD’s signatories, this is nothing radical but standard public health practice. Sweden had implemented these suggestions months before the GBD came on the scene. Many countries thought Sweden had gone mad while other European nations ridiculed Sweden as a banana republic. Sweden’s Public Health Agency believed NPIs could not prevent the virus from spreading. Older adults were most at risk from the virus. Children under 18 were seldom affected and spread it. Sweden focused on keeping older adults isolated and children in schools and protected working-class people by keeping open businesses, restaurants, etc. By early summer 2020, Swedish teachers were not suffering high risk of severe outcomes relative to other professions in society. Nor had Swedish schoolchildren suffered worse Covid outcomes than schoolchildren in countries that had closed schools. At the end of June 2021, Sweden had overall no excess mortality than its Nordic neighbours. It was the lowest in Europe. Allowing for the uncertainties and controversies about calculating excess mortality, Sweden fared well and was among the best in Europe.

Another issue of importance the book highlights is our societies’ trust in the knowledge and advice of experts. The authors advise caution in accepting wholesale the advice of experts, as happened in the Covid-19 crisis. They cite the contributions of the political scientist Lewis Anthony Dexter from sixty years ago for a check and balance on experts’ advice in setting public policy. Experts, like others, are prone to pathologies like tunnel vision, narrowness of concern and focus, class bias, and heedlessness of collateral costs. There are reasons for these biases. First, experts’ training is often specialist rather than comprehensive and they share assumptions of their fellow professionals rather than those of the public. Second, experts at the elite level are often members of a particular segment of society - the educated professional ‘laptop’ class. Third, experts care a lot about their reputations and their programs and power. This makes them develop a vested interest in the perpetuation of their programs and policies. Last, specialist professions and agencies are hierarchical and bureaucratic. Hence, it gives limited chances for those lower in the hierarchy to question the higher ones. As a remedy, Dexter calls for checks and balances. In the Covid-19 case, experts in other relevant disciplines, such as economics, ethics, sociology, and political science, could have checked public policies. Members of Congress who understand their districts and the concerns of ordinary citizens could have played the balancing role.

I feel the authors’ caution regarding expert knowledge and the criticism of handling dissent during the Covid crisis extends to other fields as well. Climate change, particle physics, and population theories come to mind. The debate on climate change is also intolerant of criticism of the orthodoxy and demonizes critics as ‘deniers’, invoking memories of ‘holocaust deniers’. It puts an excessive amount of faith on computer models that make a lot of assumptions. In particle physics, many younger scientists feel the need to look for alternative explanations beyond the Standard model, but the establishment resists it. Many physicists worry that aesthetic judgment has been driving research in theoretical physics for decades. A new and untested theory gains acceptance because it may be natural, elegant and beautiful, but lacking in experimental validation. Likewise, population theories by experts in the 1960s spread fear in the world about overpopulation. They warned us we would run out of key resources within a couple of decades, based on computer models. As a solution, they encouraged draconian and cruel sterilization policies in the developing countries. Today, demographers predict an empty world by the end of the twenty-first century.

This timely book urges us to remain skeptical, demanding comprehensible answers on social issues and questioning experts’ conclusions. Science can become politicized. Liberal democracies can also drive dissent to the margins. With future crises being inevitable, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee warn us we must not forget the deepest values of liberal democracy. They are open-mindedness, tolerance and respect for evidence, a willingness to entertain uncertainty, and a commitment to tell the whole truth.

I found it a courageous book, questioning the orthodoxy in the prevailing atmosphere of authoritarianism, suppression of dissent, and peddling falsehoods as truth. It is a call for getting back to rigorous scientific enquiry in our public discourse.

[Daniel Mala · Rating 2 out of 5]

I could go 2.5 stars but I'm rounding down because I had hoped for something completely different in this book than a skewed political analysis. (full disclosure: I work in healthcare and have a background in disaster management at the community level.)

So, to start the questions about what were the outcome of interventions in combating the Covid 19 pandemic were great. What were the consequences of the interventions? How could interventions be deployed more clearly? What proved to be effective? What didn't work? What was the cost? Social, economic, emotional and physical costs?

So good questions. Unfortunately, this book sucked at answering them. In the first few pages it admits that it is targeting liberal policy makers and critiquing them more specifically. The authors go on to admit that they are less critical of the counter arguments not because they often lacked merit, but more so be cause the persons making claims felt unheard so they might point out that something likely didn't work, but should have been part of a debate in the attempts at treating a pandemic of uncertain lethality.

So, basically a bad start to the book. But even before that there was another problem. Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee are both professors of political science at Princeton. The reason I came to find out about this is that the way in which these guys were evaluating the epidemiological data was done so poorly that I had to look up the authors backgrounds to see how they could misinterpret so many things. I do think that they have valid points of view in regards to some political aspects, but I think this may have been a much better work if they had assistance from someone with a public health background, an epidemiologist and a sociologist to better decipher the data. I'm also not sure what their political stripes are, but they should have made a more balanced analysis of the political messaging as there were lot of mistakes. And when discussing scientific data, quoting Rachel Madow is just dumb.

Anyway, I don't want to get to far into the weeds, but I'll give a couple examples of where the data was super screwed up. First was in talking about the Non Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs). At the start of the pandemic there where no know pharmaceutical treatments. There is a very specific treatment that works 100% of the time. If a person is never exposed then they won't get the disease. However, that is unlikely. Fortunately, if a person is exposed there is x% that they will get the disease. x is generally low, but this was not known at the start of the pandemic though it was considered highly contagious. So limiting exposure does work and that is actually demonstrative in the data if view correctly. The authors come to the conclusion that there is only a marginal difference between states based on their policies. What they didn't do is look at adoption of masking and distancing to reduce exposure in more densely populated areas. In sort of an ad hoc way you could see that there were more densely populated democratic areas that did a better job with adoption of NPIs then less densely populated republican areas. With this, the infection rates were about the same when they should have been much high in densely populated areas.

My dad who is elderly and a home body living out in a rural area said at the height of the pandemic that he'd been practicing social distancing for the last 30 years. Oddly, I think he understood the basic mechanics of what the goals of social distancing were better than the authors of this book. And there were multiple goals of social distancing and limiting exposure which were known may or may not be achieved.

Anyway, the authors also egregiously use the benefit of hind site when talking about initial policy and they still make some very basic mistakes. We didn't know at the onset if this disease might kill babies at a large degree. Somehow as long as it is majority old people we can throw grandma under the bus and go get a pizza, but that is a different moral quandary. The point was to slow spread, which did work to some degree, especially where there were high adoption rates of NPIs initially in densely populated areas. And thanks to some great new technology we fairly rapidly had reliable testing and vaccines. And where was the high rate adoption of vaccines? Oh, same places as high rate adoption of NPIs. And where where the highest rates of death? Oh, same place where there was low rate adoption of NPIs, likely because they wanted to debate use of Ivermectin, light therapy and injecting bleach. Basically, arguing the debating of false information doesn’t address the problem.

Anyway, there were a lot of social costs and more nuanced ways to deploy NPIs. We should be having that discussion but there is a political divide and one side is unlikely to give up their science and facts to compromise with conspiracy theorists. Oddly, that divide is not between democrats and republicans, but between people that believe in public health and people that don't understand it. It's unfortunate that this book was so lacking as there is need for a more thoughtful debate on this topic. Cheer..

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of the one star reviews here just prove the point of the authors. The reflexive need of educated people to call people who challenge their views hacks and propagandists is extremely tiresome. It's a great example of how educated and smart are not in fact synonyms.

Anyway, this was a pretty good book, although at times I thought it was overly cynical. There was a consistent dig at "the laptop class" which didn't sit right with me, as if people who can work from home shouldn't have done because others weren't able to. I thought they were a bit unforgiving of the impulse to save lives at any cost, though I agree with their point that that impulse alone shouldn't have dictated public policy, as public policy is an act of balancing various needs and can't be the domain of a small group of niche subject matter experts. Still, I think they assumed the worst of people at times and didn't account until the end of the book for the possibility that a lot of people were just panicking and doing their best.

Other aspects of the book were very eye opening. I had always assumed the lab leak to be true, and I was suspicious at the fervor with which a fairly obvious suggestion was labeled as racist and conspiratorial, which doesn't make sense (accidents are definitionally not conspiracies), but I was pretty mind blown at the extent to which the pushing of Proximal Origin was just orchestrated bullshit artistry. It was disappointing to see the degree to which dogma dictated things like the continuation of mass masking and lockdowns. Lockdowns were obviously extremely detrimental after the near term, but masks in general (aside from kids for various reasons) were not a big deal or much of an inconvenience, but they weren't particularly effective over the long term, and it's disturbing to see how data was ignored in order to push a pointless directive even if the thing itself wasn't a big deal. Especially considering how ridiculously toxic and politicized it became. (Even after reading the book I'm still inclined to think they helped more than not)

The issues with elite manufactured consensus mainly on the left, based on highly flawed research practices and in-group peer review systems is also an issue in other areas (i.e. anything related to transgender anything, honest analyses of public policy and statistics related to crime) is increasingly a problem and is a large reason many people no longer trust what they hear from the scientific establishment, and that's a huge loss for society and progress. People are stupid, but they aren't quite as stupid as elites think they are. People pick up on these things and it has a corrosive effect on not only policy, but general political and social discourse.

[N Rizkalla · Rating 5 out of 5]

As usual with Goodreads algorithms, rational reviews of this book will be suppressed while inane reviews by rabid wokes will be promoted!

If you want to read one book about the political mishandling of the COVID epidemic, this is the one. It is balanced, extensively referenced, logical and very rational.

Although the book is focused on the political climate in the US, it has profound lessons for the whole world.

In conclusion, I quote an important paragraph:
“Governments around the world moved like a herd and adopted lockdown policies on a model imported from authoritarian China, encouraged by dire but doubtful predictions by mathematical modelers with track records of overestimating health threats. Public health leaders embraced policies that had long been predicted to be both highly costly and likely ineffective. Politicians largely failed to consider the costs of the school closures and other restrictions”.

[Frank Nemecek · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is long on pontificating, while being short on evidence and reason. I was only able to read about a third of it because I could actually feel my IQ dropping with every page.

[Jennifer Dorsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book very dry and scholarly but it is well worth plowing through for anyone who wants a clear evaluation of how the U.S. handled the COVID-19 pandemic.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some thorough research presented lucidly. Though I'd prefer less in-depth study of data in the middle chapters and more detail on social media platforms behavior during the pandemic. Not enough was said on that topic. also, to present Hayek as a laudatory figure to end your book off with is questionable. Though I do appreciate the stayed and mature tone that only very rarely goes towards anger or polemic. I guess they are trying to walk their talk.

The authors are liberals clearly. So this book is not a real question of any foundational assumptions but a call to be more committed to those assumptions. This ends up usually as challenges to be more critical and that elites need to be more introspective. We need more rationality, more of a 'marketplace of ideas.' Hmmm sure, I don't disagree. But, to me, this is the same thing as the guy that stops a conversation or argument with saying 'I just love that we can disagree. I love that we can have our own opinions and still be friends. That's so important."

[Anastasia Wixson]

Ok so some thoughts:

I liked how the authors highlighted issues with both mayor political parties. I felt that it made the book come off as neutral as opposed to biased. I also really appreciate the amount of research that went into this. It was clear that the authors wanted to support their claims with statistical evidence and that gave them more credibility. My one issue was that at times this felt like it was straying more into the realm of conspiracy theory (ie. The origin of COVID). I would have to do more research to form a full opinion but in general this is one of the most balanced accounts of the pandemic that I have seen.

[Robyn Roscoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short version: In Covid’s Wake presents an excellent overview of the policies and actions in several regions of the world (primarily the US) during the Covid-19 pandemic, evaluating these for lessons learned for future crises. The authors do an excellent job analysing the rationales for the various approaches and the outcomes and impact on the pandemic progress and society more broadly. Part history, part politics, and part social science, the book is an important walkthrough of what happened in the recent past, and providing a cautionary tale for the future.

Full review: In Covid’s Wake began with a much broader premise, to look at political polarization across a range of policy issues. However, as became clear early in the writing, the Covid pandemic had several interesting features and failures on the policy and politics front worthy of its own book. As the authors note in the introduction, many of these issues were not being studied or reported on, and the opportunity and necessity of their study became clear. The result is this well researched and transparent assessment of pandemic policies (primarily in the US, but with some international considerations and comparisons) with the aim of providing lessons for any future pandemic. Not quite a textbook, it is more academic than mainstream non-fiction, but the material is highly accessible, engaging, and well-presented and ‑written.

Starting with the early days of the pandemic, the book follows the decision-making, policies, and mainstream media, looking at who-said-what and who-knew-what-when to reveal the failures of public officials on all levels. While not explicitly a search for blame, there is a healthy amount of finger-pointing and identification of failures of accountability. The primary failures were: treating the virus like an enemy that could be defeated (the war on Covid); presenting things as certainties when there were really considerable variabilities; confusing the different types of risks in various situations; suppressing informed opinion and demonizing experts questioning the narrative; prioritizing control of Covid at the cost of any other population health factors, including well known social determinants of health.

The original premise was to study the relationship between politics and policy: does political polarization influence public policy implementation? The answer is yes, although the data as presented was less compelling on this specific point. While the charts and interpretations show Red/right states were less restrictive than Blue/left states, the resulting Covid outcomes data are not as dramatic as one might expect; there are differences but not stark, and given the many variables (especially timing and clarity of messaging) between jurisdictions, the dots didn’t always connect. Although not explored in great detail, the impact of polarization on vaccination rates and the post vaccine periods are more striking, but still not slam dunks IMHO.

Much more interesting was the detailed presentation of the decision and policy timelines in the US and global communities in the early days of the pandemic, the drama of the “origin story” story, the policies around speech and information, and the politicization of science itself. To discuss all of these would be to completely recapitulate the book, so I’ll focus on the pandemic’s early days.

In first months of 2020, when word of a strange flu was emerging, policy makers turned to two sources for guidance. The first was the various pandemic plans that had been developed, updated, revised, and refreshed over the previous 20+ years. With little exception, these agreed with each other: non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as lockdowns, masks, and physical distancing would do little to prevent the course of a respiratory infection in society; further, the other costs of NPIs, including to social determinants such as mental health, nutrition, education, and equity, were incalculable and likely to be very high.

In other words, the prevailing science prior to Covid recommended minimal and targeted interventions aimed at protecting the most vulnerable (which was not everyone) while allow the rest of the population to continue close to normal. The authors do a great job of tracing this back over the past few decades, and all the way back to the influenza pandemic 100 years ago. The wisdom of these ages acknowledged the reality of a respiratory virus: once it is in the community, and in the absence of an effective vaccine, attempts to control or eliminate the spread are futile and incredibly costly. Focus should be on the vulnerable, and treatments and control interventions should be as low impact as possible.

Those earlier plans also agreed that modelling, while interesting, should be a part of, not a substitute for, policy making. This latter point is most tragic because it was to this source that most governments turned to and then ultimately relied on, ignoring all the previous plans. To “work” models require that most of those uncertain elements like the economic costs and impact on other health dimensions be ignored, and instead focus on the projected impact of interventions along limited and easily measured dimension that provide clear signals, such as Covid deaths (distinction between deaths-with-Covid and deaths-from-Covid is similarly ignored as a further confounder of the analyses). With those limitations and narrow focus, the modelling presented the direst outcomes if anything but the most draconian of policies were implemented.

Governments prioritized the models, and so lockdowns, masks, and distancing became the policies of choice, overriding rather than following the science of the previous decades. Most approaches were more primarily driven by politicians desperate to be seen to be doing something, encouraged by publics demanding action over inaction. This is where the polarization trends are most stark if still somewhat weakly correlated – the more left-leaning the politics of a region, the stricter the NPIs, with little (or even inverse) correlation to better Covid outcomes.

Also interesting in the early months of the pandemic were the diplomatic and strategic interactions with China. Without getting into the details of the origin story, the city of Wuhan is universally recognized as ground zero for Covid. In the early months of 2020, governments and agencies, especially the World Health Organization (WHO), used considerable delicacy in their interactions with the Chinese government to maximize the potential of transparency into how Covid was behaving at the frontline of the outbreak. Early assignments of responsibility were quickly derided as preliminary, simplistic, xenophobic, and counter-productive, with many serious people insisting that the proximity of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (well known for and richly funded by the US for bat coronavirus research and with a reputation for lax safety protocols) was purely coincidental. Indeed, such assertions were deemed disinformation, often leading to the earliest examples of silencing and cancellation, with social media companies implementing deplatforming policies and policing language and messaging in the virtual public squares.

These early investigations involved two phases, the first with exchanges of scientific data and information about the virus and its spread in the population, and the second with a visit to Wuhan by a team from WHO. These elements perhaps most influenced the subsequent redirection of global pandemic responses from calmer minimal and targeted approaches to the strict and long-term imposition of NPIs, including travel restrictions deemed unnecessary just a few weeks previous.

While not stated in the book, there is a reasonable theory that China had a vested interest in convincing the world to adopt at scale the costly and socially damaging approaches of NPIs, especially lockdown and contact tracing. Normalizing such approaches in the West, with the consequent divisions in society and crippling costs, could be very appealing to a hostile power playing a very long game. Again, the authors do not assert or suggest this theory, but it is not a stretch based on the trajectory that followed and the state of geopolitics today.

Hindsight is, of course, more revealing than any perspective in the heat of the moments of those early days. However, the authors discuss how the public had – and has – the right to expect politicians and policy makers, along with the expert class they depend on – to apply more reasonable and sober judgement in difficult times and make even difficult decisions on our behalf. One could argue that decisions to close schools and impose lockdowns were difficult. As presented here, though, those now seem to have been seen as easier by those in power – easier than educating people about the relative risks and benefits of a less restrictive approach. The catchy slogans of the time – “Two weeks to flatten the curve.”, “Not forever, just for now.”, “Do it for the we and not the me.” – purported to follow the science, but were more akin to the marketing of a preferred narrative and intended to create cohesion and obedience among a terrified populace. Like wartime slogans, the purpose was to sustain fear of an unseen enemy and compliance with difficult social strictures, as well as suspicion and derision of those who did not comply (the fringe minority, the deniers, the anti-‘s).

The public personalities involved only exacerbated the situation. From the polarized political environment, preferring to create havoc for the population rather than let an opponent be correct, to the sudden stardom bestowed upon once obscure but no less ambitious public health officials and scientists, several individuals had reputational interests in advancing approaches that were more “stoke the fear” than “follow the science”. That a feature of such individuals – from politicians to newly famous public health officers – is a healthy ego with a generous amount of hubris, the Covid narratives, once set, were highly resistant to change and very hostile to questions or alternative possibilities.

This leads to the other dimensions covered in the book – suppression of freedoms (speech, movement, and belief), coopting of the mainstream media (with the emergence and attempted suppressions of alternatives and social media), the twisting of the origin story and blacklisting of experts – which I won’t go into further, but highly recommend for anyone interested in learning from history.

As the purpose of the book is to study the failures of the Covid experience as a way of preparing society for a future catastrophe, it does a great job of presenting many cautionary tales. The concluding chapter is sadly quite brief, perhaps because the pandemic is still too close to provide sufficient perspective to translate the cautions into lessons or recommendation. The concluding passage is perhaps the most sobering after all the revelations and reflections of the book:

“The Covid crisis, fortunately, was not mankind’s darkest hour. But the losses of the Covid pandemic will be further compounded if the conclusion political and cultural elites draw from it is that their fellow citizens failed them. That conclusion may serve important ego defense needs, but it will ultimately prove to be a much greater threat to our democracy after Covid than the pandemic ever was.”

This book presents knowledge about and insights from Covid as they currently exist with minimal (but not no) bias. As more is revealed in the coming years, including the long-term impacts of NPIs, vaccines, and social reorganization, it will be interesting to return to this book as a snapshot of the current state of knowledge.

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Again, a look at policy failures across the board during the pandemic, and a call for open discussion about those failures from the elites who were at the helm.

[Vincent Waldron · Rating 2 out of 5]

In COVID’s Wake is a book written by two political science professors from Princeton, who attempt to analyze different nations' response to the epidemic and identify practices that worked. I am going to say up front, that the book was frustrating. It felt like a couple of “elites” (I use the term ironically, for these authors throw the same term around a lot in the book) spouting right wing rhetoric that I have read from many different sources over the last five years. They believe that nothing worked until vaccines became available.

I think their underlying message is that we need to consider the economic effects of public health policy, not only the “lives saved.” They are unwilling to quantify this, so I am unclear if they think that 2 percentage point improvement in GDP is worth 500 lives or 50,000, but that is something that they think wasn’t considered when making COVID policies.

 They begin with a brief look at what was known ahead of COVID. Most papers written ahead of COVID discounted the idea that masking, border closures, and lock downs would make much of a difference in affecting the transmission rates of a flu epidemic and since they had huge economic costs, they should probably not be attempted. Of course, it is hard to know if you should apply policies designed for a flu outbreak to a novel virus – while the authors of In COVID’s Wake strongly imply that COVID is only slightly worse than influenza (they routinely bring up the fact that for people under 50 it wasn’t too bad), the reality is that people over 50, COVID was four or five times more lethal than flu. Influenza typically has a mortality rate of around 1 to 2 per thousand people infected and so lock downs don’t make sense for it, but whether policies centered around a less lethal disease make sense for a more lethal one, is debatable. Flu is estimated to cause 20 to 30,000 excess deaths per season, while COVID killed a million people in the US over a two-year period of time.

 They spend a huge amount of time on Sweden, I guess because Sweden is the poster child for a country that didn’t lock down, close schools, and "stayed open." They make the point that at the end of three years, Sweden’s death rate from COVID was similar to the death rate for other Scandinavian countries. I think there are three things to mention here. First, while Sweden didn’t lock down initially, within a few months of COVID hitting the country, Sweden had a number of policies in place asking people to social distance, restricting the sale of alcohol in restaurants, and requesting people to work from home who could. In practice, these acted similar to government policies in other countries. Second, there is no way to demonstrate that Sweden had significantly better economic results than surrounding countries. All of the Nordic economies contracted in 2020 and began to improve in 2021. Third, statistics show worse results for Sweden than other Nordic countries. Sweden to date has had 2,700 deaths per million population while Norway sits at 1,200 and Denmark at 1,500 deaths per million. Finland ended up with 2,100 deaths per million – mostly because they screwed up their vaccine roll out and used Astra Zeneca’s vaccine, which was less effective and had more side effects than other options.

 A lot of paper is devoted to the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). Lee and Macedo believe that the GBD should have been given more press and that the fact that its authors were castigated for it is shameful. In an open society you should allow people to have differing opinions. I think the challenge with GBD was that it claimed something that it probably couldn’t deliver. It posited (rightly) that young people were at low risk of dying from COVID. Therefore, restrictions on them didn’t make sense. Old people who were at high risk of dying from COVID should isolate until everything blew over – whenever that was. The challenge of course, is that while younger individuals may not die from COVID, they can get pretty sick from it, but more importantly, they also provide care for elderly people who can catch it from them and do die from it. The second thing is that the GBD talks about “herd immunity.” As it turns out, herd immunity is a useless concept in terms of COVID, just as it is in terms of influenza or the common cold. People can and do get COVID multiple times – I know people at the time of writing this who have had COVID five times (bad luck for them). Fortunately, after you get COVID a couple of times, your risk from the illness drops considerably, but your immunity to it is not durable as strains shift. The authors of the GBD gave lip service to protecting the elderly while letting young, healthy people carry on life as usual, but it seems like lip service only. In practice, it is hard to say how this could have happened and in point of fact, there is no society where things were open for the young and the elderly were protected.

 The authors of the GBD varied greatly in who they thought were “at risk” from the disease. Many of them seemed to have thought it was isolated to individuals over 65 or 70. The reality is that people over 50 had significantly increased risk of requiring hospitalization, or dying from COVID. Lots of younger individuals had major risk factors, as well. Estimates were that around 170 million Americans were at increased risk for complications of COVID, either due to age or other risk factors.

 A major point that they bring up multiple times is the idea that the “laptop class” was able to sequester themselves away and avoid infections, while the essential workers (many of them in poorer socioeconomic groups) had to continue working. I am not certain what the point here is. If the best policy was to let people do their thing without restriction, then those who went to work like normal, rather than working from home, were the ones in the best situation. If non-medical interventions (masking, social distancing, and school closures) were ineffective, then the laptop class was ridiculous -- doing a bunch of stuff that made no difference, except to make them feel like they were in control of an uncontrollable virus. On the other hand, if that was risky, then the rest of the book falls apart.

 Government policy in the United States was extremely fragmented. The feds did almost nothing. States mostly locked down for the first month and then gradually opened up. Even within states, differences varied greatly -- Florida might have no restrictions, but local municipalities might have very tight restrictions on activities that were allowable. Whether or not schools opened and how quickly they moved to in person learning was mostly a local school board decision. The fact that teachers' unions were opposed to in person learning before vaccines were widely available is disparaged in the book. Public school teachers aren’t paid that well and about a third of them are over 50 – it is understandable that they believe their role was to instruct students, not to risk their lives.

 Whether or not lock downs work is uncertain. In anything, except an authoritarian state, they probably have limited usefulness. Few people were locked up or fined due to violations of COVID policy and the end result is that most people did what they did. I think this is a point that is important. Most people would have avoided a lot of social contact in the spring of 2020, regardless of whether the government told them they had to isolate or not. As the year wore on, this resolve tended to wane and even the most ardent followers of restrictions tended to gather with other people that they believed were safe. The focus on decreased economic activity during 2020 is foolish. The economies of most countries turned down and then bounced back in 2021.

 Most of what individuals experienced had more to do with employer policies and local government restrictions. My employer had employees wear masks for two years. Employees who tested positive were furloughed without pay for five days after a positive COVID test. This had nothing to do with state or federal mandates.

 A huge amount of ink is wasted on the lab leak hypothesis. Much is made of Dr. Fauci’s initial response which basically instructed the scientist who brought it up to get together a group of evolutionary biologists to pursue the question of whether this virus was made or naturally occurring in nature and if there was a smoking gun to refer the question to the FBI. It takes a pretty weird mind to see something nefarious in this response – to me it seems appropriate – but the authors here see Dr. Fauci as covering his tracks and trying to make the scientists prove something “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The authors of this book spend a lot of time trying to prove that there is a smoking gun here, but in my own investigation, I don’t see anything particularly nefarious. There is little evidence that the Wuhan Lab was doing gene editing and the out break really didn’t start with workers at the Lab, but in a completely different part of the city, closer to the live animal market – the two are 12 kilometers apart and it is certainly odd that we don’t see an indication of the epicenter of the outbreak being in the area near the lab, rather than near this market. Regardless, I don’t think we will ever know and the majority of Americans believe in the lab leak hypothesis, so whether Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci tried to shut down dissent from the zoonosis hypothesis, they weren’t successful.

 I don’t have energy to break down everything else in the book. I think these political scientists are above their head when it comes analyzing scientific studies. At the end of the day, how well policy worked had more to do with what the people in a population did than with the policies themselves. Asian countries fared really well – they are used to wearing masks and are willing to consider the social good of others and do what they think is indicated to help, while Americans push back hard on any kind of impingement of their freedom. I do think that they have forgotten how horrific the beginnings of COVID were and how terrible the Delta variant was as well. In our local community, during COVID waves, the local hospital was completely overwhelmed. Wait times in the ER exceeded twenty hours and all non-elective procedures were cancelled. This was not due to state policy, but simply a lack of resources to deal with the number of COVID patients in the hospital and ICU. The big thing that changed that was the availability of vaccines and that really did bring the level of hospitalization from COVID down to manageable levels.

At the conclusion, the authors seem to say that in the future when we have an epidemic, we should not only gather a panel of experts, but we should also gather a panel of “non-expert dissenters” who are people who disagree with the policies of the experts. By listening to the dissenters, we will gain knowledge on how to proceed with policy.

This seems like an odd way to make policy. I have no idea how this would work. Get RFK Jr., Andrew Wakefield, and Dr. Atlas on a committee and have them turn in recommendations along with a separate committee composed of Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins and then draw recommendations out of a hat? Experts aren’t perfect, but someone whose main qualification is dissenting status, seems even less likely to bring helpful recommendations to the table.

I wouldn’t recommend this book unless you want a summation of all of the right-wing conspiracies and discreditation of things like government lock downs, masking, and castigation of Dr. Fauci.

[Robert Steuteville · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Covid's Wake is an outstanding and important book. These two Princeton professors are brutally honest and fair, and they lay bare the dishonesty and failure of our "laptop elite" in setting Covid policy. Macedo and Lee are credible as highly credentialed members of that educated elite and are brilliant at analyzing research. The authors criticize Covid policy with the best intent—to broadly improve society, science, public health, and the vital role of experts in Democracy. Experts suppressed dissenting views, even when they had glaring conflicts of interest, and dominant views were highly uncertain. They ignored the massive economic and social costs of dubious policies, such as extended school closures and masking of children, even when there was strong evidence that these policies did not work at all. They denied billions of people the right to know as much as possible about the origins of the worldwide pandemic. Because dissidents were intimidated and marginalized, we cannot trust the intentions or judgment of the experts. They lied over and over. We need reckoning and accountability. Do not be put off by the 19 percent who rate this one star. These folks are threatened by accountability and/or are so deeply invested in their beliefs that they are blind to their biases. A thousand books will be written on Covid, and a few will stand the test of time. This is one. To understand what we went through, you need to read In Covid's Wake, even though it will make you angry.

[Anna · Rating 1 out of 5]

Like one of the authors, I remain furious about how public schools in my blue state handled COVID. I also agree that as a society, we failed to have constructive conversations about the goals of various actions during COVID and their costs and benefits. This book is, unfortunately, not a useful step towards such conversations. Perhaps someday we will get a book that is.

[Robert Vender · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just says the same thing over and over

[Daniel Ahmed Ortega · Rating 1 out of 5]

Fucking awful, a perfect destillation of ignorance, liberalism, and political science complete lack of both politics and science.

[David Knapp · Rating 5 out of 5]

During the COVID pandemic, I wrote countless posts on social media and then on Medium when I found that social media was not the best platform for my thoughts. These posts respectfully, but forcefully, challenged a lot of the thinking and decision making that I was seeing by politicians, public-health officials (including those at the CDC and WHO), and my fellow citizens.

The topics included my questioning of why the CDC and WHO were abandoning their own pandemic playbooks by demanding massive non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) when they had argued for years that they were not only ineffective during pandemics, but that the associated societal costs were not worth their implementation.

I also wrote about how this draconian approach, which included long government-mandated lockdowns and lengthy school closures, highlighted the fact that politicians and public-health officials were ignoring systems thinking and leadership. I even went so far to criticize their near obsession with “flattening the curve” and “follow the science” – when it was clear to anyone who had studied the pre-pandemic “science” could clearly see that most of the NPIs were sheer folly.

Not surprisingly, I was crucified by most readers. That included numerous friends and family who “canceled” me, in some cases ending life-long connections.

But now I feel vindicated after reading this detailed and thoroughly researched post-mortem of the pandemic by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee. From the jacket description:

“The Covid pandemic quickly led to the greatest mobilization of emergency powers in human history. By early April 2020, half the world’s population—3.9 billion people—were living under quarantine. People were told not to leave their homes; businesses were shuttered, employees laid off, and schools closed for months or even years. The most devastating pandemic in a century and the policies adopted in response to it upended life as we knew it. In this eye-opening book, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee examine our pandemic response and pose some provocative Why did we ignore pre-Covid plans for managing a pandemic? Were the voices of reasonable dissent treated fairly? Did we adequately consider the costs and benefits of different policy options? And, aside from vaccines, did the policies adopted work as intended?

With ‘In Covid’s Wake,’ Macedo and Lee offer the first comprehensive—and candid—political assessment of how our institutions fared during the pandemic. They describe how, influenced by Wuhan’s lockdown, governments departed from their existing pandemic plans. Hard choices were obscured by slogans like ‘follow the science.’ The policies adopted largely benefited the laptop class and left so-called essential workers unprotected; the benefits and harms were distributed unfairly. Extended school closures hit the least-privileged families the hardest. Science became politicized and dissent was driven to the margins. In the next crisis, Macedo and Lee warn, we must not forget the deepest values of liberal tolerance and open-mindedness, respect for evidence and its limits, a willingness to entertain uncertainty, and a commitment to telling the whole truth.”

I realize some will accuse me of confirmation bias, given that the authors support nearly every article I wrote during the pandemic. But their pain-staking research (some chapters contain nearly 150 references, many of which were only obtained under “Freedom of Information” challenges) clearly demonstrate what so many of us not following the herd off the cliff could see during the pandemic. Seriously, I can’t tell you how many times I felt like the frustrated Greek prophetess Cassandra, who could see things no one believed.

Consequently, I believe every American…no, EVERY human should read this well-researched and well-written book. For as Macedo and Lee warn, ignoring the failed policies and decision-making that was rampant during the COVID pandemic will only set us up for another “March of Folly” (to quote the great historian Barbara Tuchman) during the next global pandemic.

[Christopher Mclaughlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m really trying to be kind to this book, because I believe it was written in good faith, but goddamn it gets some important topics very wrong. The authors are at least partially right about the consequences of some of the public health decisions made during the COVID-19 pandemic, but their perspective is very much lacking the full breadth and depth of the conversations and debates which occurred during the pandemic. In reality the dissent was louder than the establishment. The “rebels” were so successful that they now run HHS, the FDA, NIH, CDC, CBER, and if it’s not now clear to the authors that these ambitious men are a danger to the health of all Americans well then they may not be the heroes we need at this moment after all.

The book portrays the Great Barrington Declaration as a serious proposal authored by serious men that were unfairly maligned and the document could have served as a guiding light for our dangerously wrong public health policy. In reality herd immunity is not possible for COVID-19. Even in a fantasy land where it was, no “let it rip” strategies have ever successfully produced herd immunity without enormous costs in lives and health. Every time this idea has been tried, it has either failed outright or caused massive suffering before vaccines or other interventions eventually controlled the disease.

These GBD’s projection (e.g. that herd immunity might be reachable in 3-6 months under “focused protection”) was wildly incorrect in the real world. The appearance of more transmissible or immune-escaping variants (e.g. Delta, Omicron) complicate the idea that one can easily reach herd immunity by natural infection in a few months. The GBD didn’t adequately account for how variants would alter infection dynamics, reinfection risk, or vaccine induced immunity. Also, as vaccine rollout became feasible, herd immunity by infection became much less justifiable or necessary, and letting infection spread became much more harmful. I could go on, these are but a few of the reasons the GBD was regarded as unserious at best and dangerous at worst, but I’m tired of beating the same dead horse. That’s what this book felt like, it repeats all the same scolding narratives we’ve heard again and again, but for all the data it tries to back up its claims with it still misses the point over and over again.

Then there’s the lab leak. The preponderance of evidence is for an animal spillover, this is a fact. Macedo’s book even acknowledges that more recent scientific evidence continues to support animal spillover, including environmental sampling of the Huanan wet market, and that increasing evidence points toward zoonotic origins.

Instead of exploring the evidence, the authors prefer to write about emails supposedly exposing the contradictions between the experts’ public and private statements. I say just ask the experts who track these diseases for a living, there’s not that many of them. Way back in March 2023 three of those experts explained everything I wanted to know about the origins of COVID-19 on Decoding the Gurus. And yes, two of them (Andersen and Woroby) are the very two people of whom Macedo tells his dramatic story of subterfuge. Listen to them in their own words and you be the judge:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...

The actual interview starts around 34 minutes, after introductions and much discussion by the hosts.

There are parts of this book worth reading, but if you are going to accept as fact everything the authors write you will be better off not reading this book at all because it gets so much wrong.

[Zak Schmoll · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book written by two political scientists from Princeton. As the subtitle implies, they believe that specifically the American government, although they do talk a little bit about international issues, failed in terms of responding to the pandemic. Almost immediately, the government discarded all the conventional wisdom about pandemic control before coronavirus and quickly moved to demonize anybody who deviated from the orthodox position. The interesting part about that is not much evidence has come out that perhaps the reality was not as straightforward as the official position.

The authors talk about things like the lab leak theory and the efficacy of nonpharmaceutical interventions, specifically lockdowns and masks. Even talking about these topics was taboo during the pandemic, but the authors argue that at a minimum, the debate should have been had. They contend that because the debate wasn't had and now the results are starting to come out that lab leak theory appears to be at least possible and studies reaffirm what was known before the pandemic (and, ironically, during some of the first days of the pandemic before experts got in line) that nonpharmaceutical interventions like lockdowns and masking might have caused much more psychological harm than benefit, institutional trust decreased.

This leads to one of the most of their most provocative claims that our government's response to the pandemic crippled our commitment to democracy. By restricting discussion and debate, the gatekeepers of acceptability, who had skeletons in their closet need to be held accountable. Both of these authors self identify as liberal Democrats publishing with a press at a liberal university, and almost every source they reference throughout the book along with almost every public figure they discuss are liberal as well, and they still are calling for essentially an investigation into who knew what, and why they did what they did.

At the end of the day, I think most people are going to be upset with this book. There is very little discussion of anyone on the right who had been arguing for some of these theories from the beginning. Some people will be upset about that. As I already mentioned, some people are going to be upset because they challenge the official narrative from their own side on the left, and they certainly do not fit the caricature that some have made of right wing people who challenge pandemic orthodoxy.

I feel like if either of the two groups about read this book with an open mind, you will learn something. At a minimum, it is chock full of references to primary sources, emails that have become public, and statistics about the coronavirus itself. You can debate with the conclusions that the authors draw, and I think that is the point. I also disagreed with things they said, but I still think it's a valuable book if for no other reason than I hope it creates a discussion with other people writing books and trying to figure out what to do if and when another massive illness breaks out.