March 7, 2025 by Sara Talpos
In March and April of 2020, more than 50,000 people in the United States died from the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Doctors were forced to guess at which treatments might work, while hospitals reported shortages of face masks and other personal protective equipment. On March 19, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, was the first to issue a statewide stay-at-home order. Most other states soon followed suit.
For more than three years, the country remained under a Covid-19 public health emergency. And during this time, the federal government, states, counties, schools, and businesses enacted a wide range of mitigation measures to keep people alive and healthy. But what were the benefits of these efforts, and did they outweigh the costs? The answer is far from clear, according to Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, political scientists at Princeton University.
In their forthcoming book, “In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us,” they argue that many pandemic-era policies were not grounded in evidence and were undertaken without properly weighing their potential to cause harm. Educated elites, in particular, “exercised much power under Covid and made some serious mistakes,” including adopting a partisan mindset, write Macedo and Lee. Now they are asking their fellow academics, as well as journalists, to look back and reflect — “and strive to do better.”
Our interview was conducted over Zoom and edited for length and clarity.
Undark: The seeds for this book were planted in 2022, when one of you, Stephen Macedo, was investigating political polarization and public policy. Can you talk more about how it led you to focus on Covid-19?
Stephen Macedo: My basic thought was that public deliberation was being degraded by extreme polarization, which includes affective polarization, as political scientists call it: mutual loathing on both sides of the political spectrum. We weren’t taking seriously — even as academics, as researchers, as people trying to discover the truth — arguments on the other side. My belief was that the whole truth is not on one side of the political spectrum, even though I, myself, am a Democrat and fairly progressive.
I was going to focus on immigration, abortion, and Covid. But I realized, once I started working on the Covid issue and talking to Frances about it, that it was a big and urgent set of questions in its own right.
UD: Do you think there was anything about your academic background that made you particularly aware of the possible downstream negative effects of lockdowns?
Frances Lee: I’m an empirical social scientist, and one of the things you learn from early on in doing that kind of work is that there’s often a big gap between what government intends to accomplish and what it actually accomplishes. Unanticipated consequences, government failure — it’s just sort of built in.
I anticipated there would be difficulties in achieving the goal: You’re talking about shutting down human society, which had never been attempted before. I didn’t think it was feasible. I’m sitting at home during the early months of the lockdown, and I could hear the people out in the street partying. I’m thinking, this is not working. What happens to our institutions that are operating as if this strategy is working?
UD: Prior to Covid-19, you write, public health researchers and officials were somewhat skeptical of many mitigation measures, including preemptive school closures and mass testing. The concern was that these efforts might not work against a respiratory virus and could cause downstream harms. Yet in March 2020, the World Health Organization’s director-general asserted that “if countries detect, test, treat, isolate, trace, and mobilize their people,” they will be able to suppress the virus.
Based on your research, what was behind this apparent pivot?
SM: We found that the World Health Organization had sent a mission to China in late-January 2020. They spent only a week there. They wrote up their report at the end of that week, having done a sort of light dive into the country, guided by the Chinese. They seemed to have believed everything that the Chinese told them and wrote a report that endorsed China’s strategy fulsomely, without reservation, for the entire world. Simply taking the claims of the Chinese authority on trust was just crazy. A kind of malfeasance.
That report was released in February 2020. China was already well shut down by that point. Italy then adopted that strategy — and it went around the world.
FL: I spent time doing research looking back at what was known about how to prepare for a pandemic before 2020. Immediately, you find this report published in November 2019 by the World Health Organization examining the different measures that one might attempt to control the spread of a respiratory pandemic, and emphasizing, in each case, how poor the evidence was, how much uncertainty there was, and specifically saying that some measures were not recommended under any circumstances: contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry and exit screening, and border closure.
Those measures had been imposed globally, and scientists and policy makers were saying that they were following the science. The question was, what science?
SM: We went back through quite a number of these reports.
UD: In the first year of the pandemic, Democratic- and Republican-leaning states had markedly different policies regarding Covid-19. Yet these policies don’t seem to have influenced death rates, you write. How much uncertainty remains?
SM: We have evidence from around the world, as well as in this 50-state study that Frances did — and that others have done, at The Lancet and elsewhere — showing that there’s a lack of evidence that these measures had measurable effects. Now one ambiguity here is that there is some evidence that they had an effect on infection rates. But there’s no evidence of a significant impact on serious illness and mortality and morbidity.
FL: There have been a few systematic reviews. One from 2022 in The BMJ Open, concludes that the evidence on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions remains insufficient “to be actionable by policy-makers.” So we did all these things, and as we look back, we don’t have evidence that allows us to reject the null of no effect. We can’t say that they didn’t have an effect. We just can’t conclude that there was a systematic benefit.
But we also don’t know the pace at which the virus spread. We don’t even know for sure when it arrived in the U.S. Certainly, by the time lockdowns were imposed, the virus had been in the U.S. for a while.
UD: The book is quite critical of pandemic-era science journalism. Chapter 6 looks at a subgenre in which news outlets surveyed epidemiologists to find out how these experts were modifying their behaviors in light of the pandemic. For example, would they attend a sporting event or a religious service? In your view, what is wrong with this approach?
FL: I mean, first of all, you’re asking the people who are most focused on the spread of disease by nature of their profession. They’re going to have some tunnel vision around that. Their views about the importance of protecting yourself from a respiratory infection are likely to be systematically different from other people. Their values, then, can’t guide the whole of society.
Second, there’s class bias here. These are highly educated people for whom staying home and self-isolating was much more feasible than for the rest of society. So their perspectives on that, and their views on what exactly would be the hardships associated with that, were also biased.
UD: Another way of looking at it, as I’m putting myself in the mind of a science journalist, is that these are experts who understand the consequences of getting an infection, for example.
FL: Yes, but there are tradeoffs.
SM: And there were a lot of value differences around things like sporting events, but also going to church. For many people, not being allowed to attend religious services was a severe cost, which eventually the courts took some account of. But there was not, I think, a fair weighing of what we usually consider to be a fundamental liberty. It was limited, constrained, denied fairly cavalierly.
Certainly, there’s some expertise involved in surveying epidemiologists, but that shouldn’t have been regarded as in any way sufficient — not with respect to shaping the policies.
UD: Working on the book, what did you do to stress test your analyses? For example, did you speak with anyone who signed the John Snow Memorandum, which supported the WHO’s approach?
SM: That’s an interesting question. I would put it this way: We’re surrounded by people that are skeptical of what we’re arguing. We got skeptical pushback at a workshop that we did in April 2023. We’ve both given presentations. I’ve certainly gotten lots of very skeptical pushback from colleagues. We did not contact signers of the John Snow Memorandum, particularly, but we do our work in environments where our position on many of these issues is the minority viewpoint.
FL: I would just add that our approach to doing the research was not to interview. We looked at the public record; we looked at the research record, and we, of course, attended carefully to the whole body of research as best we could reconstruct it. We certainly did not steer to only looking at research that was confirmatory of reason for doubt in the measures. In assessing what the body of evidence tells us, we looked to systematic reviews and metanalyses.
I’m struck by the lack of engagement on this question. Here we are coming up on the 5th anniversary of Covid. “We did all this stuff: Did it work?” I never see that. I think the reason why is because it’s so unclear, which is very uncomfortable to confront.
UD: Unclear, or do you think people assume that they already know the answer to the question?
FL: Well, they may assume that. That may be. But why no interest in taking a look at it?
SM: I think that people find it very uncomfortable to go back. They knew that we did this. They knew that we went along with it. They knew that in many cases, people on the progressive side supported it because it was something that enlightened people were generally in favor of throughout this — the epidemiologists and scientists that you mentioned who were surveyed, most other academics as well.
Elite universities closed down for long periods of time. Others remained open. There’s a huge database there that someone could be looking at. What were the consequences on different university campuses among their populations? How successful were these lockdowns, and what were the costs of places that stayed open? Did they suffer from it? How did the students do?
UD: In November, you both came out in support of Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya to be the next head of the National Institutes of Health. Is this support informed by the research you did for your book?
SM: Yes. He did something very early on, which was very important. We knew the people who were getting seriously ill from the virus. They were coming to emergency rooms or doctors’ offices. But we didn’t know how many people were contracting the virus who didn’t get seriously ill; therefore, we couldn’t get a good fix on just how dangerous it was and to whom.
The Wall Street Journal op-ed that he published, the main point of it was to say: “We need much better evidence. We need a much better survey of the population to figure out how dangerous this is.” He offered some speculation about [the virus] could possibly only lead to 20,000 to 40,000 deaths in the United States. That was offered as a low-end speculative possibility. But the main point was to say, “We need much better evidence.”
We thought that was perfectly valid. He caught a lot of flack for that.
Then the Great Barrington Declaration drew attention to the cost of the lockdowns, suggested that we needed to rethink the assumptions of our policies, and represented an important critical point of view that should have been taken seriously.
FL: I see him as exhibiting integrity as a scientist. He kept on asking questions and objecting, even after it was clear that he was going to pay a huge price for it in terms of his reputation, in terms of his personal relationships.
This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.
