J Oliver Conroy<\/p>\n\n\n\n
US political scientists\u2019 book argues aggressive Covid policies such as mask mandates were in some cases misguided<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Were conservatives right to question Covid<\/a> lockdowns? Were the liberals who defended them less grounded in science than they believed? And did liberal dismissiveness of the other side come at a cost that Americans will continue to pay for many years?<\/p>\n\n\n\n A new book by two political scientists argues yes to all three questions, making the case <\/strong>that the aggressive policies that the US and other countries adopted to fight Covid \u2013 including school shutdowns, business closures, mask mandates and social distancing \u2013 were in some cases misguided and in many cases deserved more rigorous public debate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In their peer-reviewed book<\/a>, In Covid\u2019s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee argue that public health authorities, the mainstream media, and progressive elites often pushed pandemic measures without weighing their costs and benefits, and ostracized people who expressed good-faith disagreement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPolicy learning seemed to be short-circuited during the pandemic,\u201d Lee said. \u201cIt became so moralized, like: \u2018We\u2019re not interested in looking at how other people are [responding to the pandemic], because only bad people would do it a different way from the way we\u2019re doing\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She and Macedo spoke to the Guardian by video call. The Princeton University<\/a> professors both consider themselves left-leaning, and the book grew out of research Macedo was doing on the ways progressive discourse gets handicapped by a refusal to engage with conservative or outside arguments. \u201cCovid is an amazing case study in groupthink and the effects of partisan bias,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many Covid stances presented as public health consensus were not as grounded in empirical evidence as many Americans may have believed, Macedo and Lee argue. At times, scientific and health authorities acted less like neutral experts and more like<\/a> self-interested actors, engaging in PR efforts to downplay uncertainty, missteps or conflicts of interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a controversial argument. Covid-19 killed more than a million Americans, according<\/a> to US government estimates. The early days of the pandemic left hospitals overwhelmed, morgues overflowing, and scientists scrambling to understand the new disease and how to contain it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, Macedo and Lee say, it is unclear why shutdowns and closures went on so long, particularly in Democratic<\/a> states. The book argues that in the US the pandemic became more politically polarized over time, after, initially, \u201conly modest policy differences between Republican<\/a>– and Democratic-leaning states\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After April 2020, however, red and blue America diverged. Donald Trump<\/a> contributed to that polarization by downplaying<\/a> the severity of the virus. Significant policy differences also emerged. Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, moved to re-open physical schools quickly, which progressives characterized as irresponsible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet in the end there was \u201cno meaningful difference\u201d in Covid mortality rates between Democratic and Republican states in the pre-vaccine period, according to CDC data cited in the book, despite Republican states\u2019 more lenient policies. Macedo and Lee also favorably compare Sweden, which controversially avoided mass lockdowns but ultimately<\/a> had a lower mortality rate than many other European countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Covid is an amazing case study in groupthink and the effects of partisan bias<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The shutdowns had foreseeable and quantifiable costs, they say, many of which we are still paying. Learning loss<\/a> and school absenteeism<\/a> soared. Inflation went through the roof thanks in part to lockdown spending and stimulus payments. Small businesses defaulted; other medical treatments like cancer screenings and mental health care<\/a> suffered; and rates of loneliness and crime<\/a> increased. The economic strain on poor and minority Americans was particularly severe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Covid policies escalated into culture wars, amplifying tensions around other social issues. Teachers\u2019 unions, which are often bastions of Democratic support, painted school re-openings as \u201crooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny\u201d and \u201ca recipe for \u2026 structural racism\u201d, the book notes, despite the fact that minority and poor students were most disadvantaged<\/a> by remote learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These measures also had a literal price. \u201cIn inflation-adjusted terms,\u201d Macedo and Lee write, \u201cthe United States spent more on pandemic aid in 2020 than it spent on the 2009 stimulus package and the New Deal combined\u201d \u2013 or about what the US spent on war production in 1943.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet of the $5tn that the US Congress<\/a> authorized in 2020 and 2021 for Covid expenditure, only about 10% went to direct medical expenses such as hospitals or vaccine distribution, according to the book; most of the spending was on <\/strong>economic relief to people and businesses affected by shutdowns. Ten per cent of that relief was stolen<\/a> by fraud, according to the AP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The pandemic was an emergency with no modern precedent, of course, and hindsight is easy. But In Covid\u2019s Wake tries to take into account what information was known at the time \u2013 including earlier pandemic preparedness studies. Reports by Johns Hopkins<\/a> (2019), the World Health Organization<\/a> (2019), the state of Illinois<\/a> (2014) and the British government<\/a> (2011) had all expressed ambivalence or caution about the kind of quarantine measures that were soon taken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe take a look at the state of the evidence as it was in early 2020,\u201d Lee said. \u201cIt was clear at the time that the evidence was quite unsettled around all of this, and if policymakers had been more honest with the public about these uncertainties, I think they would have maintained public trust better.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n They wanted there to be an answer \u2013 that if we do X and Y, we can prevent this disaster. And so they\u2019re kind of grasping at straws<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a wargaming exercise in October 2019, shortly before the pandemic began, to simulate a deadly coronavirus<\/a> pandemic; the findings<\/a> explicitly urged that \u201c[t]ravel and trade \u2026 be maintained even in the face of a pandemic\u201d. Similarly, a WHO paper in 2019 said that some measures \u2013 such as border closures and contact tracing \u2013 were \u201cnot recommended in any circumstances\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAnd yet we did all of that in short order,\u201d Macedo said, \u201cand without people referring back to these plans.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He and Lee also believe there was a strong element of class bias, with a left-leaning \u201claptop class\u201d that could easily work from home touting anti-Covid measures that were much easier for some Americans to adopt than others. Many relatively affluent Americans became even wealthier<\/a> during the pandemic, in part due to rising housing values.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the same time, the laptop class was only able to socially isolate at home in part because other people risked exposure to provide groceries. Stay-at-home measures were partly intended to protect \u201cessential workers\u201d, but policymakers living in crisis-stricken major metropolitan areas such as New York or Washington DC did not reckon with why social distancing and other measures might be less important in rural parts of the country where Covid rates were lower.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lockdowns were intended to slow Covid\u2019s spread, yet previous pandemic recommendations had suggested they only be used very early in an outbreak and even then do not buy much time, Macedo said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Policymakers and experts often embraced stringent measures for reasons that are more political than medical, Macedo and Lee argue; in a pandemic, authorities are keen to assure anxious publics that they are \u201cin charge\u201d and \u201cdoing something\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In strange contrast, policymakers and journalists in the US and elsewhere seemed to take China as a model, the book argues, despite the fact that China is an authoritarian state and had concealed the scale of the outbreak during the crucial early days of the pandemic. Its regime had obvious incentives to mislead foreign observers, and used draconian quarantine measures such as physically welding people into their homes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When the WHO organized a joint China field mission with the Chinese government, in February 2020, non-Chinese researchers found it difficult to converse with their Chinese counterparts away from government handlers. Yet the WHO\u2019s report<\/a> was \u201ceffusive in its praise\u201d of China\u2019s approach, the book notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMy view is that there was just a great deal of wishful thinking on the part of technocrats of all kinds,\u201d Lee said. \u201cThey wanted there to be an answer \u2013 that if we do X and Y, we can prevent this disaster. And so they\u2019re kind of grasping at straws. The Chinese example gave them hope.\u201d She noted that Covid policymakers might have been better served if there had been people assigned<\/a> to act as devil\u2019s advocates<\/a> in internal deliberations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lee and Macedo are not natural scientists or public health professionals, they emphasize, and their book is about failures in public deliberation over Covid-19, rather than a prescription for <\/strong>managing pandemics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But they do wade into the debate about Covid-19\u2019s origin, arguing that the \u201clab leak\u201d hypothesis \u2013 that Covid-19 accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than spontaneously leaping from animals to humans \u2013 was unfairly dismissed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Wuhan Institute studied coronaviruses similar to the one responsible for Covid-19, had a documented history of safety breaches, was located near the outbreak, and is known to have experimented on viruses using controversial<\/a> \u201cgain-of-function\u201d<\/a> methods funded by the US, which involve mutating pathogens to see what they might look like in a more advanced or dangerous form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If policymakers had been more honest with the public about these uncertainties, I think they would have maintained public trust better<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Perhaps because Trump had fanned racial paranoia by calling Covid-19 the \u201cChina virus<\/a>\u201d and rightwing influencers<\/a> were spreading the notion that it had been deliberately engineered and unleashed on the world by China, many scientists, public health experts and journalists<\/a> reacted by framing<\/a> the idea of a lab leak \u2013 even an accidental one \u2013 as an offensive conspiracy theory. Dr Anthony Fauci and other top public health figures were evasive or in some cases dishonest about the possibility of a lab leak, Macedo and Lee say, as well as the fact that a US non-profit funded by the National Institutes of Health allegedly funded<\/a> gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since then, though, the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have cautiously endorsed<\/a> the lab leak theory, and the discourse around Covid has softened somewhat. The economist Emily Oster sparked immense backlash by arguing<\/a> against school closures in 2020. Now publications such as New York Magazine and the New York Times have acknowledged<\/a> the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis, for example, and there is growing consensus that school closures hurt many children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reception to In Covid\u2019s Wake has been more<\/a> positive<\/a> than Macedo and Lee expected \u2013 perhaps a sign that some of their arguments have penetrated the mainstream, if not that we\u2019ve gotten better as a society at talking about difficult things. \u201cThe reception of the book has been much less controversial [and] contentious than we expected,\u201d Macedo said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet the wounds fester and debates continue. Some readers<\/a> of the New York Times were furious when The Daily, the newspaper\u2019s flagship podcast, recently interviewed them, with subscribers arguing that the episode was not sufficiently critical of their stance. And some coverage of the book has criticized<\/a> it for underplaying the danger of the disease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Macedo and Lee said that a few of their colleagues have expressed concern that their critique could fuel political attacks on science \u2013 a worry that crossed their minds too. \u201cOur response is that the best way to refute criticisms that science and universities have been politicized is to be open to criticism and willing to engage in self-criticism,\u201d Macedo said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe need to make sure these institutions are in the best possible working order to face the challenges ahead. And we think that\u2019s by being honest, not by covering over mistakes or being unwilling to face up to hard questions.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" J Oliver Conroy US political scientists\u2019 book argues aggressive Covid policies such as mask mandates were in some cases misguided Were conservatives right to question Covid lockdowns? Were the liberals who defended […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11645,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[162,288,333,445],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-face-masks","category-lockdown","category-mortality-morbidity","category-policies-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11642"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11644,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11642\/revisions\/11644"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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