Measures like stay-at-home orders, school closures, and mask mandates, which defined life during the pandemic, are all too familiar to every American. On March 11, Politics department professors Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee published their new book, “In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us,” a two-year-long project that examines the legitimacy and ethical concerns of these COVID-19 policies with a critical eye.
Shortly after the publication, The Daily Princetonian spoke with Macedo and Lee.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
The Daily Princetonian: What first inspired you to write this book?
Stephen Macedo: I had started working on a project slightly broader on various issues, including immigration and abortion, where I thought that progressives weren’t paying enough attention to arguments coming from the other side of the political spectrum. When I started looking into COVID, I immediately realized that there was more than enough there. I began talking to Frances and doing some research on it. We co-organized a conference in April 2023, inviting people who had been thinking about COVID policies from the scientific, political, and ethical lenses. After that, Frances decided to join, so we’ve been collaborating since.
DP: In the Charles E. Test, M.D. ’37 Distinguished Lectures Series before spring break, you both shared that non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), including mask mandates or the different closures, summed up the government’s main approaches. Were these measures effective?
Frances Lee: Studies have shown that peoples’ likelihood of getting COVID was not affected at all by school or border closures. One has to keep in mind that NPIs have never been tried on this scale, so it was just a theory based on untested mathematical models, bearing the trace of a very oversimplified view of society. Humans have to cooperate just to live and much of that cooperation is not affected by NPIs. For example, the elderly and people who have to interact with the healthcare sector regularly experienced high mortality rates during the pandemic because they still had to go to hospitals and centers.
SM: We do think there is a class bias here. As Frances was saying, we need to think about which populations are being protected by these NPIs and which ones are not. People in the nursing homes are not very empowered, but members of the laptop class who work from home and have things delivered to them are.
DP: Did the government foresee these complications?
SM: We think so. Pre-COVID plans all warned that NPIs would be unsuccessful and costly, but they also emphasized that political leaders would have an incentive to use them because they want to show they’re in control. A U.K. sociologist, Robert Dingwall, who was on the advisory committee at Johns Hopkins, said in retrospect, “We had the right plan; we just didn’t follow it.”
DP: During the onset of the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) lauded the Chinese zero-COVID policy. Do you think that had an impact on other countries’ policies?
SM: Absolutely. When the WHO sent a team to Wuhan, they came back and fulsomely endorsed the Chinese strategy without qualification. Reading it is like reading an award citation. And then, Italy locked down and showed that a Western country could do it and that the population was willing to put up with lockdowns and comply.
FL: As far as I could tell, civil liberties did not go on the radar screen of the people who made COVID policy. We found it interesting that there were news reports in the West about Chinese citizens being bolted or welded into their apartments as early as February, but the WHO never mentioned it in their initial report.
DP: Based on your research, then, what did you find to be the cause of this silence?
SM: In April [2020], an elite consensus seemed to form. There was a national plan put out by the Safras Center for Ethics at Harvard, which called for vital unity among governments, universities, social media companies, and journalists. COVID was a war, and there needed to be unity as in wartime. Around that time, dissent seemed to wane, and social media companies started to remove postings. A professor from Stanford, John Ioannidis, who led seroprevalence studies about the level of COVID-19 pathogens in the population, was not only vehemently criticized, but at one point, he and his family were even subjected to death threats.
DP: Do you think there is a link between suppressing dissent and suppressing misinformation, especially on social media?
FL: For the concept of misinformation, people’s exhibit A is anti-vaccine beliefs because it is very clear-cut, but the example gets applied to a lot more questionable topics, like whether or not cloth masks slow the spread of the disease or whether lockdowns work.
SM: We cited an American Medical Association brief about the duty of public officials to punish doctors for spreading health-related misinformation, such as the statement that having COVID-19 can lead to a stronger immune response against future encounters with the virus. Their own specification for misinformation is itself misinformation.
DP: What about universities? In the lecture, you called all of these institutions “truth-seeking,” so what was the obligation of the academic world?
SM: When it comes to universities like Princeton, I think there is a failure to enact a positive duty, a failure to not be more curious about these things, and a failure to not pursue the perception questions we’ve been talking about. Law schools did not hold conferences about changing social media policies. The ACLU never filed a brief about First Amendment concerns. Perhaps it’s because the answers would be uncomfortable. Perhaps the answer would run against the grain of their partisan sympathies. Our view is that the health of these institutions will be improved by being honest and self-critical about shortcomings to confront the challenge of the future. We can’t cover up our mistakes. We should be open and honest about them and seek to do better. That’s part of the reckoning that we’re trying to promote — just to tell the story and to open up these questions.
Elaine Gao is a contributing Data and Research writer for the ‘Prince.’
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com
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