There are lots of stories to tell about the Covid pandemic, but most of them, if you drill down, are about politics. It’s about who made the decisions, who set the priorities, who mattered, who suffered the most, and why?
Frances Lee is a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University and the co-author of a new book called In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. It’s a careful book that treats our response to Covid as a kind of stress test for our political system. Lee and her co-author Stephen Macedo look at all the institutions responsible for truth-seeking — journalism, science, universities — and examine how they performed.
Were they committed to truth and open to criticism? Did they live up to the basic norms of liberalism and science? Were we able to have a reasonable conversation about what was happening — and, if we weren’t, why not?
The book isn’t really an attempt to grade our Covid policies. There are no villains in their story. It’s more about the quality of the debate and deliberation that surrounded those policies. Which is more than just an academic exercise. The conceit of the book is that it’s worth knowing what broke down during our response to Covid because those same things might also break down when the next crisis arrives.
So I invited Lee onto The Gray Area to talk about what she learned and what she thinks are the most important political lessons of the pandemic. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How would you characterize the debate we had in this country about our response to Covid?
Well, it was a fast-moving crisis, and so it’s not surprising in retrospect that the debate was truncated. But it is surprising, as we looked back and did the research for this book, the extent to which the decisions that were made in the early going of the pandemic departed from conventional wisdom about how to handle a pandemic and violated recommendations that had been put on paper in calmer times about how a crisis like this should be handled.
Countries around the world sort of scrapped preexisting pandemic plans in order to follow the example set in Wuhan, and then in Italy, with Italy having the first nationwide lockdown and improvising along the way. There wasn’t a scientific basis for the actions that were taken, in the sense that there was no accumulated body of evidence that these measures would be effective. It was hoped that they would be, but there was a lack of evidence.
If you go back and take a look at a report that was prepared by the World Health Organization in 2019, just months before the pandemic broke out, that document goes through each of the proposed “non-pharmaceutical interventions,” meaning the measures that are taken to keep people apart in the context of an infectious disease pandemic, like masking or social distancing, business closures, school closures.
Across the board, the evidence base is rated as poor quality. Several such measures are recommended not to be used under any circumstances in the context of a respiratory pandemic. Among those were border closures, quarantine of exposed individuals, and testing and contact tracing. And then all those measures were of course employed here in the US and around the world in the context of the Covid pandemic without any kind of reckoning with the reasons why those measures were not recommended in the pre-pandemic planning.
Let’s get into the core of your critique, which is about the decision-making process. You quote a health official in the book, who said, “I simply could not tolerate the notion of having 10 percent, 1 percent, or even 1/10 percent of Americans die a preventable death.” So what’s wrong with saying, as a matter of policy, that the most important thing is to save lives at all costs?
I believe that that’s a quote from Deborah Birx. She was the coordinator of the Coronavirus Task Force. She was not able, she said, to do a cost-benefit analysis where she could calculate how much a life was worth. I mean, that’s a very understandable response and attitude. But you have to remember that as policymakers were faced with the kinds of measures that were being employed to control the spread of a disease, lives are on both sides of the equation.
Let’s begin with one of the first measures taken, which was the shutting down of so-called nonessential health care, and it was defined quite broadly. There were a lot of cancer treatments that were canceled and regarded as nonessential depending on how advanced the cancer was. So you’re trading off future risks to life to preserve health care capacity now.
When you are exacerbating inequalities, when you are depriving people of education that has long-term health effects, you’re trading the present for the future, and these are very difficult choices. The reason why we do cost-benefit analysis is in order to be responsible as policymakers. You can’t only focus on one threat to human beings when we’re facing many different threats.
But you’re also arguing that health officials were intolerant of criticism and skepticism. I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just trying to be as fair as possible to the people in the fire at that time. I can imagine that one reason for that intolerance is that they really were in a tough position. I’m not here to defend any particular people or decisions, but do you have sympathy for the predicament that these people were facing?
Well, I do have sympathy. I also know, and experts should be cognizant of this as well, that they have their limitations. We have our limitations, and there’s always a risk of hubris. They should have acknowledged the possibility of failure, that these measures wouldn’t work as well as they hoped that they would, and that should have been factored into their decision-making.
It’s not just lives versus the economy. It’s also the question of how many lives are you even saving? Are these policies workable for society? There was a lack of evidence based on that. And so you can’t just make policy affecting the whole of a society on a wing and a prayer — and to a great extent that is what they were doing.
An important part of the argument is that there was a disjunction between what health officials like Anthony Fauci and Birx were saying in private and what they were saying in public. Can you give me examples?
Well, in her memoir, Deborah Birx is quite frank, that two weeks to slow the spread was just a pretext and it was just an effort to get Trump on board for initial closures and that, “As soon as those closures were in place,” she says, “we immediately began to look for ways to extend them.”
I think one of the more devastating noble lies that was told during the pandemic was to go out there in spring and summer 2021, even into the fall of 2021, with the vaccine mandates and tell people that if you get vaccinated, you can protect your loved ones from catching the disease from you, that you will become a dead end to the virus. They did not have a scientific basis for making that claim. The vaccine trials had not tested for an outcome on transmission.
We also knew that a systemically administered vaccine, meaning a shot — it’s not a nasal vaccine — doesn’t prevent you from contracting the virus and for it proliferating in your nasal cavity so that you can transmit. That was known. And so you shouldn’t have gone out there and just reassured people that this would work and you’d be able to protect your loved ones. Everybody found out in rather short order, that getting vaccinated for Covid didn’t prevent you from getting Covid and also from transmitting it to others.
If you were in one of those rooms making these decisions about what to tell the public, what would you do if you were faced with a choice where you could either mislead the public with a “noble lie” that you were absolutely convinced would save thousands of lives, but you also knew that if the public were to learn about the lie later, it would shatter trust in scientific institutions for maybe a generation?
This is a very important question. The question I return to is: What is the basis for believing that these measures would work? You have to be able to accept uncertainty. If you’re a scientist, there’s a lot we just don’t know about the world. To a great extent, the more expertise you develop, the more you learn about what we don’t know. And so you have to come to terms with your ignorance as a policymaker, and so you may be wrong about what you think is going to work.
Under those conditions, now you’re trading your future credibility for measures that will be suboptimal and may not have nearly the effectiveness that you hope for. That, I think, is the greater failing to not confront the limits of our knowledge.
So here’s where I think we see failures in other truth-seeking institutions. Where were the academics? Where were the journalists asking hard questions of policymakers during that time? Critical thinking got suspended during the pandemic. And so then government officials, including public health officials, are not being held accountable in the way they should be to justify themselves.
Do you think Covid shattered the delusion that there’s a value-free science, that we can make policy choices like these based on science alone?
One should not think that it is possible for science to settle political questions in the way that politicians talked about the Covid response, that they were just “following the science.” That was never responsible rhetoric. It was never a responsible way to make policy.
You have to come to terms with the reality of politics, which is diverse values and diverse interests, and that when you make policy choices, there are always winners and losers. And you have to see that with clear eyes and you try to make as many winners as possible and you try not to harm people unnecessarily. But you can’t blind yourself to the effects of the choices that you make by pretending like there was no choice at all.
It’s interesting to me that there are no real villains in this story, at least not in the story you tell in the book.
The book Steve and I have written is not a muckraking book. We’re not accusing officials of nefarious motives or corruption. It’s not about the “Plandemic.” It’s more a story of folly than villainy.
What’s the most important takeaway from all this?
The acknowledgement of uncertainty, the willingness to keep learning. And then resist that impulse towards moralized antagonism, dismissing the perspectives of people you disagree with on the other side, politically. Resist that. Listen to them and try to evaluate what they say on the merits. And don’t assume that you have nothing to learn from people you think are bad people.
What we saw in the pandemic was society sort of turning on itself. Democrats blaming Republicans, Republicans blaming Democrats, all these different divides, where the root problem was that we did not have the technology to control or stop this crisis. All we could really do is mitigate it. And acknowledging our frailties as human beings, that’s difficult. It’s much easier and more comfortable just to blame the bad things that are happening on the people you don’t like anyway. We saw an awful lot of that.
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