The Coronavirus Consensus Was Wrong

The 2024 presidential election was a referendum on many things, but not, it seemed, on Covid. Both parties had sound reasons to avoid relitigating the pandemic on the campaign trail. Donald Trump’s erratic performance during the crisis contributed to his loss the last time around, and what is more, many of his most fervent supporters disapproved of an achievement he might otherwise have taken credit for: the rapid rollout of vaccines. For their part, the Democrats were no longer eager to promote their pandemic track record. Various blue-state policies, especially prolonged school closures, later came to be viewed as excessive, even by many within the party.

Most Americans may have wanted to consign Covid to the history books, but a belated reassessment of the politics and policies of that period is nonetheless underway. Trump’s appointment of the vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a hero to many who rejected pandemic-era mandates — to lead Health and Human Services means that ideas once treated as dangerous “misinformation” will now have a prominent advocate in Washington. But the more important development is Trump’s tapping of Johns Hopkins’s Marty Makary and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya to head up the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, respectively. Both have promised to bring a reform agenda to the agencies they now will be overseeing.

RFK is crankish enough to be easily dismissed, but Makary and Bhattacharya offer far more credible challenges to the public-health consensus of recent years. Both are accomplished physicians and researchers and are entering government from appointments at top universities. Due to their views on Covid policies, both were maligned as “fringe” figures (an adjective outgoing NIH director Francis Collins once applied to Bhattacharya). But they are not, and much of what they warned about — the harms of school closures, for one — came to pass.

“Follow the science,” the facile mantra that took hold in 2020, has aged poorly. Eventually, it was admitted that various claims given official scientific imprimatur — including the zoonotic origin of Covid, the utility of standing six feet apart, and the unfailing effectiveness of vaccines — were at best hasty improvisations and half-truths, at worst politically motivated “noble lies.” Yet many of those who questioned these ideas at the time continue to be treated as pariahs. The ascent of figures like Kennedy, Bhattacharya, and Makary into positions of power makes the unsustainability of this position even more acute. A reckoning with the Covid era is happening, whether we like it or not; the question is whether the denizens of our knowledge-producing institutions want to join the conversation or retreat into ivory towers and pretend it’s not happening.

Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee’s In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton University Press), timed to be published for the fifth anniversary of the lockdowns that swept across the world in early 2020, is an exhortation to academics, scientists, and liberals to engage in robust self-examination regarding the Covid years. Macedo and Lee are eminent Princeton scholars of politics. They describe themselves as progressives. Their harsh assessment of how their fellow liberal academics comported themselves during the pandemic is informed by a desire to hold them true to their ostensible values. “The truth-seeking functions of journalism, science, and universities,” they argue, were “undermined by class bias, political polarization, partisan animosity, premature moralization of disagreements, and intolerance of reasonable dissent and contestation.” Achieving “a more honest politics of crisis policy-making,” they say, requires looking back and seeing not only what the expert class got wrong in terms of specific policies, but why it retreated into a dogmatic groupthink from which many have yet to emerge.

The orthodoxy remains on display, for instance, in a recent New York Times article that described appointees like Makary and Bhattacharya as “Covid minimizers.” The implication seemed to be that should another pandemic strike, those in charge will refuse to take the measures necessary to control it. But surely the first question should be whether the public-health measures widely adopted between March of 2020 and May of 2023 were in fact effective in achieving their purported aims. Given the unprecedented nature and scale of the “non-pharmaceutical interventions” — including business and school closures, social and physical distancing, contact tracing, and mask mandates — deployed starting in early 2020, one would expect to see many attempts to assess their efficacy. Unfortunately, academic and scientific institutions have largely declined to explore this question, despite an abundance of available data.

In a Zoom conversation, Macedo and Lee told me how strange they find their fellow academics’ refusal to engage in objective assessment of the Covid policy record. As Macedo remarked, “We went through the biggest global crisis since World War II, and there just hasn’t been a critical thought looking back and assessing what the costs were before it happens again.” The tacit assumption of those who fret over the “Covid minimizers” now in government is that, to use Margaret Thatcher’s phrase, there is no alternative: The course taken in 2020 was the only reasonable pandemic response, and those who claim otherwise are dangerous. Given the ad hoc nature of the measures as well as the reality that their efficacy hasn’t been seriously studied, this is an odd stance.

As Lee and Macedo document, the culture of science, and of the educated class more broadly, was extremely hostile to dissenting ideas during and after the pandemic. In his recent Senate confirmation hearing, Bhattacharya said that his NIH predecessors “oversaw a culture of cover-up, obfuscation, and a lack of tolerance for ideas that differed from theirs.” He experienced this firsthand as one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, the document that led him to be tarred by Collins as a “fringe epidemiologist.” In reality, Macedo and Lee show at length, the proposals in the Declaration were consistent with decades of pandemic-preparedness literature. In contrast, indefinite societywide lockdowns were a “fringe” idea until early 2020. But by later that same year, even raising mild questions about this measure was heretical. Collins and Anthony Fauci also took part in an attempt to suppress discussion of the hypothesis that Covid had leaked from a lab — a theory that various U.S. government agencies later admitted was plausible and worthy of investigation.

The culture of intolerance did not subside even after mandates and lockdowns had come to an end. That much was clear from the fallout of a 2023 Cochrane Library systematic review on the efficacy of face masks. Cochrane, whose database of meta-analyses is widely regarded as the “gold standard” of medical evidence, found there was no conclusive evidence that masking was an effective measure against the spread of respiratory viruses. This shouldn’t have been surprising. The meta-analysis was an update of a study begun in 2006, earlier iterations of which had also found insufficient evidence for mask efficacy against other coronaviruses and influenza. When Cochrane published this conclusion pre-Covid, it raised no eyebrows. But in 2023, it caused an uproar that prompted Cochrane editor-in-chief Karla Soares-Weiser to declare that the “wording” of the study was “open to misinterpretation, for which we apologize.”

The issue wasn’t that the evidence base had changed — there were very few high-quality studies of masking performed during Covid — but that the question had become politicized. Normally, restating the null hypothesis that there is no evidence for a given effect is one of the least controversial things a scientific study can do. But in the course of the pandemic, failing to affirm the efficacy of masks became a political statement. In effect, Soares-Weiser was embarrassed that the study had been cited by conservative pundits and other parties regarded as “anti-science.” Her damage-controlling apology notwithstanding, the language of the study was never updated.

Lee emphasized to me how surprising this sort of episode is from her perspective as a veteran political scientist. In the academic field in which she has made her career, she said, “radical skepticism about causal inference is the prevailing norm” — as is, or should be, the case in the sciences more broadly. Yet when Lee has presented evidence pointing to the weakness of evidence that various non-pharmaceutical interventions reduced Covid spread, she found that norm flipped on its head. For her colleagues, the efficacy of the measures was taken as a given, and challenges to it were vigorously disputed. “Never in my life had I presented null findings and been subjected to this level of skepticism,” she told me.

One would think the denizens of knowledge-producing institutions would see the problem with this. It seems obviously inimical to the values these institutions claim to uphold for a particular conclusion — especially one as modest as “We don’t have sufficient evidence to determine whether masking reduces the circulation of respiratory viruses” — to be regarded as beyond the pale. But that is where we seem to be. One hopes that In Covid’s Wake, whose authors can’t be dismissed as right-wing cranks, will be widely read enough to provoke a reconsideration. But given the moral panic that still attends even mild skepticism about pandemic-era policy, that can’t be taken for granted.

Much of the content of Macedo and Lee’s book will be familiar to people who have paid attention to skeptics like Bhattacharya and Makary, but it may be shocking to readers who haven’t. I recently found myself on a social-media platform attempting to persuade someone of an easy-to-prove fact that Macedo and Lee document in a chapter called “‘Following the Science’ Before Covid”: that almost all the pandemic-preparedness literature published before 2020 explicitly ruled out the sorts of measures — especially indefinite mass quarantine — abruptly adopted in that year. As late as March 2020, many public-health experts who later became fervent supporters of lockdowns warned against emulating the draconian Chinese approach.

The first piece of evidence cited for this drastic reversal was the reported decline in cases in Wuhan after the city was locked down. But this reasoning was highly questionable at best. As Macedo and Lee remark, “there was not a sound basis for proclaiming the virus had been contained in Wuhan.” As we all later had ample occasion to verify, numbers of reported infections rise and fall in waves in the course of a pandemic, so the reported decline in Wuhan didn’t necessarily point to the efficacy of the measures taken there. Moreover, as Macedo and Lee note, the scientific establishment was shockingly credulous about the data furnished by an authoritarian regime that had previously spent months trying to conceal the existence of the virus.

Another source of the expert class’s pivot on lockdowns was the mathematical models published by Imperial College London, which predicted catastrophe if a Wuhan-style approach wasn’t taken. Just as the scientific establishment and the media took the Chinese government’s claims about the efficacy of its containment measures at face value, they mostly treated the Imperial models not as debatable approximations but as a sacred oracle. As Macedo and Lee note, Imperial’s lead modeler, Neil Ferguson, had a long track record of predictions about prior infectious diseases — and the results shouldn’t have inspired confidence. His models, as they say, “had a long-standing tendency to exaggerate threats and alarm the public and policymakers.” (Unsurprisingly, his predictions proved off-base for Covid as well.)

By and large, as Macedo and Lee narrate in detail, the same pattern repeated itself at later phases of the pandemic. Policies initially regarded as probably ineffective and in some cases immoral — from mask and vaccine mandates to prolonged school closures — were repeatedly embraced by the very experts who had once dismissed them. They were then cordoned off as sacred writ, defended against any detractors with a breathtaking inquisitorial fervor that sometimes involved defamation and censorship.

When Georgia ended its lockdown in April 2020, The Atlantic accused the state’s GOP leadership of carrying out “an experiment in human sacrifice.” And yet, as Macedo and Lee document at length in a chapter replete with charts, “the policy differences between Republican and Democratic states in the pre-vaccine period (March 2020 to April 2021) have no evident effect on Covid mortality.” The same holds for countries. Some that undertook harsh lockdowns had dire results, whereas Sweden, denounced for avoiding full-on lockdown, fared better than most of Europe in terms of the crucial measure of excess mortality. (In the United States, mortality did diverge between red and blue states after vaccines were introduced, although it’s unclear whether vaccine mandates were the reason, as opposed to partisan differences in rates of uptake or other factors — again, causal inference is difficult.)

Macedo and Lee are particularly scathing when it comes to universities’ abdication of their responsibilities to enable the airing of dissenting views and to critically assess evidence in an objective manner. Elite universities spent years accumulating data on Covid infection and spread through comprehensive mandatory PCR testing for students and faculty, much of which was published for a time on dashboards. Have any of these institutions, Lee wondered, “done any kind of after-action review to examine what was achieved?” Apparently not.

The paltry evidentiary basis for faith in the Covid-era health regime is surely part of the reason it is still often treated as immune from criticism. To admit we got some things wrong is also to admit that “the science” is far more uncertain than was too often claimed, and that some who were once denounced as dangerous heretics deserved a hearing. The fear, in other words, is that admitting mistakes will further erode the credibility of experts. But that ship has already sailed. By most measures, the authority of knowledge-making institutions has sunk to new lows in recent years, no doubt in part because of the behavior of an expert class that combined arrogant dismissal of dissent with a long series of whiplash-inducing reversals.

“The election,” Macedo told me, “showed progressives there are things out there we’ve been wrong about.” There was widespread denial about the public discontent over, for instance, inflation and immigration, which led to a refusal to acknowledge a major electoral weakness. But regardless of the partisan groupthink one finds in academic settings, economists continued to debate the severity of inflation and the costs and benefits of large influxes of migrants during the Biden years. To a remarkable extent, this was not true when it came to public-health policy in the Covid era. The unwarranted certitudes of that time continue to stifle the possibility of open debate. Now that dissenting views have a platform in the heart of the U.S. government, it is well past time for academics to start listening.