Professors Stephen Macedo *87 and Frances Lee Assess the Politics of Covid

The Book: In Covid’s Wake (Princeton University Press) is a comprehensive assessment of the political responses to the Covid pandemic. Authors Macedo and Lee question why pre-Covid plans were largely ignored, if dissenting voices were treated with fairness, and if the adopted policies actually worked. They examine how governments, influenced by Wuhan’s lockdown, abandoned existing strategies in global pandemics and how these policies disproportionately harmed essential workers and vulnerable, underprivileged families. Science was suddenly caught up in a web of political polarization. They underline the importance of open-mindedness, democracy, and evidence in future crises.

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The Authors: Stephen Macedo *87 received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. He is currently the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton. Macedo’s current research focuses on the various pressures social justice faces from globalization, but he writes and teaches broadly on political theory, public policy, democracy, and civic education. He has co-authored, edited, or co-edited more than 20 books. Macedo has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2014 and the American Academy of Sciences and Letters since 2024.

Frances E. Lee holds joint appointments in the Department of Politics and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. She is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs. Lee is broadly interested in American politics, national policymaking, and congressional politics. Her political research has appeared in several publications such as the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, and Legislative Studies Quarterly. Lee is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Excerpt

Introduction

The fear that gripped the world in March 2020 is not something we will soon forget.

“Italy coronavirus patients overwhelming Lombardy hospitals” proclaimed the Washington Post on March 12. This “eruption of coronavirus cases” in Italy’s wealthiest region brought it “within inches of a healthcare system collapse, while offering a warning to the rest of the world against waiting too long to control an outbreak.”

“It’s not a wave. It’s a tsunami,” an Italian doctor said as the PBS NewsHour reported that the “death rate” from Covid was a staggering 7%. Doctors Without Borders, an organization that normally provides assistance to developing nations, was deployed, and the Italian society of anesthesiologists advised that it might soon be necessary to adopt ­wartime triage criteria, based on chances of survival, to ration access to intensive care unit beds and ventilators.

A “tidal wave” is what a New York doctor called it on March 30. “The rate of patients who cannot breathe is overwhelming,” said a nurse. “The rate of patients who cannot breathe is overwhelming,” said a nurse. The NBC News headline was “ ‘COVID on My Face,’ Colleagues Fall Ill: NYC Doctors, Nurses Plead for Help.” On YouTube there were shocking videos of body bags being forklifted into a truck outside the Brooklyn Hospital Center in New York. One video shook as the local resident filming sobbed, “This is for real! . . . Y’all take it real serious . . . this is for real!”

Amid the immediate horrors of the pandemic’s first surge ­were inklings of longer-term consequences. Italian hospitals “clung on through three weeks of galloping case growth by delaying surgeries, stopping HIV treatments, converting regular hospital space into Covid-19 units.

Adding to the fear was the tremendous uncertainty. No one could yet gauge the dimensions of the threat. “According to data from China, the death rate in Wuhan was nearly 6% versus 0.7% in other parts of the country.” But it was also apparent that not everyone was equally at risk: “WHO [the World Health ­Organization] reported that in China’s out-break, nearly 22% of ­ people over 80 who caught COVID-19 died. The average age of Italy’s dead is 80.3; only 25.8% of them are women.” It was also clear from the earliest reports that ­people under age 40 were at low risk of severe outcomes, and ­those under age 20 were at extremely low risk.

All the reporting about “death rates” reflected the confusion of ­those times: in the accounts quoted above, “death rate” seems to refer to the fatality rate among known “cases.” ­Because it was often not pos­si­ble to differentiate mild Covid from other respiratory diseases, it was the very sick who ­were likely to be identified as cases. Meanwhile, many more were infected but had minor or no symptoms. This type of se­lection effect — in which the very sick are disproportionately identified as cases and the less sick are overlooked —­ tends to exaggerate estimates of a disease’s lethality. As in previous pandemics, early estimates of Covid mortality were far too high.

The Covid pandemic quickly led to the greatest mobilization of emergency powers in ­human history. By early April 2020, just a few weeks ­after the lockdowns spread from China to Italy and elsewhere, 3.9 billion people —­ half the world’s population —­ were living under some form of quarantine. In many places people were confined to their homes, not allowed to attend religious ­ services, see ­family living outside their house­holds, or even take a solitary walk outdoors. Businesses ­were closed and employees laid off. Millions of ­children ­were not allowed to attend school for months or even years. Borders ­were shut and emergency immigration restrictions imposed. The most devastating pandemic in a century upended virtually every­ one’s lives, and many people died.

Our policy responses ­were also extraordinary and costly, and the benefits and burdens ­were distributed unevenly, exacerbating pre-existing inequalities.

Against Covid, public and private resources were expended on a vast scale. Direct U.S. federal spending alone on Covid relief ­measures totaled more than $5 trillion, nearly a quarter of Amer­i­ca’s gross national product in 2020.

Mobilization against Covid included extraordinary restrictions on free speech. ­Behind the scenes, public officials pressed social media companies to take down or “shadow ban” the accounts and postings of scientists, academics, and social media influencers accused of spreading misinformation and disinformation. In the summer of 2023, a federal judge characterized this effort as the biggest campaign of government censorship in U.S. history.

That the Covid pandemic was a stress test for our public health agencies, our economy, our educational systems, and our personal relationships are facts of which we are all too painfully aware. But it also tested, and is still testing, our commitments to democracy and liberalism, and to the basic norms of science, scholarship, journalism, and politics.

Ours is a book about Covid and politics, in the broadest sense of that latter term. We provide a retrospective account and assessment of Covid policy responses. We consider the staggering extent to which, in the United States, both perceptions and policies ­were ­shaped by partisanship. We examine the quality of deliberation about Covid policy, including when the ideas guiding the pandemic response took hold and the extent to which the costs of those policies ­were considered. We consider the state of scientific discourse on critical issues related to the pandemic. The picture that emerges is often surprising and in many ways depressing.

We use ­these policy choices and the debates and deliberations around them to explore a broader and deeper set of issues concerning how the pursuit of truth fared ­under Covid. We examine the ­performance of what might be thought of as the central truth-­seeking departments of liberal democracy: journalism, science, and universities. Together, along with other institutions and professions, they represent in practice the core commitments of liberalism to the open-­ minded pursuit of the truth based on evidence and reasons subjected to public criticism and debate.

We also consider the ­ performance of ­those government agencies and public officials tasked with representing “the science” to the public in the course of making or recommending policy decisions and guidelines for personal behavior. Did they remain truthful in the conduct of their official responsibilities, as demanded by the basic princi­ples of representative democracy? Or did they sometimes mislead the public or “economize” on the truth? If they did mislead and economize, could this be justified as “noble lies” in the public interest —­ simplifications for the sake of clear public health messaging?

Did we adequately weigh the inevitable trade-­offs among competing values in our policy options, including the “costs” of such decisions as the closures of schools, businesses, and places of worship? Did those policy elites who most ­shaped policy pay adequate attention to the interests of everyone in society, especially the less well-­off?

Were we well served by heavy reliance on experts, and how well did those experts perform? Why were legislatures so often sidelined in favor of executives long ­after the initial weeks of emergency?

Did we live up to the basic norms of liberalism and science, which require openness to criticism? Were voices of reasonable dissent treated fairly by major journalistic ­organizations, scientists and science journals, and universities? Did major media companies report fairly on the full range of reasonable opinions?

What does all this tell us about the health of American democracy? How can we do better?

In Covid’s wake ­there has been a reluctance to ask hard questions, not simply about the choices that were made but about the quality of the debate and deliberation that surrounded them. Given the magnitude of the Covid crisis and the unprecedented nature of governments’

responses to it, ­there have been remarkably few university conferences taking stock of what was done and to what extent ­those responses succeeded or failed. This dearth of reflection is itself a sign that something is wrong.

In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Fails Us, 2025, published by Princeton University Press and reprinted here by permission.

Reviews:

"Provocative."— Sara Talpos, editor at Undark

"Must read. Among other things, a frank discussion of how the Laptop Class championed policies — lockdowns and school closures — that primarily impacted the Have Nots, while the Haves enjoyed remote work, online shopping, booming stock portfolios, and groceries delivered by the poor." — Tyler Austin Harper, assistant professor at Bates College