Pandemic Exposes a Deeper Sickness as Covid Lays Bare Authoritarian Impulses in Science, Academia, and Journalism

The worst public health crisis in 100 years became arguably the worst public policy failure in American history because of social pathologies that the pathogen triggered. The coronavirus pandemic is over. What it exposed lingers: intellectual malpractice and authoritarian impulses infecting governmental, scientific, academic, and journalistic institutions.This is unsparingly documented by two Princeton social scientists, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, in “In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us.” The most comprehensive and aggressive mobilization of emergency powers in American history, wielded with scant regard for collateral consequences, exacerbated inequalities, included “extraordinary restrictions on free speech,” and constituted a “stress test” that “the central truth-seeking departments of liberal democracy: journalism, science, and universities” frequently flunked. Mr. Macedo and Ms. Lee say the “moralization of disagreements” stifled dissent, employing censorship and shaming.Incantations to “follow the science” obscured this: Science cannot “tell us what to do” because gargantuan government interventions in society involve contestable judgments across the range of human values. And large uncertainties, requiring difficult choices demanding cost-benefit analyses that were neglected during the pandemic.The authors, self-described as “on the progressive side,” detail how “the class biases of pandemic restrictions” favored the “laptop class” of knowledge workers and others able to work remotely. “Essential workers,” about one-third of the workforce, largely working class and disproportionately minorities, were expected to carry on. There was no historical precedent for success in what was attempted: using non-pharmaceutical interventions — lockdowns, social distancing, masking, etc. — to stifle a pandemic. And there was, Mr. Macedo and Ms. Lee report, “no relationship between the stringency of state” restrictions and Covid mortality rates.The biomedical establishment, academia, and the remarkably unquestioning press reacted ferociously — politically, not scientifically — against the theory that the pandemic’s origin was a leak from a Chinese lab doing “gain of function” research that engineers especially transmissible and/or virulent viruses. This origin is now widely deemed plausible, even probable. The authors note that the leading U.S. infectious-disease specialist, Anthony S. Fauci, initiated the writing of a paper, more political than scientific, asserting the virus’s natural origin, then cited the paper against the lab-leak hypothesis. He repeatedly and clearly misled Congress with emphatic denials of his involvement in funding gain-of-function research.The three eminent epidemiologists who wrote the October 2020 Great Barrington Declaration — proposing pandemic mitigations focused on the elderly and persons with comorbidities — were disparaged by the head of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, as “fringe” figures. This adjective conveys a presumption against departures from groupthink. Galileo was a fringe figure.In September 2020, about 100 Stanford public health professors denounced a colleague — author of five books on health care policy — whose sin was arguing that policy should “minimize all harms,” not simply to stop the coronavirus “at all costs.” Two months later, Stanford’s faculty senate voted overwhelmingly to censure him. Censure, not refute. Those declaring the scientific consensus unquestionable included two professors of comparative literature and a professor of theater and performance studies.Despite the fact, quickly known, that Covid largely spared the young, the heads of the major teachers unions called for prolonged school closures, during which their members were paid. Even after the ineffectiveness of masking was disclosed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said children as young as 2 should wear them all day.In the ever-overwrought Atlantic magazine, Georgia’s decision to end lockdowns was called an “experiment in human sacrifice.” Yet cumulatively, the consequences of unfocused measures taken against the coronavirus — from cancer screenings missed because of lockdowns, to a generation’s learning loss and a legacy of chronic absenteeism from schools, to myopia in children from excessive screen time, to accelerated dementia among the isolated elderly — were worse than the disease, whose infections were mostly (more than 98 percent) mild. The costs of hysteria, partly driven by “noble lies” to panic the public into compliance with authoritarian measures, will, Mr. Macedo and Mr. Lee say, affect “the health, wellbeing, and longevity of the whole population years into the future.”“The ‘pandemic,’” Mr. Macedo and Ms. Lee write, “was routinely said to have closed schools, businesses, theaters, travel, and so on, rather than government officials’ decisions.” The authors have produced the most dismaying dissection of American policymaking since David Halberstam’s Vietnam War policy autopsy, “The Best and the Brightest.”Their book is more dismaying, but also exhilarating. Vietnam revealed the insularity and hubris of a small coterie of foreign policy shapers. Mr. Macedo and Ms. Lee identify much broader and deeper cultural sicknesses. Yet their meticulous depictions and plausible explanations of the myriad institutional failures demonstrate social science at its finest.The Washington Post

Pandemic Exposes a Deeper Sickness as Covid Lays Bare Authoritarian Impulses in Science, Academia, and Journalism

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