On the fifth anniversary of the COVID outbreak, a new book examines where American science — and politics — went wrong.

By David Scharfenberg Globe Staff,Updated March 9, 2025, 3:00 a.m.

You probably don’t remember the lockdowns all that fondly.

But if you’re like a lot of Americans on this fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, you at least understand why they were put in place.

The virus felt so frightening back then. So unexpected.

And if public health officials made some mistakes — you might be convinced, by this point, that they kept schools closed too long — you’re willing to cut them some slack.

People like infectious disease chief Anthony Fauci were doing the best they could with the information they had. They were following the science. And we got to the other side in better shape than we might have.

But if there’s something comforting in this story — even a little triumphant — there’s just one problem: It’s almost completely wrong.

That’s according to Princeton University political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee’s scathing new book, “In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us.”

In their telling, Fauci and his ilk didn’t follow the science, they betrayed it — pressing for lockdowns even though experts had warned for years that there was little evidence to support such a drastic intervention.

When they ran into dissent, they squelched it.

And the people who should have held them to account — the academics and journalists charged with speaking truth to power — too often fell down on the job.

The costs of the shutdowns were enormous: trillions of dollars in deficit spending to stave off economic ruin; massive learning loss, concentrated among the least advantaged children; the special pain of leaving loved ones to die alone in dreary nursing homes and emergency rooms; a further cleaving of our already divided society.

And despite all the sacrifice, the United States still had a much higher death rate than other wealthy nations.

At a critical moment, American science abandoned its most fundamental tenets. It forsook inquiry, it muzzled debate.

And American democracy did no better. Reasonable skepticism was cast as tinfoil-hat conspiracy mongering. Twitter and Facebook and YouTube were purged of heresy.

For Macedo and Lee, the story is clear: The pandemic was a monumental test of the American system — and the system failed.

That pronouncement feels a little overwrought in parts of the book. Though the authors promise in their introduction to be careful about criticizing what happened in the past based on what is known in the present, they don’t always live up to their pledge.

But much of “In Covid’s Wake” feels convincing — in no small part because Macedo and Lee are of the liberal, data-driven tribe they critique.

At the height of the pandemic, Macedo bleached his groceries like a good Blue Stater, shot dirty looks at strangers who crossed his six-foot perimeter, and took off his clothes after he’d been out in the world — dropping them straight into the washing machine before venturing into the house in a fresh outfit.

What a strange, isolating time that was.

How did we get there?

Origins of a failure

While vacationing at his ranch in the summer of 2005, President George W. Bush read an advance copy of a new book called “The Great Influenza: The True Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.”

It told the harrowing — and by then, largely forgotten — tale of the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed some 50 million to 100 million people worldwide and left about 670,000 dead in the United States.

Author John Barry focused on the American story — and it was the story of a nation unprepared. After the virus swept through Philadelphia, bodies lay in the streets for days.

When Bush returned to the White House, he demanded a full-fledged strategy for the next pandemic.

Speeding up vaccine development and isolating the sick wouldn’t do. It would have to be a whole-of-society approach.

Borders, commerce, everything.

The key figures on the White House task force charged with developing a plan were Dr. Richard Hatchett, an oncologist-turned-presidential adviser, and Dr. Carter Mecher, a blunt-spoken executive at the Veterans Administration who’d developed a reputation as an out-of-the-box thinker.

In the early stages of their deliberations, someone put Mecher in touch with Bob Glass, a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.

Glass had recently helped his teenage daughter with a science project that examined how infection spreads through social networks. And he’d homed in on a strategy that went back centuries but seemed to be getting little attention in contemporary epidemiology: social distancing.

Mecher was intrigued.

And when he started messing around with Glass’s model of disease spread, he alighted on what looked like the single most important strategy for suppressing flu-like viruses: “Holy shit!” he said, in his eureka moment. “Nothing big happens until you close the schools.”

The broader strategic insight these Bush-era planners had landed on: The country didn’t have to wait around for a vaccine when a pandemic struck. It could separate kids from their classmates and workers from their colleagues — and suppress the virus until the pharmaceutical companies hit paydirt.

The Bush administration wove the idea into a series of lengthy planning documents. And there it sat — until calamity arrived.

Science upended

Here’s the thing, though.

As Macedo and Lee lay out in “In Covid’s Wake,” the Bush team was hardly the only group of scientists to think about pandemic management in the run-up to the COVID outbreak.

And the Bush group’s faith in so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions, or NPIs — the school closures and quarantines that were supposed to contain the virus until a vaccine could be developed — left them very much in the minority.

One of the most prominent scientists to clap back was Dr. D.A. Henderson, a giant in the field, known for leading the global effort to eradicate smallpox.

Lockdowns, he argued, would simply never work.

If schools were closed, teenagers would still find ways to hang out. There would be plenty of close contact at prisons and in nursing homes. Restaurant and grocery store workers would keep doing their jobs in person.

And the social and economic dislocations could be devastating.

Lots of other experts echoed that view. A Johns Hopkins University report from September 2019 pointed to research on the limited effectiveness of travel restrictions and quarantines. And it warned that governments sometimes resort to NPIs for the wrong reasons — to “abate fear” or appear to be doing something.

Just two months before the World Health Organization declared COVID a public health emergency, it issued a report on NPIs that designated several “not recommended in any circumstances.” Among them: contact tracing (there wasn’t strong evidence the practice worked and it gobbled up a lot of resources) and border closure (it might delay infection, but wouldn’t stop it).

School closures, the WHO added, might have some moderate effect, but the cost would be significant, having “a major impact on the safety, health and nutrition of children in lower income families.”

This is what the best science said when the pandemic arrived. And elite opinion largely reflected that consensus in the early going.

On March 2, 2020, hundreds of public health scholars posted an open letter cautioning that measures like regional lockdowns and travel bans are “difficult to implement, can undermine public trust,” and “have large societal costs.”

Liberal television host Rachel Maddow, appearing on “The Tonight Show” the next day, insisted that “we don’t have to do anything outrageous ... we don’t need to change our lives drastically at an individual level.” Healthy people wearing masks, she said, was “probably not that rational.”

This view didn’t hold for long, though.

Amid mounting panic over the virus, a desperate West was taking a growing interest in China’s big, authoritarian swipe at containment. The government was imposing extreme social distancing — going so far, in some cases, as to weld apartment doors shut.

At first blush, it seemed to be working.

The World Health Organization organized a hasty visit. And just months after issuing its pre-pandemic report warning against just the sort of strategies that China was imposing, the group heaped praise on Beijing for “perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history.”

NPIs were suddenly in fashion — and in Washington, that meant pulling the Bush-era strategy off the shelf.

The plan’s heretofore obscure authors had a star turn in the press. Think tanks put forth their own, more intense visions for lockdown. And soon, it felt like the only way forward.

In one particularly dispiriting column, Ezra Klein, then with Vox and now with The New York Times, concluded that there “was no good alternative to shutting down life as we know it.”

Difficult decisions

For Macedo and Lee, the dereliction of duty is clear.

The best science called for a less restrictive approach — and the elites ignored it.

But as the authors themselves acknowledge, in parts of their book, the best science could be quite equivocal about how public health officials should handle a pandemic.

While the WHO’s pre-pandemic study recommended against contact tracing, it did reference one study that suggested the practice could be effective when bundled with quarantine, isolation, and antiviral drugs. Tracing could also be useful, the organization added, in quickly identifying newly infected people and getting them into treatment.

The study also suggested school closures “during a severe epidemic or pandemic” and declared that workplace closures could be considered “in extraordinarily severe pandemics”; the COVID pandemic, if nothing else, was extraordinary.

And while the WHO acknowledged that the evidence for masking’s effectiveness was scant, the group still “conditionally recommended” it in severe pandemics — explaining that there is “mechanistic plausibility for the potential effectiveness of this measure.”

While the science may have pointed, on balance, toward a more hands-off approach — humble about health authorities’ capacity to suppress a fast-moving virus and mindful of all that’s lost in a lockdown — there was some genuine ambiguity in the literature. And figures like Fauci — tasked with leading a frightened nation through a deadly pandemic — may deserve a bit more grace for latching onto NPIs than Macedo and Lee are willing to offer.

But if early, aggressive moves to contain the pandemic can be forgiven, it’s harder to excuse officials who clung to the shutdowns even amid mounting evidence that they were wrongheaded.

School closures are the most important case.

There was broad agreement, at the start, about the need to shift to remote learning. But the rationale for keeping millions of kids at home started to fall apart pretty quickly.

Within weeks, it was clear that children were much less likely to grow seriously ill or die than adults. And schools didn’t seem to be the super-spreaders that many had feared. Countries like Norway and Denmark that reopened schools for younger children — and made reasonable efforts to sanitize classrooms and put some distance between kids — didn’t see spikes in COVID cases.

By June, the American Academy of Pediatrics, an organization with a reputation for caution, was recommending that schools reopen — emphasizing the enormous costs of “social isolation” and bemoaning the closures’ “substantial impact on food security and physical activity for children and families.”

The case for reopening wasn’t ironclad at this point.

But it’s fair to say that Fauci, knowing what he knew at the time, was wrong to argue that many schools would have to remain shuttered in the fall of 2020 (later, he’d voice regret over how long remote learning lingered).

And the local officials who kept schools closed were wrong, too.

Those officials were highly concentrated in blue states. And no surprise. By that point, the pandemic had become thoroughly politicized.

The liberal, “follow-the-science” crowd was certain it was right.

And it had little tolerance for dissent.

Stifling the opposition

The sharpest challenge to liberal orthodoxy came in October 2020, when a group of academics from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford universities published a document they called the Great Barrington Declaration.

It highlighted “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts” of the lockdowns.

And it called for a pursuit of “herd immunity” instead: Large swaths of the population should be allowed to return to normal life and build up natural defenses to the virus through infection, while the old and infirm would be shielded from the disease through a system of “focused protection.”

The idea, as Macedo and Lee argue, was hardly out of bounds. Before the pandemic, herd immunity was widely accepted as a broad defense against infection. And many public health experts had invoked the concept in the early months of COVID’s spread.

But the guardians of the shutdown strategy couldn’t abide it.

Email records show that a few days after the declaration was published, Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, reached out to Fauci and other public health officials urging “a quick and devastating published take down of its premises.”

“I am pasting in below a piece from Wired that debunks this theory,” Fauci replied.

“Excellent,” Collins wrote. And soon, he was publicly declaring herd immunity a “fringe component of epidemiology,” a “dangerous” idea designed to justify people “doing whatever they damn well please.”

Other establishment figures piled on.

A Yale public health specialist called herd immunity “not a plan” but a “massacre.” And at one point, YouTube pulled down a video of a conversation between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and two of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.

This is not to say there weren’t legitimate critiques of the document. There was reason to doubt, for instance, that the vulnerable could truly be walled off from infection through “focused protection.”

But banishing the declaration from the realm of acceptable debate was a pretty stunning betrayal of scientific and democratic ideals.

The next crisis

Of course, some who broke with the “follow the science” crowd were offering up pure nonsense.

President Trump famously predicted that the virus would “miraculously” disappear, and later suggested household disinfectant, ingested or injected, might be an appropriate remedy.

The trouble was that too many liberals lumped these absurdities together with legitimate skepticism.

To question school closures was to be a “COVID denier.” To argue that younger, low-risk populations should be allowed to resume their normal lives was to invite a “massacre.”

And to suggest that the virus, which originated in Wuhan, China, might have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology — a sophisticated lab specializing in coronaviruses — was to traffic in conspiracy theories.

This sort of rhetoric not only clouded judgment on public policy, it also did enormous damage to public trust.

As Macedo and Lee argue, a more responsible politics would acknowledge scientific uncertainty. It would be clear about what the experts know and don’t know. It wouldn’t simply tolerate dissent, it would welcome it.

Even institutionalize it.

In April 2020, Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and former US assistant secretary of defense, took a page from the intelligence community playbook and suggested the creation of a “Team B” of experts “that is prepared to begin by questioning everything.”

That would mean casting a critical eye on the scientific findings guiding policy. But it also would mean looking beyond science to experts from other domains. If “as the saying goes, war is too important to just be left to the generals,” he added, then the same should hold for “the current declared ‘war on coronavirus.’”

Early on, Allison was putting his finger on a central problem.

It’s not just that experts can be wrong. It’s that they can be blinded by their expertise — unable to see a problem through any other lens.

That’s what happened with COVID.

Public health professionals — and the liberal politicians and media who turned to them — focused too much on epidemiology and not enough on the economy, education, and the need for human connection.

“Science,” as Macedo and Lee write, “cannot tell us what to do.” It can only advise us. We have to balance values. Manage tradeoffs.

And as we face the next great crisis — pandemic, climate, democracy — we’d be wise to heed the lessons of the last one.

https://archive.is/GFxWf#selection-1391.0-2335.119

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5692477&forum_id=2:#48736806)

this wonderful little place was really important in helping keep me sane during 2020

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5692477&forum_id=2:#48737228)

credited. and that's actually a concise statement of what the scientific mindset ideally is. but that's not how the Fauci-Collins world responded.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5692477&forum_id=2:#48737584)

Basically only really old people on the ship got sick and died. Everyone else was fine

I believe that was late Feb early March. At that point I was confident it was virusfraud

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5692477&forum_id=2:#48737497)

and then very shortly afterwards the papers and accompanying articles by those Stanford guys (John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya and a couple of others) showing that a LOT more people were infected than we realized and so the death rate was 1/10th of what everyone was claiming i.e. same as a nasty flu and that only for the old and the sick

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5692477&forum_id=2:#48737510)

remember when Trump said correctly that the WHO's 3.4% death rate was nuts and that it'll be under 1% and libs and MSM went crazy?

basically ever thing he says here was spot on and yet the Fauci's and MSM shat all over Trump for this.

https://x.com/atrupar/status/1235409660104015873

also this:

https://theweek.com/speedreads/900087/trump-hunch-covid19-death-rate-way-under-1-percent-calls-whos-34-percent-false-number

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5692477&forum_id=2:#48737570)

libs have shit for brains

libs have scum for brains

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5692477&forum_id=2:#48737256)

https://images.app.goo.gl/HW1W6MTjH278JK127

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5692477&forum_id=2:#48737408)

https://x.com/DeAngelisCorey/status/1787486168637952038/photo/1

https://x.com/DeAngelisCorey/status/1787486168637952038

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5692477&forum_id=2:#48737712)

‘The lockdowns were never really effective’: New research shows COVID stay-at-home orders did more harm than good

Five years ago, lockdown critics faced death threats and censorship. Now they are gaining influence amid new evidence on the harmful health effects of prolonged isolation.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5692477&forum_id=2:#48738488)

You can't title an article "The Case Against Fauci" and not bring up that there's an email, documented paper trail showing he knew the virus came from a lab but coordinated science papers to journals to show it couldn't be manmade (something he knew was false).

It's 10x worse than anything anyone at Enron did yet the media is totally uninterested in him coordinating the publishing of lies in premier science journals.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5692477&forum_id=2:#48738665)