Rick McGinnis:

Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements

With the recent announcement that government employees must return to their work in office, the physical remnants of the COVID-19 lockdowns are mostly gone. Do you remember where your vaccination documents are? The arrows on the floors of stores telling us which direction to walk are gone, as are the stickers on subway platforms reminding us to socially distance, but the corner store at the bottom of my street still has a plexiglass wall around the cash register. And there are the people still wearing masks outside, on buses and even in parks; they probably will for the rest of their lives.

Nobody can deny that lasting changes happened because of COVID and the lockdowns; lives were lost along with jobs. Governments increased their debt load trying to compensate for the effects of emergency measures they put in place. But there were less quantifiable changes, and those are the subject of In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, a new book by Princeton academics Stephen Macedo and Francis Lee.

Students and schools were among the most affected by what varied from many months to almost two years of stay-at-home orders and distance learning, and that will be the subject of another column. But Macedo and Lee are more concerned with the effect of lockdowns on civic life and politics, before we move on and try to bury our memory of an experience that was inconvenient at best, catastrophic at worst.

They write that since the pandemic ended “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 the deliberations that surrounded them.”

“This dearth of reflection is itself a sign that something is wrong.”

They begin the story by noting that pandemic planning before COVID-19 broke out in late 2019 discouraged widespread orders to shelter in place along with most other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), including social distancing and mandatory masking. There were, however, reports written during the George W. Bush presidency that advocated a more drastic response, and that, based on computer modeling, massive lockdowns and intervention early on in an outbreak might reduce fatalities.

Criticism of these society-wide lockdown scenarios noted that there would be negative effects, and that any lack of transparency from authorities about what they knew about the disease, its effects and treatments, would ultimately create public distrust. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) produced a report in 2008 warning that “grafting the values of law enforcement and national security onto public health is both ineffective and dangerous. Too often, fears aroused by disease and epidemics have justified abuses of state power.”

But in the early weeks of the COVID pandemic, supporters of NPIs and lockdowns captured the ear of President Donald Trump and, even worse, health official all over the world made the mistake of taking reports of the success of brutal lockdown programs in China at face value. A single trip organized by the World Health Organization to Hubei province in China in February of 2020, heavily managed by the Chinese state, came back with glowing reports of the regime’s success there. This encouraged subsequent lockdown orders around the world a month later – none of which, thankfully, were as draconian as the Chinese response, which was facilitated by the Communist Party’s considerable resources at social control both online and in the real world, where citizens were literally welded into their apartments.

The truth is that by March of 2020 any lockdown program was diminished by the fact that the virus had already spread farther than containment could manage, and that despite claims that it would be just “two weeks to flatten the curve,” there was no way of stopping the waves of infection due to follow. Transparency was already forgotten: despite knowing early on that the disease was far more fatal to the elderly and patients with co-morbidities, schools were still closed and offices emptied (though legions of “essential workers” were at work, at risk in what was being described as a lethal pandemic, though poorly compensated).

By the time the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration – a non-partisan group that included scientists and academics – published their appeal to scale back lockdowns and other NPIs in October of 2020, their opponents had already captured the high ground in government and had convinced politicians that the fight against the epidemic required countries to act as if at war.

Indeed, senior health officials started talking about a wholly unscientific goal of total victory in defeating the virus, and governments spoke about “mobilization” of the population, who must be made to act in unity in the battle against the virus, using all means necessary. What this led to was a disinformation campaign led from the highest levels of government that sought to minimize dissenting voices, which quickly infected social media platforms like Twitter, whose former head of “trust and safety,” Yoel Roth, wrote later how the FBI “made direct moderation demands” on the platform to suppress critics.

Not just supporters of the Great Barrington Declaration but anyone who talked about the origin of the virus in a lab leak at Wuhan or advocated for herd immunity over vaccination found themselves under attack. (The phrase “granny killers” is a curious artifact of the COVID era: it demonized advocates of herd immunity while admitting that the strongest argument against school closures – the virus’ increased lethality in the elderly versus the young – was true.) In a 2024 Telegraph article, a former BBC journalist described a “climate of fear” at the broadcaster with reporters who questioned lockdowns “openly mocked” and called “dissenters.”

It’s no surprise that the media enthusiastically supported NPI as the only legitimate response to the virus. Macedo and Lee use the term “laptop class” to describe the demographic most invested in lockdowns and closures because it would have the least effect on their lifestyles; they admit that they were members of this privileged group.

“The cost of enforced quarantines,” they write, “were easy to discount for those able to work from home; order food, wine, and medicine online; count on the maintenance of our utilities and internet; and even upgrade our home furnishings and appliances. All these activities were only ever possible because other, less privileged people were exposing themselves daily to the virus and doing all the in-person work that was necessary to make the laptop class comfortable. Debate about this particular distribution of costs was surprisingly truncated.” They also note that, despite their earlier warnings about the unevenly spread costs of lockdowns and unprecedented power ceded to the state, the ACLU were conspicuously silent as debates about the wisdom of lockdowns and their enforcement grew heated.

There is, the authors of In Covid’s Wake assert, a basic conflict between democracy and the biases and prerogatives of experts in the technocracies western governments increasingly favour. Politicians, who need to be seen as in charge, will inevitably choose to do something – anything – and seek out expert advise to direct their actions. They quote Sandro Galea, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, who said that during the pandemic: “…public health experts were granted unprecedented influence. We had the ear of policy makers, we helped shape guidance that affected the lives of billions, we saw our profiles elevated in the media. It would be hard for anyone to be unaffected by such a sudden rush of prestige. This is perhaps why public health officials took actions during COVID in which the evidence-based pursuit of health was often secondary or incidental to maintaining our continued influence. We saw this in our willingness to toe an ever-shifting party line, and when called out we could say we were just ‘following the science.’ We saw it in the way that many of us closed ranks around the Biden administration when it came to power.”

Combined with the eagerness of mainstream media outlets to become willing accomplices of government as they desperately cling to relevance, Macedo and Lee consider official responses to COVID-19 as a test that most democracies failed. “If a national conversation about the pandemic is ever going to take place, now is the time for that conversation,” they write. “In the twenty-first century, would one have believed that stigmatization of dissent – precisely as described by John Stuart Mill in 1859, before the U.S. Civil War – would still be a recurrent feature of our liberal democratic institutions? That government officials would engage in an active effort to censor their political opponents for expressing dissenting views? That scientists would distort their own accumulated knowledge, as they did with the definition of ‘herd immunity,’or seek to stifle debate on questions of legitimate concern, as they did with the coronavirus’s origins or the efficacy of population masking as a means of controlling the spread of disease?”

Ultimately the people who were in charge during the COVID-19 crisis will still be the people in charge whenever the next crisis, real or imagined, arrives, and in the absence of a real debate on what went wrong during the last crisis it’s likely that the last response will become a precedent.

“In many ways, cultural and political elites in the United States had a ‘good” pandemic,’ Macedo and Lee conclude, while admitting that despite “widespread pleas to solidarity” in the outbreak’s early days, “both sides of the partisan divide may look back on those appeals somewhat cynically…The partisan divide is deep and abiding. But every divide has two sides, and neither side ever had a monopoly on the truth about COVID.”