Have American elites—influential journalists, powerful policymakers and other cultural arbiters—learned the lessons of 2020-21? Do they want to?
“by 2020, in response to a global pandemic, the dominant part of America’s political and media class had turned the imperative to “follow the science” into an expression of almost religious reverence for the judgment of experts. Many educated and otherwise intelligent Americans, meanwhile, made a single, bespectacled government scientist their idol: “In Fauci We Trust” read their lawn signs and bumper stickers.
Their faith was misplaced. Credentialed experts, especially those in the fields of epidemiology and public health, had tied themselves to badly flawed theories, closed their minds to new evidence and thrown the mantle of “science” over value judgments for which they had no special competence.
“An Abundance of Caution,” by the journalist David Zweig, documents the poor evidentiary basis for the prolonged school closures and attendant follies such as masking requirements and social distancing. Mr. Zweig distinguished himself throughout the pandemic by his willingness to question the assumptions of self-identified “Covid hawks.” When he dug into the epidemiological modeling papers whose projections seemed decisively to rule out the safety of opening schools, he found “a never-ending matryoshka doll” of citations, resting ultimately on an assumption conceded to be “arbitrary” by its initial author.
Mr. Zweig shows how evidence emerged early on—in March 2020—that the virus did not pose a serious threat to children. American public-health professionals remained largely impervious to this fact. Further evidence of children’s relative safety from the virus came to light in Europe and parts of the U.S. where schools reopened early or never closed, but America’s public-health establishment remained largely unmoved. Teachers’ unions, it’s fair to say, promoted hysteria about the alleged dangers of opening schools, and health officials and school boards in many of America’s large cities were gulled into keeping kids away from school for a year or more. They insisted their intransigence was justified by officials’ findings, even as those same officials claimed only to be offering nonbinding recommendations. [..]
“In Covid’s Wake,” by the Princeton political scientists Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo, [..] state with disarming plainness that “elite institutions failed us” by giving in to panic. Ms. Lee and Mr. Macedo marvel at how consensus plans—none of which would have required extended lockdowns—were thrown out before Americans ever began dying, in part because public-health experts were entranced by China’s harsh restrictions. American policymakers had sound advice ready at hand, but most of them took the view that safety outweighed individual liberties, economic activity and quality of life.
Where Mr. Zweig emphasizes incuriosity, Ms. Lee and Mr. Macedo stress the willful suppression of reasonable debate, including the unfortunate tendency to paint critics of lockdowns and mask mandates as racists, quacks and conspiracy theorists. Such conduct was especially evident on the question of Covid-19’s origins, as top scientists vilified anyone suggesting the virus may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. Credulous journalists, academics and other cultural arbiters, the authors remind us, embraced the effective censorship of those who questioned the official line. [..]
Many people who now see America’s pandemic response as regrettable nevertheless still believe that, taken in proper perspective, we couldn’t really have done much better. That belief will not survive the reading of these two books. By clinging to their favored nonpharmaceutical interventions, well past the point when they should have known such policies offered few benefits and many costs, governments in many urban and wealthy parts of the country trod a path that was uniquely bad, both historically and comparatively. Ms. Lee and Mr. Macedo catalog reams of data to show that, before the availability of vaccines, areas imposing the severest restrictions earned no discernible health benefits.
They also show that, thanks to lower vaccination rates, red states suffered many more deaths in the pandemic’s second year, but neither they nor Mr. Zweig have much to say about the vaccine, America’s great pandemic success. Ms. Lee and Mr. Macedo make a strong case in favor of Sweden’s approach, which called for voluntary safety measures focused on the elderly but never included enforceable mask requirements or stay-at-home orders, let alone extended cancellations of school and recreational activities. Despite some front-loading of deaths in 2020, Sweden’s excess mortality ended up, the authors show, the lowest in Europe. As much as it pains us to admit it, most of our sacrifices of normal life, however piously offered, were for naught. [..]
There is poetic justice in Mr. Trump’s appointment of Jay Bhattacharya, one of the few public-health luminaries to oppose lockdowns, to lead the National Institutes of Health. Yet in the Department of Government Efficiency’s preoccupation with crude metrics, there is a kind of sickly ironic echo of 2020’s obsession with counts of positive tests. Knowing that something went wrong with our expert class hardly guarantees that we know how to put things right.
The subtitle of Ms. Lee and Mr. Macedo’s book is “How Our Politics Failed Us.” Having learned what madness it is to place too much trust in experts, Americans would be wise to demand that accountable elected officials bear responsibility in future crises. Politicians are not experts, but in their deliberations they can fairly weigh considerations that experts may not appreciate—the value of gathering as a religious community, the inherent dangers of upending the public’s habits and routines, the importance of being physically with loved ones, especially in their final years.
[..] We’ve received a rude lesson in the perils of tribalistic conformity displacing reasoned thought, but we may have to retake the course.”
Full review, P Wallach, The Wall Street Journal, 2025.4.18