COVID and the Craving for Certainty – Religion & Liberty Online

In March of 2020, I published an essay warning both the public and our policymakers against overreacting to the COVID threat. We overreact, I argued, in times of “epistemic uncertainty,” when we do not know enough about a threat we face and are unclear about our best response. We become consumed by fear, and the greater the fear and the trickier the response, the more likely we overreact.

In some ways, COVID came at the worst time imaginable. Americans were deeply divided along partisan lines, and those differences and associated feelings intensified after the murder of George Floyd. We had a president who polarized the public and engaged in a hotly contested effort for reelection. The public had low trust in our governing institutions and our media outlets, and colleges and universities that overreacted after Floyd’s murder were often populated by “experts” who not only politicized their disciplines but were mostly uniform in their partisan and ideological leanings.

Among those progressive professors is Stephen Macedo of Princeton, who confesses in the book In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us that he spent the COVID years bleaching his groceries and, when in public, zealously maintaining a six-foot perimeter and changing and washing his clothes before reentering his house. His coauthor and Princeton colleague, Frances Lee, assumed she would get COVID and made minimal prophylactic efforts. Acknowledging that reactions to the virus tended to divide people into two camps, they suggest that each tribe “needs to introspect, admit its biases and shortcomings, and strive to do better.” The substance of the book, however, is far kinder to Lee’s tribe than it is to Macedo’s.

I don’t know if the authors meant the word “wake” in the title ironically, but the connection seems obvious. For all the claims that people who favored highly restrictive policies were simply “following the science,” Macedo and Lee effectively demonstrate that ideology and self-interest rather than science drove COVID-era policies and that Americans will be paying a high price for progressive hubris for years to come. One must give credit to Macedo especially: He demonstrates genuine scholarly integrity in admitting his errors.

To return to my earlier claim: Because we tend to overreact in times of uncertainty, we try to develop plans in advance of catastrophes, especially ones we can anticipate. Pandemics are predictable disasters, and for that reason governments should have plans in place for dealing with one when it happens, especially if they want to avoid a repeat of the Spanish Flu nightmare. 

Global flu outbreaks occurred every decade from the ’70s on, and in the first decade of this century, governments and NGOs, including the World Health Organization (WHO), put together pandemic-response plans. Macedo and Lee review those plans carefully and identify a significant common thread in all of them: the conviction that Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs)—including mask mandates, social distancing, quarantines, shutdowns, and border closures—would have no discernible effect on improving health outcomes. These plans predicated themselves on the belief that they could not contain any respiratory virus. A review published by WHO in November of 2019, around the time of the COVID outbreak, argued that many NPIs were “not recommended in any circumstances” (emphasis in original). Even in April of 2020, WHO issued a statement recommending against mask wearing. Leading epidemiologists such as Tom Jefferson argued that “there is no evidence” that masks “make any difference. Full stop.”

Likewise, no science justified the ideas of border closings, school closings, social distancing, and quarantining—as realized in all the pre-pandemic plans. Most plans argued for protecting the most vulnerable and letting the virus work its way through healthier populations. Granted, there would be lives lost, but all pre-pandemic plans focused on the full range of costs and trade-offs involved in policy measures. Macedo and Lee look at the costs of highly restrictive policies “on educational attainment, mental health, employment, business failures, substance abuse, economic inequality, childhood obesity, social service provision, and non-Covid health care delivery” and conclude that the trade-offs were definitely not worth it, especially since there were limited “excess mortalities.” In a shocking admission, they write: “For every government policy employed during the pandemic, the distribution of estimated effects clusters around zero, which ‘suggests that government responses did little or nothing to change the COVID-19 burden.’”

So what changed from the pre-pandemic plans, and why did governments not shift policies when the failure of restrictive policies was already evident in the summer of 2020? Two things: First, officials around the world looked at China’s response to the virus and mimicked its policies; and second, mathematical models that predicted death on a catastrophic scale caused panic in the public.

Macedo and Lee express no small amount of amazement at the impulse of Western democracies to follow China’s lead. Long known as a highly authoritarian regime that often lied about data and information, China also had the largest dog in the fight given that it was the provenance of the virus. Macedo and Lee demonstrate how experts had initially rejected China’s policies but then eventually adopted them. Why would they do this? The authors are coy in their answer—indeed, throughout the book they are hesitant to comment on motives—but suggest that some experts believed that China had demonstrated that suppression of the virus was possible through extreme exercise of power, and that this was “a very appealing idea to policymakers and government leaders the world over—perhaps especially to progressives.” Then, too, political leaders worried about the strategic costs of placing blame on China for the virus and seem to have overcorrected in their response.

The use of mathematical modeling, because of its weak predictive power, has long been suspect among social scientists. Drs. Carter Mecher and Richard Hatchett of Bush’s Homeland Security team had produced mathematical models in the early 2000s that they claimed demonstrated NPIs could reduce death rates by 50% or more. The CDC, WHO, most healthcare experts, and even The New York Times had rejected the Mecher and Hatchett plan as “ethically questionable” as well as scientifically suspect. It also rubbed completely against pre-pandemic consensus.

The more significant modeling problem occurred when Dr. Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College in London, a frequent collaborator of Mecher’s and Hatchett’s, issued a “bombshell” report on March 16, 2020, that predicted 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. unless severe NPI measures were implemented. Macedo and Lee carefully examine the negligence of other scientists as well as journalists to investigate not only Ferguson’s claims but also his credibility. He had “a poor track record” during previous health scares and a “long-standing tendency to overestimate threats and alarm the public and policymakers.” Alarmist press coverage meant that “a consensus developed far too fast around previously untested strategies at odds with warnings expressed in prior pandemic planning.”

The COVID response abounded in war metaphors, and nothing expands government power like war. The first casualty of war is truth, with governments as well as opinion-makers actively suppressing dissent. One of the most compelling parts of the book is the authors’ tracing of the ways in which all dissent was suppressed by government actors, by the press, by scientific experts, and by other elites. Indeed, the authors excoriate the behavior of elites throughout the crisis, identifying the specific class interests of those formulating policies. Decision-makers tend to be specialists who share common assumptions and are drawn from the same segments of society. They are members of the laptop class, largely shielded from the economic consequences of lockdowns and other extreme measures. They tend not to change their minds because their reputations are at stake, concerning which they tend to be hypervigilant.

Perhaps nowhere did elite consensus congeal more thoroughly or more comprehensively than around “the lab-leak theory.” Early debates over the biological origin of COVID-19 suggested two possible sources: an open animal market or the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) that was engaged in precisely the kind of research that would produce the coronavirus. Early on, epidemiologists mostly assumed that the lab-leak hypothesis was the correct one but changed their analysis as a result of political pressure from those who thought that assigning blame could upset the geopolitical order. “In short, despite the scientists’ well-grounded concerns with the Institute’s biosecurity and their conclusion that accidental release of a coronavirus was ‘highly’ or ‘friggin’ likely, they concluded that a ‘shit show’ would result from a serious accusation—or maybe even a plain statement of facts. Whatever this is,” the authors ruefully continue, “it is not science.”

America’s two “leading scientists” of that time come in for a tongue-lashing. The authors won’t come out directly and accuse Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, and Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, of bad faith and malpractice, but most readers will not resist. Macedo and Lee prove that both doctors were up to their elbows in gain-of-function research, roughly defined as experimentation designed to increase the transmissibility and virulence of pathogens, exactly the kind of research occurring at the Wuhan Institute. Fauci had consistently advocated for its continuance even after the Obama administration had banned such research as too dangerous. Non-malicious reasons for supporting gain-of-function research would include counteracting bioterrorism and helping to develop vaccines. There is no shortage of money involved in the process, and while money may not be a malicious motive, it’s not an inconsequential one.

Beyond the geopolitical reasons for suppressing the lab-leak theory Fauci and Collins had an interest in crushing all dissent because they supported not just gain-of-function research but such research at the WIV specifically. “The record is clear,” Macedo and Lee write, “that the NIH and NIAID funded gain-of-function research that was performed in part at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had known biosecurity deficiencies. After the Covid pandemic began, scientists with complex and mixed motives engaged in an extensive and unacknowledged effort to deflect attention from the Chinese lab to the city’s wet market and thereby shape public perceptions of Covid’s origins.” The authors replicate email exchanges involving Collins and Fauci whereby the two most important public experts intentionally suppressed dissent. The elite experts “excluded and then deceived the public.” There ought to be a reckoning.

Or one might say there already was. Whatever else Trumpism is, I believe, it’s a rejection of the elites, not only their arrogance but also their ruthless exercise of power and indifference to those it affects most negatively. The authors conclusively demonstrate that America’s COVID policies were a rejection of science, a rejection of liberal principles, and a rejection of democratic processes. Such rejections necessarily result in diminished public trust and confidence. Indeed, the authors do not chide the public for not trusting experts, but experts for not trusting the public. The expert opinion was “nuance just causes confusion,” but they gave the public certain untruths rather than uncertain truths because, as in war, completely unity of purpose was required.

The book is notable also for what it does not discuss. It doesn’t give us any raw data on COVID mortality, and even though the authors mention it in passing, no distinction is made between dying from COVID and dying with COVID and how eliding the difference actually inflated mortality numbers. In fact, Macedo and Lee don’t go into any detail at all about the complete failures of data collection that took place in the middle of the pandemic, including the failure to get accurate numbers on infection rates and, maybe most importantly, the corruption of the Vaccine Adverse Effect Reporting System (VAERS).

Which brings me to the biggest omission: discussion of the vaccines themselves. The authors’ data demonstrate no difference between outcomes in red and blue states prior to the vaccines, but metrics in favor of the blue states after. But those metrics only measure hospitalization rates. Macedo and Lee also note that the Biden administration fed the public false information about the efficacy of the vaccines but avoid any conversation about side effects. Perhaps we don’t know enough about those yet, but the inadequate reporting into the VAERS, and doctors being actively discouraged from reporting negative effects into the VAERS, may mean we will never have a clear picture of the long-term health effects of the vaccines.

Speaking of which: If truth is the first casualty of war, quickly on its heels comes the distortion of language. COVID made “misinformation” and “disinformation” parts of our common vocabulary, and Macedo and Lee treat both those terms as examples of the bad faith in service of elite control that marked so much of COVID politics. The government appointed itself the arbiter of what could be considered true and exercised unlimited authority in labeling dissenting views as “misinformation,” thus justifying the suppression of those views. The medical experts, governing authorities, media apologists, and so-called educated elites “have yet to come to terms with the scope of the mistakes that were made during the pandemic and the extent to which their critics were, in many cases, more right than the medical associations were. Watching these public health officials defend their punishment of misinformation by advancing their own misinformation is a little like watching a dog chase its own tail.”

This is an important book. It should get us to rethink the way the public, expert authorities, and governing officials manage crises: from identifying a crisis to coming clean about mistakes as well as motives. More’s the pity, then, that the book is so badly edited. The voice constantly flips between verb tenses and the arguments are often repetitive. Eliminating redundancies would have allowed space for dealing with the serious questions the authors avoided. I suspect that many readers who still believe that the hammer was not brought down swiftly or vigorously enough will cling to their delusions, because, as the authors argue, those delusions resulted from fear and not from reason. Those who expressed skepticism about NPI policies will have to resist the urge to say “I told you so” when they read the book.

In Covid’s Wake walks us through the inherent problems of dealing with rampant uncertainty during a time of crisis in a polarized age. People on both sides of the policies got things wrong, but few of them expressed their views with anything short of rock-solid certainty. I’m not sure where all that certainty comes from, except to say that in an age such as ours, when we are beset by forces and powers we barely understand and cannot control, we will grab whatever certainty we can wherever we can get it. Once in our grasp, we seldom let it go.