CCCG hosts Stephen Macedo to discuss elite failures in COVID response
The Center for Citizenship & Constitutional Government (CCCG) hosted Princeton Professor Stephen Macedo for a talk on October 3 centered on his latest book, In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. Co-authored by Frances Lee, another Princeton professor, the book explores how political and scientific elites failed in their efforts to deal with the virus that shut down the world in 2020.
Macedo described the COVID-19 pandemic as the “biggest global crisis since World War II” and discussed pandemic research pre-COVID. He noted that most research did not recommend any preventative measures outside of pharmaceutical drugs. Macedo added that the World Health Organization reported, before the outbreak of COVID, that “contact tracing, quarantining of exposed individuals, entry and exit screenings, internal travel restrictions, border closures [are] not recommended under any circumstances.”
Macedo quoted a John Hopkins University report stating,“It is important to communicate to political leaders … the absence of evidence surrounding many non-pharmaceutical interventions [lockdowns] and the adverse consequences that may follow from them.” Yet, despite widespread distrust of lockdown methods, Macedo said that “all of these measures were undertaken in short order” once the pandemic began.
Macedo then discussed initial protests to the lockdowns. He listed Dr. Michael Osterholm, one of the “world’s leading experts on epidemiology.” Osterholm, in reference to the nation’s quick adoption of quarantine measures, said, “We’ve got people literally just following each other off the edge of a cliff because they’re not thinking.”
Dissent, however, soon died off. According to Macedo, “tolerance for dissent waned” as people began to think of the lockdown as a “war on COVID.” As in war time, if the cause was going to succeed, “everyone need[ed] to be on the same page.” Toleration of dissenting ideas quickly diminished, even among the scientific community that had once denounced these quarantine methods.
To show just how drastically opinion had shifted, Macedo referenced the Great Barrington Declaration. In this report, three acclaimed scientists—Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford (who visited ND last year to discuss COVID), and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard—spoke out against the quarantine. Cognizant of the previously researched effects of lockdowns, they argued that the best path to general immunity among the population was to “allow those who are at minimal risk of death to lead their lives normally to build up immunity … through natural infection.” The declaration came out in October of 2020, well into the lockdown.
The report was dismissed by many in the government and medical community. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institute of Health, told the Washington Post, “[The declaration] is a fringe component of epidemiology, it’s not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.” As Macedo pointed out, however, “What [the Declaration] was saying was a lot what people were saying … a few months before.”
At that point in time, then, Macedo argued that “measures were more predicted by partisanship than COVID virulence.”
Macedo moved on to discuss the “strongly partisan” nature of the lockdowns. The extent of quarantine measures were almost entirely split along party lines. In Democratic states, Macedo said, “lockdowns and various other measures [were] more stringent.” Schools were closed for months on end, with some, like those in California, “staying closed for much or even all of the 2020 to 2021 school year.”
On the other hand, many Republican states reduced restrictions early on. Although all governors shut down their states initially, “Republican states started opening much more quickly and tended to stay open,” Macedo noted. Florida hardly closed down at all.
Despite these differences, Macedo argued that “California did no better [than Florida], having had much more stringent lockdown measures.”
Medical experts continued to advise lockdown measures, however. Macedo acknowledged that there was a lot of “misinformation around getting the virus and recovering” put out by scientists in hopes of encouraging people to get the vaccine.
Macedo said he was supportive of promoting the vaccination campaign, but he admonished the conduct of the scientific community, saying, “Don’t lie about all these scientific facts. … It’s the kind of thing that encouraged great distrust of public health officials.”
Macedo continued with another quote by Francis Collins from a 2023 interview, in which he said, “What I did was wrong. … We failed to say every time there was a recommendation, ‘Guys, this is the best we can do right now. It’s a good chance this is wrong.’ … We wanted change to happen in case it was right, but we did not admit our ignorance, and that was a profound mistake.” Macedo lamented this “lack of humility” present in scientists during COVID, which he believed “degraded discussion” during this all-important time period.
In closing, Macedo stressed, “We need greater toleration of disagreement and respect for dissent, even when it’s coming from the other side of the political spectrum. … We need greater humility on the part of experts and elites.”
Mercedes Curran, a CCCG Tocqueville Fellow who attended the lecture, wrote to the Rover, “Prof. Macedo’s lecture brought to light the large gaps between the preexisting recommendations for managing public health crises and the approaches our health officials took at the beginning of the pandemic.”
She concluded, “Overall, I was very grateful to hear Prof. Macedo’s lecture, and appreciated his dedication to these issues that risk being overlooked as ‘crisis’ reactions. His work raises important questions on the responsibilities we owe each other, our political leaders, and our health researchers.”
Finn Saivar is a freshman from Nashville majoring in political science who loves football, golf, and history. You can reach him at fsaivar@nd.edu.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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