Princeton Scholars Deliver Hard Truths About Covid Policies

Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee have just published a book highly critical of COVID pandemic policies. In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton University Press 2025) does not paint a pretty picture of public policy:

Hard choices were obscured by slogans like "follow the science." Benefits and harms were distributed unfairly. The policies adopted largely benefited the laptop class and left so-called essential workers unprotected; extended school closures hit the least-privileged families the hardest. Science became politicized and dissent was driven to the margins. In the next crisis, Macedo and Lee warn, we must not forget the deepest values of liberal democracy: tolerance and open-mindedness, respect for evidence and its limits, a willingness to entertain uncertainty, and a commitment to telling the whole truth.

That will ring true for many from their own experience.

The authors were interviewed recently at Undark. A couple of excerpts:

SM: We found that the World Health Organization had sent a mission to China in late-January 2020. They spent only a week there. They wrote up their report at the end of that week, having done a sort of light dive into the country, guided by the Chinese. They seemed to have believed everything that the Chinese told them and wrote a report that endorsed China's strategy fulsomely, without reservation, for the entire world. Simply taking the claims of the Chinese authority on trust was just crazy. A kind of malfeasance.

That report was released in February 2020. China was already well shut down by that point. Italy then adopted that strategy -- and it went around the world.

...

UD: The book is quite critical of pandemic-era science journalism. Chapter 6 looks at a subgenre in which news outlets surveyed epidemiologists to find out how these experts were modifying their behaviors in light of the pandemic. For example, would they attend a sporting event or a religious service? In your view, what is wrong with this approach?

FL: I mean, first of all, you're asking the people who are most focused on the spread of disease by nature of their profession. They're going to have some tunnel vision around that. Their views about the importance of protecting yourself from a respiratory infection are likely to be systematically different from other people. Their values, then, can't guide the whole of society.

Second, there's class bias here. These are highly educated people for whom staying home and self-isolating was much more feasible than for the rest of society. So their perspectives on that, and their views on what exactly would be the hardships associated with that, were also biased.

Macedo offers, "I think that people find it very uncomfortable to go back. They knew that we did this. They knew that we went along with it. They knew that in many cases, people on the progressive side supported it because it was something that enlightened people were generally in favor of throughout this."