Politics, Government, and Science During Pandemic Times

When asked in early 2000 how long I thought COVID-19 would last, I answered three years.  Alas, it has now been nearly six years since a frightening respiratory disease was first noticed in Hubei Province centered in Wuhan.  Retrospective analyses indicate the virus was already circulating in other parts of the world.  It soon became clear how disruptive the third coming of a deadly and much more transmissible human coronavirus would be. [1]  We have previously discussed how the scientific response to Covid differed from the response to HIV/AIDS in the 1980s.  A recent comprehensive, if conventional, book by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee (both of Princeton) covers the politics of COVID-19.  In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us (2024) is likely to be the standard account of the politics of pandemic for some time.

In the beginning, in the words of Francis Collins, the former Director of the National Institutes of Health, “We did not admit our ignorance and that was a profound mistake.”  Yes, it was and is probably the foundation of the feeble scientific response to Covid, so far.  The various mistakes of the scientific community led to policy schizophrenia among politicians and unrest among the people.  This distemper has not abated.

Macedo and Lee ask the question, “Was Covid the moral equivalent of war?”  Going back to William James, as the authors put it:

Liberal democrats have hoped to find some ‘moral equivalent of war,’ which would call upon citizens to exhibit the civic virtue and self-sacrifice that exists in time of war.

Perhaps.  But at the same time, liberal democrats like Randolph Bourne were writing War Is the Health of the State.  And it should be noted that conservatives continue to find novel moral equivalents of war in libraries and under the beds and in the closets of liberal democrats and others anathema.  Recent events have exacerbated this tendency, and it is doubtful the outcome will be healthy for any and all concerned.  American politics in particular seems to thrive, after a fashion, in this “all-war-all-the-time” era of imperial decline.  This is a thoroughly bipartisan affliction.

It is clear to the most casual observer that the response to Covid was a failure of “educated elites.”  Macedo and Lee admit to being part of that tribe.  I am a paid-up, if heretical member, too.  The pathologies of our response can rightfully be attributed to a generalized “withholding of civic respect to political opponents.” [2]  This has often, if not always, been the problem of American politics.

It is uncontroversial to say that the notional Left represented by their version of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) is the guiltier party recently.  But the Right PMC also learned early.  Beginning with a Congressman from Georgia, they figured out how to withhold civic respect to their opponents and actually win.  It was the former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich – I remember well his rise as a glibertarian history professor from the wilds of West Georgia in the late-1970s – who thought it is a good idea to call me a sick, pathetic, radical traitor (Radical, as in attempting to get to the root of the matter? No argument from me but my opponents will undoubtedly disagree).  Newt’s memo has returned, with a vengeance, with the president who made his current wife Ambassador to the Holy See and more recently Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

After an introductory chapter on “Democracy under Covid,” Macedo and Lee proceed as follows:

2. “Following the Science” before Covid
3. Turning on a Dime: Embracing China’s Covid Model
4. Partisan Pandemic: Stigmatizing Disagreement
5. Laboratories of Democracy?
6. Pay Any Price: Ignoring Costs of Covid Policy
7. Science Bends to Politics: Covid’s Muddled Origins
8. Politicized Science: Of Masks and Mandates
9. Noble Lies? Public Health Mis- and Disinformation under Covid
10. Concluding Reflections: Learning from the Politics of Crisis

What follows in the next few paragraphs is a summary of the main points presented by Macedo and Lee, after which we will return to core sections of the book in Chapters 4, 7, and 10.  Chapter 2 begins:

Communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted?

This is undoubtedly true and the analytical framework foremost in the minds of Macedo and Lee throughout the book is “costs and benefits.”  However, as with any cost-benefit analysis, those who pay the costs and those who reap the benefits are the important questions.  These are not always addressed from the perspectives of those who pay and those who benefit, but the authors are clear that most of the costs were paid by “essential workers” who had no choice but to conform to shifting mandates.  Whether we could have absorbed most of the costs is dismissed as a ridiculous question.

According to Macedo and Lee costs of the non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) throughout the pandemic were too large to justify the expense.  The initial and legitimate urge as SARS-CoV-2 spread widely was to prevent transmission and thereby prevent disease, by whatever reasonable means necessary, the key here being “reasonable.”  As it happened, the withholding of civic respect to political opponents on both sides was the major stumbling block to consensus.

In the initial Covid waves, those with comorbidities, including people over the age of sixty, were most at risk.  Early assumptions that Covid was a passing thing among the young and healthy were incorrect, however.  Long Covid is limited to one page, late in the book.  The success of the hard lockdowns in China and New Zealand worked in the beginning, so it was natural to follow their lead.  But again, at what cost and for whose benefit?

Macedo and Lee are very good with the notion that different responses by different nations and states within the United States would be a test of Justice Louis Brandeis’s justification for federalism with each state or region serving as a “laboratory of democracy.” [3].  The comparisons between “red” states and “blue” states are useful.  Although this is often overlooked, studies showed that pandemic restrictions reduced infection rates.  It follows that reduced infection rates would mean less disease.  Covid kills fast and slow.   Lower infection rates put fewer people at risk for long covid, which is likely to be the very long tail of the pandemic.  This was not appreciated early, and that is a failure of biomedical science.  Macedo and Lee conclude that the states are not laboratories of democracy.  Probably not, but comparisons of their responses will be valuable, if Covid data have been retained (doubtful) and are considered by citizens, scientists, and politicians in a disinterested manner.

Pandemic responses had the most enduring ill effects on education.  But what is not considered is that disruption of education did not have to be as complete or as long as in some states.  SARS-CoV-2 is an airborne virus.  Masks and ventilation prevent transmission very well, though not completely.  There was never any need to study this, any more than a clinical trial of parachutes as prevention of death and disability when jumping out of an airplane is necessary. [4]  Should Covid have been considered the moral equivalent of war worth any price?  That depends on what is valued.  But “Pay Any Price” for a relatively short time, while preventing damage to those most vulnerable, and then getting back to normal as quickly as possible?  Yes, we could have done that, without damage to the other that the laptop class, Right and Left, did not experience.

In Covid’s Wake is an effective indictment of our political leaders, Left and Right.  But Macedo and Lee are less convincing in Chapter 4, Partisan Pandemic: Stigmatizing Disagreement.  They begin with:

The making of sound policies on matters as complex and consequential as the Covid crisis requires deliberation that is open to criticism, tolerant of dissent, and reflective of the diversity of the political community.  These are baseline principles of liberal democracy.

True, as we have argued here recently.  Macedo and Lee then immediately proceed to a discussion of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD, issued in October 2020), which they describe as:

An earnest appeal by serious scholars, and it deserved a respectful hearing.  But it was issued into a toxic and polarized environment, where its authors were subjected to exactly the stigmatization that Mill warned about [5].  And they were far from alone.

The authors and lead signers of the GBD…were distinguished academics: Dr. Martin Kulldorf, (at the time) professor of medicine at Harvard University…Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University; and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases.

These three scholars, experts in public health, epidemiology, biostatistics, and economics, where convinced that an artificial air of consensus inhibited the robust discussion of alternatives, and they worried about what the consequences would be as nations headed toward a second wave (of covid later in the year).

The academic homes of these three are mentioned prominently in what can be perceived only as an argument from authority (an irritating constant in the book).  Jay Bhattacharya, BA-MA-MD-PhD, has four degrees from Stanford.  He is an economist with the PhD to prove it, but he is not a physician, or “one who practices the healing art, including medicine and surgery” (OED).  Dr. Bhattacharya went straight from his MD to his PhD.  He never finished his post-graduate education in medicine (internship plus residency) and is ineligible for a medical license.  Dr. Kulldorf is now a member of ACIP.  Dr. Gupta remains at Oxford.

A complete discussion of the GBD is beyond the scope of this review but see LS here as a start.  Most of the scientific justifications in the GBD are plain wrong.  Herd immunity (Let ‘er rip! while protecting our elders, method for that unspecified) and protection of “vulnerable” communities until herd immunity is reached is nonsense.  This is what most of the critics of the GBD pointed out.  Some of them came off as unhinged given the political climate, but they were not wrong on the basic settled science.  The GBD was a form of soft eugenics and little else.  That it currently has 941,261 signatures is irrelevant.  Scientific validity is not up for a vote.

More important for our discussion is the “home” of the GBD.  It is not Stanford, Oxford, or Harvard.  The home of the GBD is the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian thinktank in Great Barrington, Massachusetts that long predates the Powell Memo.  Drs. Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorf were not the “dissenting experts” and “disinterested scientists” as described by Macedo and Lee.  They were acting as representatives of one of the foremost Merchants of Doubt (Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway) in the United States.  Early in the book, Macedo and Lee refer to Oreskes several times, here on page 22:

The premature moralization of disagreement along partisan lines (during the responses to Covid) undermined basic norms of democracy (accountability requires an opposition party), liberalism (openness to criticism as the best test of truth, per J.S. Mill), and science (a community of scientists open to a diversity of viewpoints, contestation, and refutation, per Karl Popper and Naomi Oreskes).

All true, but political argument from the AIER is not the kind of argument described by Popper or Oreskes, any more than a paper on the utility of statins in which every author had a conflict with Big Pharma is to be believed as the objective “truth” about this widely prescribed class of drugs.  That Macedo and Lee did not go deeper into the origins and the flawed virology and epidemiology of the GBD is not surprising, but it does raise serious doubts.  In any case, the authors were not silenced at all by their critics.  Dr. Bhattacharya is now Director of the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Kulldorf has moved on to the greener pastures of RFKJr’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP).  The GBD authors’ mistakes and errors of interpretation and prediction were pointed out, though.  And that is how science works.  One might also add that John Stuart Mill would probably agree that scientific disputes based on scientific data are not the “polemics” he writes about in On Liberty, even if in our polarized environment this distinction is seldom made.

Chapter 7, Science Bends to Politics is the best single discussion of Covid’s Muddled Origins I have read.  The trope “follow the science” ruled the first year of the pandemic.  From the very beginning this rankled every legitimate scientist.  “Trust the science” also seemed to be an effort at obfuscation.  It probably was.  At one level, the origins of SARS-CoV-2 are immaterial, because subsequent actions and inactions would not have been any different.  But as more information came out about the genesis of one report in Nature Medicine, The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 (17 March 2020, >2000 citations), suspicions were aroused.  The story can be summarized as follows:

• Virologists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, with a subcontract funded by NIH from EcoHealth Alliance run by Peter Daszak. GOF can be defined as manipulation of the viral genome to produce a novel component of the virus that has been changed to produce a different phenotype such as binding to the target cell or processing of viral proteins during the life cycle.  GOF research on potential human pathogens is a fraught topic, as it should be.
• A modified virus that became SARS-CoV-2 accidentally escaped from the lab. This is an unsurprising conjecture to anyone who has ever worked in a laboratory with viruses and other microorganisms.  Stuff happens.  But this does not mean there was a conspiracy that led inevitably to the result.  But it is not unreasonable to suspect that this research was done for convenience in Wuhan instead of a BSL-3 laboratory in the United States.

As it turns out, the initial reactions of the authors of The Proximal Origin paper were that a lab leak (not an intentional release from a biowarfare laboratory) was a possible source of the virus.  One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to take this view.

At the Scripps Institute…Dr. Kristian Andersen was having similar disconcerting worries that the new virus  had “properties that may have been genetically modified or engineered.”  The “receptor binding domain” that enables the spike protein (the antigen encoded by mRNA vaccines) to attach “to the host cell to infect it looked too good to be true – like the perfect ‘key’ for entering human cells (as the result of GOF research)…and a…furin cleavage site…that gives the flu superpowers by making it more transmissible and more pathogenic.”

(Anderson later) found a paper written by Dr. Ralph Baric, the world’s leading coronavirologist, and his collaborator, Dr. Shi Zhengli, director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that purported to have inserted a cleavage site into SARS.  On January 29, Andersen emailed a scientist colleague in Australia asking, “Can we talk, I need to be pulled off a ledge here.” [6]

Between this email and the publication of The Proximal Origin, there were many behind-the-scenes communications about how to explain the origins of SARS-CoV-2 as the result of natural evolution and probable transmission from bats to humans through an intermediate species (which has yet to be determined, unlike for SARS and MERs; the palm civet and dromedary camel, respectively).  Included in these discussions were Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins.  A conclusion of the paper is:

The genomic features described here may explain in part the infectiousness and transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 in humans. Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.

“Believe” is not a scientific term.  Whether the conclusion that SARS-CoV-2 was not the result of a leaked GOF virus was a “noble lie” (Chapter 9) will remain undetermined.  The case against the validity of The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 is strong.  Official responses, political and scientific, to the pandemic were all over the map from the very beginning.  In May 2021 Anthony Fauci said when you are vaccinated “you become dead to the virus.”  In July 2021 President Biden said, “If you are vaccinated, you’re not going to get hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the IC unit, and you’re not going to die.”  Both these statements were simple lies.

Then there was going all-in on vaccines for a virus for which durable immunity has been a unicorn since coronaviruses were discovered, albeit in chickens, more than ninety years ago. [6]  Herd immunity to a virus in the absence of durable immunity also seems unlikely.  The data summarized in In Covid’s Wake clearly show that the Covid vaccines prevented many deaths but that they could not keep up with viral evolution.  These vaccines did not work we have come to expect of vaccines for such serious pathogens.  The vaccinated were not protected from disease despite multiple boosters.  This is the proximate origin of the latest round of anti-vax politics.

Macedo and Lee conclude that:

The Covid fiasco bears some similarities to previous gross errors of policy such as Vietnam and the Iraq War.  Under Covid, as in those earlier episodes, flawed policies were adopted and persisted due to groupthink.  Closed circles of policy elites, mistrustful of the public and broader input, sought to keep major policy decisions within comfortable communities of insiders…the brightest minds at the highest levels asserted early on that there was only one way forward…

This is correct.  But the notional left is not the only guilty party.  The GBD was entirely the product of the self-described sophisticated libertarian Right, a point completely missed by Macedo and Lee.  The scientific criticisms of the GBD were often borderline uncivil, but I have seen and heard worse in person in the seminar room.  These were mostly the clash of real titans.  The one that stands out occurred in the late-1990s between two good friends, Arthur Kornberg and Saul Roseman on the fundamentals of bacterial metabolism, which is not generally considered a controversial topic.

Finally, the message of In Covid’s Wake is that the norms liberal democracy failed during Covid.  It is difficult to argue otherwise.  Biomedical science also failed in too many ways to count, some of which we have covered previously in a comparison of HIV/AIDS and COVID-19.   But a solution proffered by Macedo and Lee for next time holds that our politicians are closer to the heartbeat of the people than the Left PMC and Right PMC who dominate all discourse, generally on behalf of the sharp apex of the money and wealth pyramid.  Thus, our political process will mediate conflicts.

It is difficult to see how this is possible.  Our normative conception of our politics, i.e., Our Democracy™, which is in danger from both sides, says yes.  But our normal politics cares not one whit about the people, who are consumers whose duty is to keep the economy going before they are allowed to be citizens.  Out politicians care about their donors, period.  This is now very old news, as shown by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page eleven years ago:

Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impact on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based groups have little or no independent influence.  The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

Or to quote Justice Brandeis again, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.  The so-called Left, Right, and Center ignore this ground truth.  Few paths out of this civic wilderness present themselves, but we should remember No Politics but Class Politics.  The ultimate message for the next pandemic is that we must do better all around.  Yes.  But conventional politics will not get us there.

Still, as a comprehensive, well referenced, and well written description of how Covid affected our polity, In Covid’s Wake is highly recommended.

Notes

As I was reading In Covid’s Wake I came across this review of the book at Front Porch Republic, “Two Liberals Walk Out of a Pandemic…”  I ignored it until I finished here.  It is very long and orthogonal to my review when not diametrically opposed.  As might be expected, Ben Darr is most impressed by the Great Barrington Declaration, which nevertheless was bad libertarian science from the foundation up.

[1] The death rates from SARS (11%) and MERS (36%) were very high, but those two coronaviruses were not very transmissible.  Imagine if they had been as contagious as COVID-19.  That research on human coronaviruses basically came to a halt after MERS is one of the larger failings of biomedical science.  This has many reasons.  The main one is that scientists must always run-in-place while searching for the next big thing to include in a grant proposal.  The problem is that no one really ever knows what that will be, not the scientists or the program directors at NIH and NSF.

[2] Jeff Spinner-Havlev and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, Respect and Loathing in American Democracy: Polarization, Moralization, and the Undermining of Equality.  University of Chicago Press, 2024. (NB: On the list but unread so far)

[3] In a lengthy dissenting opinion citing abundant social science data, Justice Louis D. Brandeis argued that the need to eliminate “destructive” competition was primarily a matter for legislative determination. Brushing aside concerns that the statute fostered monopoly, he maintained that federal and state governments must have the power “to remould, through experimentation, our economic practices and institutions to meet changing social and economic needs.” In often-quoted language, Brandeis asserted, “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” The Brandeis dissent reflected his personal support for an enlarged regulatory role for government, and his devotion to federalism. As he saw it, states should be free to fashion new solutions to economic and social concerns.

[4] Thanks to Lambert Strether of Naked Capitalism (and Corrente).

[5] The worst offence…which can be committed by a polemic, is to stigmatize those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men.  To calumny of this sort, those who hold any unpopular opinion are peculiarly exposed, because they are in general few and uninfluential, and nobody but themselves feel much interest in seeing justice done them…unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them.  John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Chapter 2 “Liberty of Thought and Discussion.”

[6] MIT Technology Review: Inside the risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan: China emulated US techniques to construct novel coronaviruses in unsafe conditions.  This is a good article that covers most of the issue.

[7] The first report of coronavirus disease in vertebrates (chickens) dates to 1931.  Thus, coronaviruses were well known long before they were crowned, which happened only after the first electron microscope images in the 1960s showed spikes on the viral surface.