WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE PANDEMIC?

 

There is little disagreement that policy errors were made during the pandemic. The problem is that Democrats, Republicans, and even scientists who specialize in public health cannot agree on what the miscalculations were or how to prevent them in the future. This result should not be unexpected.  The Pew Research Center has concluded, “The most significant pandemic of our lifetime arrived as the United States was experiencing three major societal trends: a growing divide between partisans of the left and right, decreasing trust in many institutions, and a massive splintering of the information environment.”

Democrats point to the lax preparation and prevention efforts employed by the first Trump administration. They believe there were many warning signals before COVID-19 swept across the nation. There is also criticism of the slow roll out of available vaccines in the final months of the 2020 Trump presidency.

Republicans argue that the Biden administration and governors in blue states called for “draconian” lock-down, masking, and distancing mandates that caused harm to our economic and social fabric.  They contend that elected Democrat officials gave too little priority to individual choice and did not support businesses or parents who wanted their children back in the classroom.

The only fact on which all parties agree is that “Operation Warp Speed,” a national program employed by Trump officials to quickly develop a vaccine was an unmitigated success. With vaccine production using mRNA as a delivery mechanism, scientists moved quickly to clinical and human trials. This allowed the vaccines to become the fastest ever developed and approved.

As of January 30, 2021, five of the six vaccine candidates had entered phase 3 clinical trials. Two candidates from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech received an emergency use authorization from the FDA. This decision was indispensable to lessening the effects of the pandemic. A week later, on February 5, 2021, the U.S. had over 26 million cumulative reported cases of COVID-19 and about 449,020 reported deaths.

 

In May 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared an end to the public health emergency. Adequate time has now passed to permit social scientists and historians (with no political axe to grind) to review the voluminous documentation and statistical evidence generated by federal/state agencies and scientific entities.

The initiation of governmental policies to mitigate the harm is now more or less settled. On 23 January 2020, the Chinese government banned travel to and from Wuhan and enforced a national policy of quarantines in affected regions. The WHO examined this approach and bought into the Chinese model, which swiftly became conventional wisdom around the world. As a result of this thinking, America launched masking, distancing, and lockdowns on a broad scale.

This commentary will discuss a recent book that focuses on the governmental responses to COVID-19 and other strains of the virus. The publication gives a fair and honest assessment in which no political party, elected official, or federal agency escapes unscathed. It is a straight-forward report that we all need to consider in order to learn from the pandemic moving forward.

The book, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, is the work of two public policy professors at Princeton University, Stephen Macedo and Francis Lee.  Among other favorable reviews, this study has been called “compelling” by Fareed Zakaria and “social science at its finest” by George Will.

Macedo and Lee describe how, influenced by China’s lockdown, federal agencies departed from their already existing pandemic plans that minimized the use of social distancing and masking. In making difficult choices, “follow the science without question” replaced open scientific debate and valuable input from non-scientists.

The authors found that benefits and damages were unfairly distributed. Priority was placed on avoiding hospitalization and death with little consideration of economic loss or the long-term harm caused by missing school and locking-down communities. Even when the virus started acted differently than predicted, scientific conformity replaced open debate and reasoned thought.

Macedo and Lee point to Sweden, which never mandated masks or staying at home and kept schools open. Statistics now show that Sweden had one of the lowest death rates in Europe. Initially In America, states that locked down for longer, fared no better than those that did not. However, once vaccines were readily available, red states did not do as well because vaccine skepticism increased the number of infections.

The authors conclude that: 1) the federal policies adopted largely benefited the wealthier “laptop class” and left so-called essential workers unprotected, 2) extended school closures hit the least-privileged families the hardest, and 3) science became politicized, and dissent was driven to the margins. 

On this third point, it now seems an unwarranted partisan position for Atlantic magazine to accuse the state of Georgia of performing “an experiment in human sacrifice” when the governor eased its lockdown requirements. Elected officials can often fairly weigh considerations that experts may not consider or fully appreciate.

If we are to learn anything from the pandemic, we must realize that governments need “a more honest politics of crisis policymaking, a greater willingness to acknowledge doubt and recognition of people with varying views.”

In the next crisis, Macedo and Lee warn, “we must not forget the deepest values of liberal democracy: tolerance and open-mindedness, respect for scientific evidence and its limits, a willingness to entertain uncertainty, and a commitment by the government to tell us the whole truth.”