Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee
In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us
Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press
May 2025
373 pages
ISBN 978-0-691-26713-5
When the Covid-19 lockdown began in 2020, everyone stopped going to Mass, but some people stayed away long after the restrictions were lifted. In many cases, this was because new online habits of Mass-watching had developed, but in at least some instances it was because of fear caused by the constant state and media warnings about the dangers of Covid. Whatever the causes, the Catholic bishops in Ireland have recently had to appeal to some Catholics to return to Sunday Mass.
This is one example of the unseen costs of the Covid emergency, a key theme of this absorbing book on Covid-19, which focuses on the United States. Its authors argue that several tenets of basic rationality “evaporated” under the stress of the Covid onslaught, notably the need to weigh the expected costs of pandemic control policies against their expected benefits, that this was “a fundamental failure of democratic deliberation”, and that consideration of trade-offs between the costs and benefits of policies was systematically swept aside in 2020-2021.
The costs of prolonged school closures, in particular, and their disproportionate impact on poorer families, had been anticipated before Covid, but these concerns were largely ignored during the pandemic. School closures were “unusually protracted” in the United States, even after it was clear that schools were not important drivers of community infections, and this led to a measurable decline in student learning.
The “class bias” of pandemic restrictions, the authors suggest, emerged in various ways. The educationally disadvantaged proportionately lost their jobs more and saw their children fall behind more in school, in a context where low-income families often lacked good learning conditions at home. Low-income essential workers received little protection from pandemic restrictions and had to continue, regardless of their personal risk, with indispensable work—work which, as Pope Francis noted, drew attention to the “interdependence” of society. Decision-makers, by contrast, generally had secure jobs and pensions and could work without great difficulty from home.
[Other] costs of Covid restrictions included mental health problems, the isolation of nursing home residents, the “social atomization” caused by dislocations, and the drop in church attendance, which in 2023 in the United States remained below 2019 norms.
The authors, both professors of politics at Princeton University, contend that many of the costs of Covid policies will unfold over years. As well as the educational impact, there was the increase in public debt, which will affect future policymakers and future generations. The massive aid packages introduced in the United States during the pandemic fueled growth in personal savings and increased demand for consumer goods while pandemic restrictions limited supply chains. These factors fueled increased inflation and rising house prices, which put homes out of reach of younger and less well-off workers.
Covid interventions, the authors maintain, suffered from “short-term bias”—a focus on immediate benefits rather than long-term costs.
The lack of attention to costs, they argue, arose in part because of the narrow composition of government advisory groups, typically made up of generalist government officials and experts in infectious disease. Other medical specialists in areas such as mental health and gerontology were generally not included. Infectious disease and public health doctors clearly had an indispensable role in a pandemic, but they were not best placed to consider the broader trade-offs, economic or otherwise, related to pandemic restrictions. The views of those with economic expertise or business experience were needed but often excluded from the decision-making table.
There were related failures in the media and academic world in the United States. Reporters rarely asked questions about the collateral damage caused by Covid restrictions, while a fully fledged academic discussion about their costs never materialized. Nor did profound political polarization in the United States facilitate calm debate.
If costs were insufficiently considered, the evidence for the benefits of the nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) adopted was often less strong than commonly supposed: “No Western pandemic plans available at the outset of the Covid pandemic recommended large-scale NPIs such as universal quarantines or lockdowns, lengthy school closures, and mass testing and contact tracing. Such plans were even equivocal or sceptical about far less restrictive NPIs such as requiring masks” (20).
This discussion of NPIs relates particularly to the pre-vaccine period, as the emergence of vaccines later proved to be a “game-changer.” The authors trace the lockdown approach followed globally to the original lockdown in China in early 2020 and highlight the “surprising speed” with which enthusiasm for China’s draconian approach grew. They criticize the WHO’s “ringing endorsement” of the Chinese approach in February 2020—described by one source as “incredibly naïve”—and ask how applicable the policy lessons from communist China were, given that China was an authoritarian country prepared to monitor its population “with technologically advanced state capacities and to suppress dissent with an exceptionally powerful state security apparatus” (57). The worrying early impact of Covid in Italy also influenced international perspectives.
The book is highly critical of “extraordinary restrictions” on free speech in the United States. Mantras like “follow the science” were regularly repeated, but, the authors suggest, science cannot by itself tell us what we ought to do, since value judgments are always involved in policy decisions. Respected academics who expressed significant reservations about pandemic restrictions and called for focused protection rather than general lockdown—for example, in the Great Barrington Declaration of October 2020—were vilified and dismissed as fringe thinkers rather than thanked for their contribution to discussion. Yet alternative perspectives were urgently needed at a time of national crisis.
This reviewer is not an expert on infectious diseases or pandemic management, and Macedo and Lee themselves are specialists in political science rather than public health. Nevertheless, this extensively researched book by two respected American academics raises important questions about how the Covid-19 pandemic was handled in the United States and elsewhere. It usefully emphasizes the need to learn lessons from the experience, given the likelihood of similar or worse pandemics in the future.
While the authors very effectively critique the Covid-19 policies that were followed, the pandemic was an enormous challenge. It is obviously easier—albeit very important—to offer an academic critique after a crisis than to decide on policies for a nation “in real time” during a national and international emergency and in an atmosphere of global panic.
Although Ireland does not feature in the book, some of the issues it addresses also apply here. There was also a lack of in-depth debate in Ireland during the pandemic about the lockdown of society and about the possible long-term costs of the policies adopted, and questioning of these policies was sometimes viewed as unpatriotic. Senator Michael McDowell regularly made the case for political oversight of the recommendations of civil servants, and Senator Rónán Mullen questioned the severity of the restrictions placed on church attendance. But “pushback” against Covid policies was not widespread in public discussion or the media. As in the United States, unelected health officials were endowed “with too much authority to make decisions that required broadly political judgments balancing risks and benefits” (10).
To make these points is not to indulge in personal criticism of individuals. Any discussion of the Covid-19 epidemic in Ireland should acknowledge the expertise, calm leadership, and hard work of Irish officials at a deeply challenging and worrying time. Moreover, as a small country, Ireland was probably not well placed to adopt policies that diverged greatly from those of larger countries or from those strongly recommended by the WHO.
Some years on from the pandemic, however, one’s general impression is that there is relatively little political or media appetite in Ireland for in-depth reflection on the Covid-19 experience or any acknowledgement that some policies might be open to serious question. Nevertheless, a Covid-19 evaluation is being carried out in Ireland by Professor Emerita Anne Scott of the University of Galway, and it will seek to draw lessons from the experience. This thought-provoking, clearly argued, and wide-ranging U.S. assessment could be read with great profit by the Irish evaluation team and indeed by the public at large.