Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the 271st episode of objectively speaking. I'm Jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society, joining you from Naples, Florida. As you can see, this isn't the usual podcast set, but a hotel room. And of course, running a non profit means that much of October, November and December is spent on the road meeting with our donors. So be prepared for more backgrounds like this in the weeks ahead.
I have really been looking forward to this interview. Very excited that Professor Steven Macedo is joining us to discuss the book in Covid's How Our Politics Failed Us, which he co authored with Professor Francis Lee. Stephen, thanks for joining us.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Well, thank you for having me on.
[00:00:53] Speaker A: So you teach at Princeton, you are a writer with at least four books on topics ranging from citizenship, liberalism, community and civic trust. I'm wondering whether growing up, you had any experiences or influences that later helped inspire. Inspire your interest in these areas or maybe in just pursuing an academic career more broadly.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, my. My family was very interested in politics.
My father was engaged in some local politics, and it was just something we discussed and debated a lot at home.
So, you know, I loved arguing with my older aunts and relatives and was always very interested in politics, from the very local to the national and public policy questions. So I think that did come out of my childhood. My father was a college teacher and my mother became a public school teacher later on. My grandmother was a public school teacher. My aunts were all public school teachers or teachers, sometimes in Catholic schools.
And so there was a lot of interest in education.
And, you know, there were books in the house, which was also very helpful. And we got the newspapers.
So I'm sure that kind of political engagement and argument, and there was a lot of contrarianism, but welcoming of disagreement and enjoyment and argument about politics and public policy in the household, which we should.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: We would do very well to have more of that today.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: So this podcast was started in the spring of 2020 when all of a sudden our usual schedule of conferences and meetings were disrupted. And from the very beginning, COVID policy lockdowns, school closures, and their collateral damage have been a frequent topic of discussion. But with critics like Scott Atlas and Jeffrey Tucker and economist Steve Moore among some of our earliest guests. And one of the reasons I've been particularly looking forward to this interview is that most of these critics, with a couple of exceptions, have been addressing issues from a more libertarian perspective. You and your co author, both academics, situate yourself as politically kind of classically liberal, maybe classically liberal. Democrats with traditional Democratic concerns about issues like inequality and social justice.
And I've been hopeful that others of your quote unquote tribe might at this point be able to hear things from you and your co author that they haven't been able to tolerate from those of us with different politics.
And we've been raising these issues for five and a half years. So very eager to know what has been the recession.
Has it been generally open minded or have some treated Hugh for writing this book as politically suspect for breaking silence on these formerly taboo subjects?
[00:04:18] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's a very good question. And you know, we were delighted that early on, even before the book was published, shortly before it was published, there was a long essay in the Boston Globe, which is certainly a kind of mainstream progressive publication.
And then the New York Times had us on for their daily podcast, full hour with their, I guess it's their flagship political podcast there. And it was very respectful and open minded and we thought it was terrific.
Likewise, you know, a number of newspapers, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph as well, we were on the PBS NewsHour full segment there. William Rangham, one of the correspondents, had read the book in full, had very thoughtful comments. We run Jake Tapper, you know, Fareed Zakaria did a segment on his, on his television show, Andrew Sullivan and so on. So basically the response has been better than we could have hoped for in a lot of ways. And likewise, a fair number of university invitations have come in.
You know, Harvard and Penn and Cornell and Stanford and just got back from American University this week in Notre Dame last week.
So I think it's been good.
You know, there are people who don't want to hear about this who are not so open minded. And I will say that we've had some hostility in the kind of progressive media space. You know, I would say Blue sky, which I think was founded as a kind of alternative, progressive alternative to Twitter when Elon Musk acquired that platform.
We're often some close to being reviled there.
I'm not going to name the individuals or their shows, but that's been one thing. And some of the progressive outlets have been a little unfair.
The Atlantic had a piece by Roger Karma, who we had a very good conversation with and he's a good journalist, but he actually called our book are nihilistic at the end.
I think what he meant was because we're the the evidence we report doesn't show that the non pharmaceutical interventions worked, but that's what the evidence shows. And since we're trying to be Truthful, it seemed to me we're anything but nihilistic. We're just being honest.
But some people want to resist that. Perhaps there's better evidence to be gotten and perhaps someday we'll discover that. That some of these measures worked better than appears to be the case now, or at least as the evidence shows. But. So basically it's been good. But, you know, in. In some progressive precincts, there certainly has been pushback and I think, you know, I think some unfairness, but. But in a lot of the mainstream, people have been open and, you know, there are some signs of people being willing to do a reckoning, I think, especially on the cost of school closures. I know you had David Zweig on. We think his book is terrific. Came out just a little bit after ours, and we really like his book and it's very complementary to ours.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: Right.
Well, let's just talk a bit about how this collaboration between you and your co author came together and how did your perspectives differ during those very early days of the pandemic?
[00:07:46] Speaker B: Yeah, we talk about this a little bit at the beginning of the book just because I thought a little bit of color, you know, respecting our positions could be helpful also. Honest.
You know, when the pandemic came down, I was working on other things. I was kind of busy and I didn't really spend a lot of time reflecting, you know, to be honest. I mean, I felt sort of guilty saying this, but, you know, I had a kind of good pandemic. We live out in the countryside out here, side of Princeton. I wasn't unhappy to have meetings canceled.
Lots of meetings counseled, have to attend them online.
I had a light teaching schedule that semester, as it turned out. So that. Which was very difficult to do online was not so much of a problem and rather unusually. But I didn't reflect a lot on it. I knew there were some issues on which the media coverage was not fair. The origins of the virus, that it was a conspiracy theory that the virus. Virus might originate in the Wuhan lab was always clearly, I think, absurd to call it that.
And there were other aspects of the pandemic restrictions that seemed excessive. But I only my attitudes and views developed as a consequence of the research.
Now, Frances was a different story. She was skeptical from the start. She was engaged in thinking about these things from the start. She was living in Washington and was convinced from the start that the lockdown measures and so on were a mistake. So she had a rather different attitude, as she has said.
And I didn't really get to know her until after the lockdowns were eased and we had lunch and started discussing this and some other matters. And it turned out that we were in agreement and I found her perspective extremely helpful. And I started on the book on my own first.
But it turned out to be a terrific collaboration and we have a hard time coming up with something that we disagree about.
She's been a wonderful collaborator, very enjoyable to work with. She's a terrific scholar of congress and national public policy making.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: Well, perhaps we'll have to have her on as well. So talking about people's attitudes this far out. Last year I traveled to. To Australia, which had some of the harshest lockdowns and restrictions during COVID And the general feeling I observed was that no one wanted to talk about it.
Everybody just wanted to move on.
Where do you think that reluctance comes from?
I've asked this same question to several different guests.
One who was actually from Australia and led protests against the lockdowns there, said that for many this was sort of a peak Maslow experience where they were doing, you know, what they thought was right for the cause and putting up with these, you know, restrictions and making sacrifices.
I wonder if, you know, people also were. It just. It's a natural human thing. You don't necessarily want to go and reevaluate your positions and admit that perhaps you were mistaken and it's time to change your mind. But what do you make of that reluctance, whether abroad or here at home?
[00:11:21] Speaker B: Well, I think you've put your finger on it to some considerable degree. I mean, first of all, I think for many people it was a very unpleasant experience. The social distancing, the anxiety, the fear, the panic and you know, the extreme measures that were taken, all of the important events in life that didn't occur or didn't occur in person at least because. Because of the social distancing measures. And that includes, you know, high school graduations, college graduations, weddings, funerals, visiting sick relatives in nursing homes and so on. I mean, there were extreme measures and for many people, not to mention loss of, of work, loss of employment, business and so on. So the measures undertaken were extreme and I think for many people they were not pleasant to look back on. But then two, as you say, I think that having invested so much in these measures, having disrupted life so pervasively, life as we know it and adopted course of course, of policies and across the whole society, I think there is now some probably feeling that it's a very painful thing to go back and re examine, you know, especially if the Evidence for the effectiveness of these measures is not terrific. So yes, I think there are, you know, multiple grounds for people's reluctance, the nature of the experience itself, but then also perhaps, you know, an unfortunate unwillingness to look back and see, well, was it worth it? I mean, facing up to the question of whether all these sacrifices were actually worth it or whether they provided any benefit at all with respect to mortality from the virus is a very difficult question to face up to. It's a question we need to face up to, but I think it's a question that many people are reluctant to face up to.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: So you mentioned David Zweig's book and we had him on this podcast a couple of months ago to talk about it. And he's actually the one who said that your book was a must read. And he echoed point that you and your co author make compellingly, which is how the language of public health officials during COVID was remarkably devoid of nuance, doubt or any acknowledgement of trade offs. How did a pretense of such certainty ultimately harm the credibility of the public health establishment? And what might have a healthier approach to such statements have sounded like.
[00:14:02] Speaker B: Yes, well, again, the premise of your question is certainly absolutely correct.
I mean, it's astonishing that on many issues, public health officials, scientists, public policymakers, simply did not acknowledge the limits of our knowledge, did not acknowledge the existence of doubts, uncertainty. I mean, Francis Collins did a the head of the National Institutes of Health during COVID did a panel at the Braver Angels organization, July 2023. And he said some remarkable things, including that in press conferences and at public events and so on. During COVID he had many occasions when he and others in public health urged people to do things and expressed views about evidence without acknowledging the amount of uncertainty involved, without acknowledging the degrees of uncertainty in the evidence. And he said we did that because we wanted change to happen in case it was right, but we didn't acknowledge the limits of our knowledge, the limits of our evidence, and the fact that we didn't know it was right and we lost a lot of trust and credibility along the way. So I think that's absolutely correct.
You know, on various things.
Dr. Paul Offit, for example, at the University of Pennsylvania, he's a pediatric and physician and researcher and writes on public policy.
You know, he was on the vaccine advisory committees and he says there too. And in many places people simply were unwilling to acknowledge the full range of evidence, the fact of some side effects from the vaccines, even if they're infrequent and even if vacc, you know, for those at risk, was certainly a good idea.
But for instance, when boosters were being recommended in the United States for everyone over the age of six months, he noted to some of his colleagues who were then on the vaccine advisory committee he had left that in fact there wasn't evidence for benefit for very young people from the vaccine boosters and indeed that the Europeans were only recommending them for people over the age of 65.
And asked them why they were having these sweeping recommendations. And he was told, well, we think that the people who need the vaccines are more likely to get them if we recommend them to everybody.
So not a decision based on scientific evidence, a recommendation that in a way defied the absence of evidence with respect to the benefits for healthy people, but based on kind of speculation about what would be more persuasive. So I think there are many issues on which public health officials failed to be frank. Let me just note one thing on that score.
There was a colleague of John Ioannidis at Stanford who was a very well respected COVID policy because he actually told the Washington Post this, you know, it's okay for there to be disagreement in science, it's okay for there to be disagreement in public health, but these disagreements should not take place in public.
And I think the notion that somehow scientific debates should not be, that they shouldn't be exposed to the public is just an appalling idea.
You know, the notion that science should debate these matters, but they should do so in private and not express the true state of the evidence to the public is just a kind of appalling bit of paternalism on the part of some scientists. And I think there was a fair amount of that going on.
[00:17:29] Speaker A: So frequently people say, well, we didn't know anything, we didn't have a plan.
And that's not quite true. And this is a point that I return to again and again. So I would like to hear from your perspective, what was the state of Western pandemic planning with regard to large outbreaks of respiratory viruses, specifically with regard to recommendations about non pharmaceutical interventions, lockdowns, masks, mandates, et cetera from the policies adopted by the United States and many other countries. One might assume that such aggressive interventions were the playbook, but that is not the case.
[00:18:15] Speaker B: Yes, you're quite correct.
There were decades of pre COVID pandemic planning documents that were done, surveys of the evidence with respect to all of the non pharmaceutical interventions from school closures, business closures, border closures, contact tracing, masking and so on, and the consistent, well the pretty consistent message for most of those was that the evidence in support of each of these measures was very low or poor.
The World Health Organization put out a report in November 2019, just weeks before the COVID pandemic emerged.
And it said among the things that were not recommended in any circumstances were border closures, contact tracing of exposed individuals, and several other measures that were adopted, contact and trace measures and so on.
And you know, the Johns Hopkins did out another report in the summer of 2019 and likewise rated the evidence in support of all these measures as very low. And these pre COVID pandemic planning documents also warned that public officials would have an incentive to implement these measures not on public health grounds or scientific grounds, but in order to show the public that they were in charge, in order to demonstrate to the public political leadership or the appearance of political leadership. And so these documents the responsibility of scientists and public health officials to inform the public about the limited evidentiary basis for these measures and the fact that they would be extremely costly.
These pre COVID pandemic plan documents were emphatic that the costs of these measures would be considerable and were certain to occur.
And you know, there were enthusiasts for these measures, mathematical modelers principally, who did speculative modeling based on projections about behavior that might take place as a consequence of various kinds of interventions.
But people who examined those models tended to find the evidentiary base quite weak.
[00:20:35] Speaker A: What about other pre pandemic thinking with regards to, say, civil liberties? You highlighted how the ACLU produced a paper in 2008 examining the important non economic costs of restrictions. So what did that paper say? And why didn't the ACLU revisit it?
[00:20:54] Speaker B: Yes. No, indeed, that's exactly right. 2008, the ACLU said that voluntary measures were far more effective than coercive measures, that people don't want to get sick, people don't want to make other people sick, they want to avoid catching diseases and spreading them. And if given good information, they'll engage in voluntary behavior. And so that was dangerous, according to the aclu, to wed the values of law enforcement and public health. They warned about that.
They warned that school closures and other measures would have disproportionately negative effects on essential workers and on the poor and minorities.
And so they suggested that voluntary measures work better, that mandatory measures would encourage the people who perhaps couldn't afford to miss work and so on to evade public health authorities, and that it would reduce trust in government and have other negative consequences.
So it really is a very good statement that was put out by three Boston university law and public health professors.
And it is really striking that during the COVID pandemic, the ACLU was completely silent, including about the information that we have through the case of Missouri versus Biden, which became Murphy versus Missouri on appeal, about the extent to which federal officials, administration officials and executive branches were contacting social media companies surreptitiously and pressuring them to algorithmically deboost messages on social media at odds with government policy and to boost messages supporting government policy. Social media companies were threatened with revocation of section 230, which provide, which protects them, excuse me, from liability for things on the platforms. Revoking Section 230 would destroy the business model of social media platforms.
So there was real coercive pressure exerted on the social media companies. Now, Mark Zuckerberg and the head of the other companies have acknowledged this and sort of renounced it, said it was a mistake and they wouldn't do it again. But you know, it's rather astonishing that so far as I know, the American civil Liberties Union never filed a brief in that case.
And again, so far as I know, there are no law school. I don't have no law school conferences that have taken place on the issues that that case raises. Because there are some questions about whether at what point jawboning or government pressures amount to violation of first amendment become coercive. There are some important questions there, but I don't know of any law, law school conferences, you know, that have taken place on that. So it has been astonishing lack of attention to some aspects, many aspects of the COVID pandemic.
[00:23:39] Speaker A: That's the job. Owning a very nice social media company you've got there. It would be a shame if you were to lose it, wouldn't it?
And we've seen recently that both parties are at the moment no stranger to using that kind of pressure to try to coerce their political ends, but wanted to ask the broader question before. I promise those in the audience, I will be getting to your questions, but as you know, when it comes to this topic, I'm a little bit obsessed. And so there are some questions that I do want to make sure that we get to. And one of them is how did it come to be that so much of the west, in spirit, if not in precise mimicry, came to adopt China's radical zero Covid approach of containing or eliminating the virus, While Sweden, which again was following the much more standard established pre pandemic planning and policies, Sweden instead became.
[00:24:42] Speaker B: Yes, it's really kind of a remarkable story Some people have heard someone recently called the domino theory in reverse.
Yes. You know, I think there are various aspects to it.
At first, when China locked down Wuhan and Hubei province and some neighboring provinces, 60 million people, there was a lot of pushback. Then the World Health Organization sent a team of Chinese scientists. Half of them were Chinese scientists and then half were non Chinese scientists. Only two from the United States to Wuhan, to investigate the Chinese response and its effectiveness. They spent one week in China. I mean, many of the participants had never been to China. One of the American representatives was surprised that they had good technology and that sort of thing, seemed quite ignorant of, of the state of development of China. Any case, they spent one week there and came back and fulsomely endorsed the Chinese strategy. They put out a paper, a report online that was influential by the World Health Organization recommending the Chinese Chinese strategy for every government in the world. They said that the Chinese strategy has worked, they suppressed the virus successfully and every government in the world should, should adopt that strategy without really saying anything about the fact that people were literally being welded into their apartments, that, that coercive actions were being undertaken on a massive scale, that people were also required to use social media apps that, so the government could monitor their movements and there were quarantine facilities and so on that people were required to go to.
None of that was really emphasized in the statement. But the idea that every government in the world should adopt this strategy and the idea also that you would simply accept the numbers being provided by the Chinese and the official reporting and so on is kind of mind boggling. And the other thing that then happened soon after in March was that the World Health Organization director said that the mortality rate in Covid was 3.4%, which was a frighteningly high number. I mean, we knew at the time that that was an exaggeration, as many people pointed out, because we knew in early March, late February, you know, how many people were going to the hospital or emergency rooms or the doctor's offices seriously ill with COVID But we didn't know how many people had gotten Covid and had flu like, or cold like symptoms and didn't go to the doctor's office or to the emergency room. So we didn't, we knew the numerator, but we didn't know the denominator. And in fact the mortality rate from COVID seemed to be around 0.25, 0.27, a quarter of a percent, not 3.4%.
And then finally there was a report that came out from Imperial College London, done by one of the mathematical modelers who had been working in this space for quite some time and in fact has a considerable track record of overestimating the severity of pandemics for decades.
Nevertheless, his institute at Imperial College put out a report 9 on March 16 that had a worst case scenario that was interpreted as a prediction and indeed what was highlighted in the document, but that if we did not implement a whole suite of lockdown measures of the kind that were being adopted in China, kind that were discussed in the pre COVID pandemic plans, we would have 2.2. We could have 2.2 million dead Americans by August and half a million dead in the UK by August. Again, these were frightening numbers. That report was shown to Donald Trump and it was that day that he had a news conference with Drs. Fauci and Deborah Birx and held up a document that recommended school and business closures and other non pharmaceutical interventions. Places where there were community, there was community transmission.
So all of those events conspired. And then finally, I would say, you know, Italy imposed the first national lockdown around March 12, I think it was.
And you know, it showed that the people of a Western democracy were prepared to go along with, with that sort of extreme measure. And in some ways that was surprising to people that the public would, would welcome it, not just accept it, but welcome it.
So, so, and that led to a cascade across Europe.
Boris Johnson reversed his policy of, of, of resisting those kinds of measures and those policies swept the world. With the exception of Sweden. As you say, there's a very good book by Johann Onderberg called the Herd, which discusses. Yeah, you've had him on.
[00:29:22] Speaker A: Yeah, had him on to discuss it. Maybe we can also put the.
[00:29:26] Speaker B: Yeah, it's very good. And you know, so the Swedish health authority stuck to their guns. Now they had also overreacted to another pandemic. I think it was 2009 maybe. So they had that recent experience, but I think they recognized that these messengers would be extremely costly.
Johan Giesecki, one of the advisors, was very eloquent in the piece he wrote for, I think it was the Lancet, you know, defending the strategy, saying they were willing to bear a bit more risk for the sake of their grandchildren and putting on the table a wager that a year from then, a year from May, when he wrote the piece in May 2020, so in 2021, that Sweden's mortality rate would be just as no worse than other countries. And indeed he was right. So, but they were called, you know, they were, they were anathematized and Sweden's gone mad was the, you know, the reporting.
[00:30:22] Speaker A: So, and the, the irony there, of course is also that, you know, it was more of a, on the left, more of a liberal establishment that, you know, so they were not kind of following some partisan formula. They were definitely following the science or at least the pre pandemic planning and the established protocols. So we've got a lot of questions that are building up here. So I'm going to try to rip through at least as many of them as possible and if we can quickly dispatch those, then again, like I said, I have a lot of other questions that I, that I want to, to ask you. So Alan Turner says, I saw somewhere that you use the term laptop class. How do you define that group? Why did they shape the narrative or how.
[00:31:18] Speaker B: Well, you know, the journalist Matt Ridley pointed this out in his preface to a very good book by a Scottish epidemiologist, Mark Woolhouse, called the Year the World Went Mad. It's a very good book and along with the Anderberg book, it's one of the books that we read early on that really shaped our thinking.
And Ridley points out in the, the preface to that that it simply would have been impossible to pursue the lockdowns 20 years ago because not enough of the economy was online.
So I think the extent to which the economy for many people is online, that we're simply capable of working from home. A substantial part of the population, not everybody, obviously at least a third of workers were essential, had to keep working, process our food, deliver our food, transport our food, keep the electricity on, essential services, police, fire department, so on and so forth, not to mention hospitals and nurses and all of that. But nevertheless, a substantial part of the workforce could at least conceivably carry on at home. And I think that was probably one of the necessary preconditions of our being able to follow the Chinese strategy.
Jay Bhattacharya, I should say also I think we may have gotten that particular phrase from him or some others, other people have done it. But you know, in fact it just seems to be the case that the policies were made by educated elites. And I think that the, the plight of essential workers, working class people were just kind of invisible to them. You know, actually again, Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health at that Braver Angels panel said much the same thing. You know, we were in Washington D.C. making policy on Covid. We were thinking about big cities like New York. We really didn't pay much attention to what was going on in rural Minnesota or how these policies impacted people in different parts of the country.
So again, I think the policies were made by educated elites. They tended to benefit educated elites whose stock portfolios ballooned during COVID And I just think there was a certain amount of obliviousness to the impact of these policies on the lives of people who are less privileged, who were not able to work in the way that we are at the moment by talking to each other on these nice laptops as.
[00:33:45] Speaker A: Well as we can and again, appreciate the understanding of our audience of the limitations of hotel WI fi connections. So quick question from Jackson Sinclair. Did you discover any data relating to failures unique to the US versus shared with other democracies?
[00:34:04] Speaker B: Well, I mean, the thing I would say is that there were aspects of our performance that seemed to be worse than other Western democracies. I'll just make that comparison. So again, the Woolhouse books makes clear the year the world went mad that there was learning in the UK over the summer.
And David Zweig makes this point as well, that the Europeans started reopening their schools. Western Europeans, Britain, Britain, France, Germany, other countries started reopening their schools in April and May 2020, just after a few weeks.
But in blue states, in particular democratic states, most schools were closed in the fall of 2020 and many of them were closed throughout the school the 2021 school year. In March 2021, half the schools in the country were still closed and those were predominantly in blue states.
So on that I mentioned the vaccine boosters as well.
In Europe, the recommendations have been for some time boosters over the age of 65.
We've gone to that recommendation recently, but for a long time, for a couple of years, they were being recommended for everyone over six months on the basis that I mentioned before. That was kind of a messaging strategy.
And I do think we are more polarized in this country and to some degree, some of these matters have been harder to discuss.
I mean, 2020 was an election year. Donald Trump was on the ballot. I think that was a factor that made the discussion among these matters much more fraught and in some ways more fraught than in other countries.
[00:35:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that was one of the things that David Zweig and I talked about, that if Trump really wanted these schools to open, he should have advocated for school closures.
[00:35:55] Speaker B: That's a good point.
Virus couldn't have come from Iran, right?
[00:35:59] Speaker A: One last question.
Yes.
From Iliacin. To what extent do you this kind of gets to what we were talking about. So we may have already covered this. But to what extent do you believe the failure was technical poor data versus political incentives?
[00:36:16] Speaker B: I mean, it's a very good question. I mean, there was a data component to it for sure.
So, you know, as I mentioned early on and I just gave a talk yesterday and one of the professors there was expressing astonishment that this didn't happen. We could have done early on what are called seroprevalence studies, that is the CDC or anybody could have gone out, state health officials and tested people to see how many people in the population randomly sampled, say, had evidence of being exposed to the virus. So we would know how many people in the population were exposed to the virus but didn't get seriously ill. And yet that was not done. I mean, Bhattacharya realizing this in March or April 2020, you know, got together some of his grad students and his wife helped him out and they went to supermarket, you know, parking lots and, you know, tried to test people as they were going into supermarkets. Obviously it wasn't a very good sampling strategy, but it was kind of the best they could do. It led him to argue in a Wall Street Journal op ed that the, you know, the actual mortality rate from COVID might be much lower, orders of magnitude lower than was being estimated early on. So it's rather astonishing that we didn't do that. You know, on the other hand, it wasn't just a data failure.
We simply failed to consider the costs of these measures, having been warned for decades before that they would be costly.
And also, you know, there were slogans like follow the science, which expressed an impossibility. Science gives us some empirical evidence, or, you know, within levels of confidence, you know, about certain consequences and so on. But all policy choices involve value trade offs, questions of liberty versus safety, risk, risk estimates. And there aren't scientific answers to those questions. They're questions of values. And so it was never. There was never an option of following the science, which, which really was just a way of evading the inevitable necessity to weigh the value dimensions. The trade offs among these policies, along with the importance of basic liberties, which were not given enough weight as well. So there were moral failures as well as data failures, scientific failures, as the questioner asked.
[00:38:32] Speaker A: So yes, one of our scholars here at the Atlas Society, Richard Salzman, wrote an excellent article which was follow the science in every field. Right, right. That we weren't following science of economics or other aspects. Okay, want to get to like outcomes. So states here in America follow starkly different approaches with regard to lockdowns. School closures mask mandates. States like California, New York and Illinois imposing some of the strictest and longest lasting restrictions. Others like South Dakota, Florida, Texas. Taking an opposite track, how do these different approaches pan out in terms of COVID deaths and excess?
[00:39:15] Speaker B: Yes, well, it's just as you said, there was a strong partisan relationship between the stringency of lockdowns, the length of school closures and political party. So the more democratic states, the graphs are just very striking, imposed longer school closures, earlier school closures, earlier stay at home orders, longer stay at home orders. Oxford University very conveniently nicely came up with a stringency index of nine different factors. School closures, business closures, border closures, so on and so forth. And they kind of rated governments around the world, including the states, as to their stringency overall of pandemic restrictions. And so you can compare that.
And it just turns out that while there are these strong partisan relationships to the application and severity of restrictions of various sorts, there's no association that we can find in the data to reduce mortality. So there's no evidence in the data that the states that had the longer and tougher and more stringent restrictions did any better in terms of mortality. There's an absence of evidence. We don't claim to prove that the measures didn't work, but we argue that there's an absence of evidence to support the proposition they did work. In social science jargon, it is that we can't reject the null hypothesis of no effect.
The other point that to be made though is that Republican states were also slower on vaccine uptake than Democratic states. And so mortality did trend upward in Republican states after vaccines were available.
I think the mortality was something like a third higher in Republican states after vaccines were available, but not before. I mean, that's the crucial point.
The states diverged in discernible mortality only after the vaccines were available. There's a study of Europe by scholars From Milan to 29 states of Europe diverged even more widely than the United States in terms of the stringency of these measures.
And there again the authors of that study, the best study that we know that's available, based on a 10 year average of mortality before COVID find to their surprise that there's no relationship between the stringency of the measures, the length of the closures and so on, and mortality. So simply an absence of evidence. This has been the point that seems to be hardest to convince people of just that. That's the, that's the state of the data people have argued. We allow in the book that there's some evidence of reduced transmission in the places with more stringent restrictions, but just no evidence. A lack of good evidence for reduced mortality. That could be because people in nursing homes and so on who are vulnerable need more human contact.
There are a variety of reasons why this might be the case, but that's just simply what the. That's simply the state of the evidence at the moment.
[00:42:11] Speaker A: So more generally, did the states with their wildly different approaches live up to aspirations of serving as laboratories of democracy in terms of learning from the successes or mistakes from other experiments or.
[00:42:28] Speaker B: Well, I mean, I think you could say in some ways they live up to it, that they diverged and we do have some results to report, which I've just reported.
You know, on the other hand, governors who pursued these wildly different strategies, some of which show a lack of success. So best we can discern, very costly strategies, so far as we can tell from the available data, did not succeed in reducing mortality. I mean, you would consider that to be a rather large policy failure given the costliness of these measures for children, for businesses, for the economy and so on, to basic human well being.
And yet governors in Democratic states that pursued these measures remained popular.
Gavin Newsom got reelected and so did the governors in the Republican states so far. So there has been a lack of learning. I don't think all of these results have gotten out to the public. I don't think they've been ingested partly because they haven't been reported on. Journalists didn't do their work either. Journalists were constantly egging on governments to do more. And as you said at the outset, there's been insufficient reporting in mainstream media about the profound costs of these measures. I think people intuit them but. And some of the evidence about school closures is being reported.
But I would say that the laboratories of democracy ideal did not succeed insofar as there hasn't the public hasn't fully taken on board and acted upon the results that seem to be available, which is that the lockdown measures, that we lack evidence for their effectiveness.
We have plenty of evidence for the profound costs of these measures, not just in economic terms, but basic human well being as well as civil liberties. But we lack evidence for their effectiveness. That one would think is a message that ought to be registered if the laboratories of democracy metaphorically would be regarded as having played a successful role.
[00:44:31] Speaker A: So right at the top of the interview we talked about the reception of your book and how it has been welcomed and treated fairly in some quarters. I wonder if part of that is like, okay, we're ready to talk about this subject and that subject. But certain subjects are still taboo. And from my perch, it seems like one of those taboo subjects are just not willing to kind of take a look at it yet is the issue of masking and masking mandates in a social setting. Gathering this past summer where I was among, you know, loyal New York Times readers who were still, you know, very much believing in the efficacy of face masks as, you know, unquestioningly effective.
And when I mentioned the Cochrane Review, the person came back in a couple of hours to show me the New York Times op ed that was critical of the Cochrane Review. So you do have a long section in which you talk about the Cochrane Review in particular, and you go into the findings, but also explore how the response to the findings was in some ways demonstrative of the patterns that have undermined objective thinking and objective evaluation of scientific findings throughout Covid and in its wake. So I'm wondering if you could catch that.
[00:45:59] Speaker B: Yes, we have a chapter on the mask debate, as it were, and we kind of organize it around the sort of two warring op EDS in the New York Times, one by my actually now current colleague in sociology, Zeynep Tufekse, who writes on social media issues and other issues in the New York Times.
And her opinion piece was entitled, perhaps she didn't choose the title, Editors Often do, but it was entitled something like the Science Is Clear Mask's Work.
And we do think that she overrepresented the findings of a couple of studies done during COVID 19. The op ed was in the spring of 2023.
Those studies in Bangladesh and Denmark that were at first understood to show some positive findings with respect to masking, actually the studies were corrupted by people dropping out of them. So the results were not meaningful. The Bangalore study was massive. It involved two villages of 170,000, I think it was. So untold numbers of people took part, but unfortunately the results were modest. And then it turned out that enough people had dropped out of the study, so the results were corrupted. And the same thing with the Denmark study. So there is an absence of evidence there.
The Cochrane Review has been publishing studies, meta studies of the available evidence on mask wearing with respect to respiratory viruses and other things for decades. And at the beginning of COVID they were ready to issue their fifth revision, you know, just updating previous reviews that they had put out of the empirical evidence. And it was held up because the. The overall editors of that institution thought that it would be untimely.
There was a big back and forth between the overall editor and the particular editors of the Masking Review, which, which got quite nasty. It obviously was politicized.
But any case, I just think there's an absence of evidence for the effectiveness of these things and especially for mass mandates. Bret Stephens did an alternative op ed in the New York Times a bit after Zeynep Tufexes, which argued that science is not clear. And he conceded, and I think this is proper, that at the individual level, if an individual chooses to wear a mask, to wear it tightly, to wear an N95 to do so for their own purposes, you know, fine, let individuals make these individual decisions. But we lack evidence to support mask mandates. And I think that in fact is true.
The kinds of masks that were recommended, of course, during COVID often were surgical masks which are not designed to prevent respiratory viruses.
Many of them, in fact, in particular countries say on the boxes, not for viruses. And it's illegal to advertise such masks as virus preventers. In Australia, for example, you can be fined there.
N95s again, if worn with great discipline, may have benefits at the individual level, but mandates with respect to the population are poorly supported.
These things are controversial. I have a colleague in economics who's a very eminent economist who thinks that the Cochrane reviews are garbage because it's hard to do randomized control trials and it holds up studies to an excessive standard. So again, there's a lot of uncertainty here. But you know, a lot of the recommendations that were made were bandanas and so on, and there's just a lot of.
There's just a kind of, there's no evidence for that kind of thing at all. I'll just say this. On the mass thing, Dr. Fauci was asked in 2019, before COVID by an interviewer in the event of another pandemic, what should we do? Should we wear masks? And he immediately interrupted the interviewer and said, no, no, avoid the paranoid stuff. Get a good night's sleep, do normal healthy things. Eat well, don't drink too much. Do the normal healthy things, avoid the paranoid stuff. So, you know, the messaging shifted around radically on masks and, you know, a lot of it was political and some it had to do with kind of, I guess, giving people something to do if they really felt anxious that that might help them. I think there was a kind of psychological salve, you know, to the recommendations as well.
[00:50:26] Speaker A: So, you know, at the beginning we were talking about kind of the local color and how you and your co author were coming from different places and you write about how you know, very anxious you were and that you were, you know, disinfecting your groceries, changing your clothes before you came into the house.
And that really, a lot of what you learned, you learned in the process of researching this book. So I'd like to ask, as we're starting to wrap up here, what were some of the things that most surprised you? Or did you come into this process with certain beliefs and the process of researching the book led you to change your mind?
[00:51:15] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, my partner here has a respiratory.
A bit of a respiratory issue, so that was part of the reason for all the bleaching of the groceries and so on. I shouldn't say that too loud, but, you know, but I did want to comply. And, yeah, I was frightened early on, too, when the messaging was quite dire.
But I would say that, you know, one thing that we haven't talked about. No, we won't have time to talk about it, but is the whole issue involving the origins of the virus. I suppose that the part of the book that researching the book, and we have a considerable discussion of this that most astonished me is the apparent, you know, misleading messaging that's taken place around the origins of the virus. I mean, the fact is that it's very likely that the virus that caused the worst pandemic in a century was manipulated purposefully in a lab in China, with the US Government supporting that kind of research and that kind of lab, that is, it turns out the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Allergic and Infectious Diseases, had been funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars, well, millions of dollars, to the Eco Health alliance in New York City, which then funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And I think there's been a lot of obfuscation around that.
And there were scientists who suspected a lab leak very early on, who then had conversations with Dr. Fauci and Collins and others, and who then, after a hurriedly arranged phone call, wrote an article setting out to debunk the lab origin theory rather than air the arguments on both sides. And even.
And so I think that that's a bit. That's kind of scandalous that that issue has not been subjected to wider exposure. Gain of function research, which is designed to make viruses more transmissible and more deadly, is going on in labs around the world.
Viruses have leaked out of labs many times. In 2017, in the UK there was a conference on future pandemics, and the lab that was identified as the most likely source of a future pandemic was The Wuhan Institute of Virology. It's very dangerous research. It's very controversial. And we failed to discuss this adequately.
I think in part because the question of the origins of COVID has not been sufficiently aired and publicized. The House committee investigating this actually did a very good job, Congressman Brad Wenstrup and did a very good report on this, but it didn't get any coverage in the New York Times. So there are lots of aspects of this that I found just astonishing.
And unfortunately, the scientific establishment with respect to the origins of the virus continues to cover up, maybe is too strong a word, but fail to take seriously and to publicize and pursue, you know, the question of the origins of this virus and the danger that's posed by ongoing gain of function research on coronaviruses and other pathogens at labs around the world. So I would say that's the part of the book that I found the most astonishing.
There are emails that were obtained and slack messages interops communications by an organization called U.S. right to Know.
That organization deserves a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting.
And the journalist Wendy Kopp with a K K O P P deserves a Pulitzer Prize, but she has said that she's not able to secure employment as a journalist anywhere after having done this work. So there's been a failure to pursue the truth around various aspects of COVID And I think the. The origins of the virus itself is simply an aston that people have read that part of our book, have expressed. They said that they were flabbergasted and made angry by that discussion in our book.
[00:55:14] Speaker A: Yes, I think David Zweig said that was the section where he was a punching the wall kind of moment.
No.
You know, I wonder. I've asked this question a lot to guests when we talk about this subject of whether or not you are optimistic or pessimistic about lessons learned and whether we'll be able to avoid repeating these kinds of mistakes when a similar crisis run comes along. And I'm wondering how you feel about that. I mean, perhaps I do remember very early on and kind of disagreeing with my parents on the value and the necessity and the effectiveness of some of these measures. And she said, well, one day we'll know. Here we are five and a half years out and there still is not quite the reckoning that I think that there should have been. But how are you feeling in terms of policy leaders and a return to a more objectively based kind of planning process going forward?
[00:56:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I can't say that I'm hugely optimistic at the moment. Our politics is toxically polarized. And that spills over into academic and scientific inquiry, you know, on matters that are of political significance. And that's certainly true of COVID I mean, there have been inklings of openness to discussion. I mean, it's, we really appreciate the, the mainstream, important organizations like the New York Times, the PBS NewsHour, and so on that have been, have been willing to entertain this. And I think that applies to a number of other places.
Johns Hopkins University is going to do an event for us with the American Enterprise Institute in November. So there are, you know, there are signs of opening on this particular issue, but the background problem is the intense polarization of our politics.
It's a tendency to politicize questions. And unfortunately, academics and researchers and journalists all get swept up in that. We're not immune to the pull of partisan politics. And it's very hard for many people to, you know, to be fair minded to those on the other side. You know, I think there are efforts being made in universities to sponsor and promote more civil dialogue. I think those are good efforts. There are efforts being made under the rubric of civic education to promote more, more openness to diverse points of view. And I think that's a very good thing. We need more viewpoint diversity in universities. So there is, you know, there are signs of improvement and we'll see.
But I can't say that I've developed any wild optimism. But we do appreciate these kinds of conversations and we do appreciate that people agree with us that these are important things that we all need to think more about.
[00:58:08] Speaker A: So what is next for you and where can we follow your work?
[00:58:12] Speaker B: Well, you know, I can't say that I'm disposed to leave these things completely aside. This was a kind of, you know, we plunged into this because of the pandemic. I think there are a lot of questions involving expertise and democracy and administrative agencies. I'm going to teach a grad course next semester on democracy expertise in the administrative state. So I don't think I'm going to leave these issues completely behind. I've done other things related to immigration policy and other matters where I think that, again, the progressives have not paid enough attention to concerns that come from the more conservative side of the spectrum.
And so I'll go back and do a book on immigration at some point.
Many, many pluses around immigration, of course, but there have been downsides, I think, for working class people at their various points in our history.
So I'll be running on other public policy matters, but probably stick with the issue of democracy and expertise and the kind of fraught relation there for a little while yet. There's much more to be learned, I think, about things related to the COVID pandemic, and I'm not going to abandon them completely just because the book's done.
[00:59:15] Speaker A: We hope to have you on another time as your work and your publishing career continues to evolve. So thank you very much, Stephen.
[00:59:24] Speaker B: Thank you very much, jag. I really appreciate it.
[00:59:26] Speaker A: Okay. And thanks to all of you joining us here today. Again, thanks for the patience with some of the, you know, limitations of trying to do a podcast from a hotel room. I hope perhaps, maybe, maybe to be at the studio next week to interview a dear friend of mine, Draina Sixto, who's risen up the ranks at Turning Point. For as long as I've been at the Atlas Society, we've had many private conversations in the weeks since the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And at this point, I would like to bring you, our listeners and our viewers and our audience into that conversation so she can talk about the leader who she knew and lost. And also as a student organizer for many years, she can share her perspective on the movement that Charlie started. So it's going to be personal and somewhat painful, but hopefully a little bit of healing conversation. And I look forward to seeing you again next week. Thanks.
