I knew that I was right, partly because I understood the basics of science and partly because I had already read some epidemiologists’ skeptical comments about lockdowns. What I didn’t know was how right I was. There was a well-established understanding in the literature by epidemiologist D.A. Henderson (no relation) and others that non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in the pandemic were not worthwhile. This was partly because NPIs couldn’t do much to stop the spread of a coronavirus, but mainly because the negative effects on people’s physical and mental health, their economic well-being, and children’s development, would be huge.

That message comes across loud and clear in the new book In Covid’s Wake, by Princeton University political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee. The authors thoroughly cover the issues: laying out the well-known problems with NPIs, discussing the ways that federal public health officials Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Frances Collins suppressed information about COVID, providing the receipts on how experts who had bought into the earlier scientific consensus against NPIs did a quick U‑turn and castigated those who stuck with the consensus, showing how Fauci and others tried to suppress the idea that the pandemic stemmed from a lab leak in China, and documenting the World Health Organization’s (WHO) literally changing its definition of “herd immunity” to exclude the possibility that anything other than a vaccine can create it. These are only some of the highlights of this excellent book.

Corrupt “science” / A charge that many in the scientific community made against skeptics of using lockdowns to suppress the disease was that they weren’t “following the science.” Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the main public face of President Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force, even went so far as to say on national television, “[T]o criticize me is to criticize science.” This was absurd because, as many people noted even early on, one of the key elements of science is skepticism.

Moreover, the conventional wisdom before COVID was that NPIs were not a good way to deal with a pandemic. Macedo and Lane quote the above-mentioned D.A. Henderson:

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.

Why did the practice of authorities in so many countries deviate so quickly from the conventional wisdom? You might think that it’s because there were serious flaws in the conventional wisdom. But no one seemed to point out those flaws. Rather, as early as January 22, 2020, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the WHO, praised the Chinese government’s extreme authoritarian approach. Macedo and Lee document this in a chapter aptly titled, “Turning on a Dime.” WHO then sent 25 experts to China, on the WHO–China Joint Mission of February 16–24, 2020, to observe the Chinese government’s response. That led to a report in late February that glowingly endorsed China’s extreme lockdowns.

One of the two American participants was Clifford Lane, a deputy director of the US NIAID and subordinate of Fauci. In an interview in Science upon his return, Lane lauded “the completely unified perspective of how this virus was the enemy, and we were launching an attack, and we’re going to defeat it.” Fortunately, the interviewer stated the obvious fact that Lane might not be able to trust what he learned from people in China because they don’t have freedom of speech. Lane replied defensively, “They’re trying to get things back to more normal and to loosen some of these restrictions.” Note his implicit admission that the Chinese don’t have freedom of speech. Their responses to foreign strangers, then, should have been taken with a large dose of salt.

Macedo and Lane point out Lane’s admission that although there was interaction with the Chinese members of the joint mission in meetings, they traveled separately in their own bus. The authors wonder whether that was because “the meetings but not the buses were easily monitored.” I checked the Science interview, conducted by Jon Cohen, to see whether this made Lane suspicious. Apparently not, because Lane stated, “I don’t think it was deliberate to prevent interaction.”

Another cheerleader for the Chinese approach was Dr. Bruce Aylward, a Canadian epidemiologist and a co-chair of the mission. Aylward stated that Wuhan “is a ghost town, but behind every window there are people cooperating with this response.” Behind every window in a ghost town with a population in the millions? Doesn’t that sound suspicious? Apparently not to Aylward because he added, “People have said there is a big presence forcing them, but there isn’t.” Macedo and Lee are skeptical. They point out that news reports early in February, before the mission’s visit, showed “residents being welded into their apartments because someone in the building had tested positive.” This, they write, “suggests something less than the cheerful cooperation and complete unity reported by Aylward and Lane.”

Macedo and Lee also document the harsh response to the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), published October 4, 2020. Its lead author was Dr. Martin Kulldorf, a professor of medicine at Harvard and a biostatistician and epidemiologist. The other two authors were Dr. Sunetra Gupta, a professor at Oxford University and epidemiologist who is also an expert in modeling infectious diseases, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford University Medical School who is also a physician and health economist. Bhattacharya, who has since become a friend, told me that that statement was one of the least controversial things he had ever co-authored.

But, oh my word, were the knives ever out for the GBD and its authors! Gregg Gonsalves, a professor at Yale University’s School of Public Health, had, back in March 2020, authored a letter stating that mandatory quarantines and regional lockdowns “are difficult to implement, can undermine public trust, have large societal costs and, importantly, disproportionately affect the most vulnerable segments in our communities.” All of that turned out to be true and was apparent to many observers by the time the GBD was published. But here’s what Gonsalves wrote about the GBD (and later deleted) on Twitter:

I’m in my mid-50s. I have HIV. I saw my friends die in droves in the 80s, 90s. I have no more fucks left to give. Except those peddling pseudoscience, bankrolled by right-wing, libertarian assholes can kiss my queer ass.

One other case of corrupt science the authors document is WHO’s sneaky change in the definition of herd immunity, which is the resistance to the spread of an infectious disease within a population when a high proportion of individuals have immunity. Herd immunity can come about from natural immunity—people getting infected and then recovering—or vaccination or both. WHO understood that. But, the authors note, between June and November 2020, WHO rewrote its website to state that “‘herd immunity’, also known as ‘population immunity’, is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.” There was no mention of natural immunity, even though there had been before.

Lab leak theory / Another instance of corrupt science was over whether the COVID virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan instead of from an animal market in the city, which was the predominant theory. There were some reasons to suspect a lab leak. First, there was an important lab in Wuhan doing research on viruses, including coronaviruses like COVID. Second, it was known then that some labs were experimenting with “gain-of-function” research, which is research to try to make a virus more lethal. It would turn out that the Wuhan lab was one of those labs.

One of Macedo and Lee’s biggest contributions is their discovery that many scientists close to the issue suspected a lab leak as early as January 2020. Some of those scientists later denied the plausibility of a lab leak. Finally, the authors show, the statements that denied a lab leak were orchestrated by, among others, Fauci and Collins.

The story is worth reading in full and is, on its own, arguably worth the price of the book, but here’s a short version: In January 2020, Dr. Jeremy Farrar (now chief scientist of the WHO) heard “chatter” among the scientific community that the SARS-CoV‑2 virus “looked almost engineered to infect human cells.” He then wondered whether the coronavirus had “anything to do with ‘gain-of function’ (GOD) studies.” Around the same time, Dr. Kristian Anderson of the Scripps Institute expressed to Farrar his worry that the virus had “properties that may have been genetically modified or engineered.” Yet, these two were among the group of researchers who set out to write the paper “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV2,” which focused “on trying to disprove any type of lab theory” (though Farrar was not listed as an author when the article ultimately appeared in Nature in March 2020). Why the switch?

One likely possibility is that they were influenced by Fauci and Collins, both of whom had access to billions of dollars in research funds that they could dangle in front of medical researchers. Weeks after the paper appeared, the lab of Anderson, who had written on February 4 that the lab leak explanation “is so friggin’ likely to have happened,” received a $1.9 million grant from Fauci’s NIAID. We now know, of course, that Fauci and Collins were advocates and funders of gain-of-function research. Collins and Fauci later referred to the “Proximal Origin” article without ever mentioning their involvement with the authors. The cover-up, at least back then, was secure.

Tradeoffs? / One lesson for public health—and it was one that was widely accepted before COVID—is that government intervention comes with tradeoffs. If governments were to lock down people for extended periods, there would be serious costs in terms of financial security, emotional health, and civil society overall.

But Collins, then-head of the National Institutes of Health, admitted in 2023 (when it was far too late) that he explicitly refused to make tradeoffs. Macedo and Lee quote the following from Collins:

When you’re a public health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life. It doesn’t matter what else happens.

Well, yes.

Relative risks? / Macedo and Lee point out that we knew from data from Italy as early as March 13, 2020—before the US and British lockdowns—that the risk of death from COVID was mainly to the elderly. That fact should have been shouted from the rooftops. But instead, it was de-emphasized.

The authors quote Scottish epidemiologist Mark Woolhouse pointing out that the UK government had pushed messages saying “We are all at risk” and “The virus does not discriminate.” The first statement is true but misleading, while the second is outright false. The fatality rate for the elderly was at least three orders of magnitude greater than the fatality rate for the young. Some members of the media were also guilty of misleading people. Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN, for example, wrote a book in which he told the stories of three people who had COVID, two of whom died. Those two were 22 and 41 years old, respectively, while the one who lived was 51 and had “long COVID,” the persistence of some symptoms for months or years afterward. Macedo and Lee comment, “The most notable thing about these cases is how unusual they are.” Moreover, these three vignettes “are the three vignettes that Dr. Gupta uses to introduce his book” (italics in original).

Where were the economists? / One depressing statistic the authors point to is the response of fairly well-known economists to this March 27, 2020, statement:

Abandoning severe lockdowns at a time when the likelihood of a resurgence in infections remains high will lead to greater total economic damage than sustaining the lockdowns to eliminate the resurgence risk.

Some 80 percent of the economists agreed and none disagreed. The authors point out correctly that the mathematical models that dominated policy discussions were all about COVID. But then they write, “No models were developed to take account of the costs of COVID policies.” That’s false. My Naval Postgraduate School colleague Jonathan Lipow and I published a piece in the June 15, 2020, Wall Street Journal that surveyed the cost–benefit research on COVID policy, and we noted:

Rather than validating draconian lockdown orders, the latest economic research on COVID-19 suggests that social-distancing efforts in general, and shelter-in-place measures in particular, have done more harm than good.

Conclusion / The power that governments in the United States and most of the rest of the world exerted on people’s lives because of the virus was horrendous. Governments ignored some relatively well thought out ideas of public health experts that went against lockdowns and other coercive measures based on a few mathematical models and, presumably, a lot of fear. Some of those same public health experts then turned on a dime, advocating coercive measures and even denouncing other experts who disagreed.

What was learned from this tragic episode in regulatory policy? Macedo and Lee write:

But the losses of the COVID pandemic will be further compounded if the conclusion political and economic elites draw from it is that their fellow citizens failed them.

That well could be the conclusion that many of the elite reach. The question for the rest of us is, though, is will we stand against those elites and their dubious interventions the next time something like this happens and not let them get away with it? That’s where my hope lies.