The premise of the book “In Covid’s Wake: How our Politics Failed Us” is to candidly ask, four years later, if the world reacted reasonably and responsibly to a global pandemic. That is really a rhetorical question, asked by co-authors Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, because their conclusion is a grim one.
“Science became politicized and dissent was driven to the margins,” the book’s description reads.
“In the next crisis Macedo and Lee warn, we must not forget the deepest values of liberal democracy: tolerance and open-mindedness, respect for evidence and its limits, a willingness to entertain uncertainty, and a commitment to telling the whole truth.”
Macedo and Lee, who teach political science at Princeton, recall how the Far Left moralized the pandemic, meaning the people who refused the vaccine, mocked masks and the six-foot rule, the state governors who re-opened schools, and the store owners who kept their business open, were labeled a selfish and evil “grandma killer” by a fear-driven mob.
Reacting to the book’s goal, talk show host Richard Randall says the liberal authors were honest about questioning policies that harmed hundreds of millions of Americans.
“There was plenty of information that the authors found that was out there,” he says, “that would have specifically said not to shut down transportation [and] not to shut down schools.”
Rasmussen poll revealed a lot
Interviewed by The Guardian newspaper about the book, Macedo said the idea for the book came from his own academic research over how the Left refuses to listen to or consider conservative arguments.
“Covid,” Macedo told The Guardian, “is an amazing case study in groupthink and the effects of partisan bias.”
Just how bad was the groupthink at the time?
In a 2022 poll by Rasmussen, 55% of Democrat voters supported fining people who refused the COVID-19 vaccine, and 59% supported keeping their neighbors confined at home for refusing the vaccine.
The most jaw-dropping poll question was about being removed from your home into a designated quarantine facility. A strong majority, 71%, opposed that idea but 49% of Democrats supported it.
Those same Democrats likely supported President Biden's executive order that required unvaccinated Americans, estimated to be about 81 million at the time, to get the controversial shot in order to keep their jobs.
"This is not about freedom or personal choice," Biden lectured in a White House speech. "It's about protecting yourself and those around you, the people you work with, the people you care about, the people you love."
"I don't think I'll ever forget it," TV host Jesse Kelly, recalling that speech, remarked in an X post just last month. "That a president felt comfortable speaking that way to the people is not something I can think of ever happening before."
President Biden's order, which required OSHA to fine non-compliant employers, was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
For her part, Lee said she was alarmed how the World Health Organization and U.S. officials chose to model China’s own lockdown, even though that meant mirroring the tactics of an authoritarian government that itself had lied about the outbreak in the crucial early days of the pandemic.
A related issue is the so-called “lab leak theory” about the origin of the virus. That conclusion was dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” by the Biden administration, and by the liberal media, which ridiculed anyone who suggested a virus that originated in the city of Wuhan came from the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Randall says the book includes some remarkable admissions by the authors but he's not convinced it goes far enough to conclude the Left is taking responsibility for its horrendous policies.
“I don't think it satisfies me,” he concludes, “that they have been 100% candid with what's going on.”
