It has been more than five years since the outbreak of coronavirus. For many, the horrific images will never fade: Italian hospital wards overwhelmed; intubated patients; ventilator shortages; hazmat suits. New York City body bags, stacked; refrigeration trucks; nursing homes ravaged. Doctors, nurses, and hospitals besieged. Everywhere, empty streets; eerie silence; whole nations in lockdown. The fear of dying alone, slowly suffocating. It was the worst pandemic since 1918. And the global response was equally stunning, the greatest mobilization of emergency powers in human history.
By early April 2020, 3.9 billion people—half the world’s population—were living under some form of quarantine. People were confined to their homes, not allowed to attend religious services, see family living outside their households, or in some places even take solitary walks in parks or along beaches. Businesses were closed, and employees were laid off. Children were kept home from school. Borders were sealed, and global supply chains were severely disrupted. In response, public and private resources were marshaled on a vast scale. Within the United States alone, direct federal relief totaled over $5 trillion, nearly a quarter of GNP in 2020.
The pandemic was a stress test for our public health agencies and our economy, our health care and educational systems, and personal relationships. But it also tested, and still tests, our commitments to liberal democracy and to scientific, scholarly, and journalistic norms. Despite its once-in-a-century effects on our social and political lives, there has been a dearth of comprehensive retrospectives in academia, public affairs commentary, and government agencies. Three large and ferociously controversial questions still loom:
We have our own dispiriting answers to these questions: No, No, and No. We will defend these answers, but we are even more concerned to encourage a broad and serious public debate about these issues. Asking hard questions about the pandemic response is vital because we must learn from our mistakes before another crisis strikes.
In defending our dispiriting answers, we are, of course, mindful of the political context in which COVID-19 policy evolved—as well as the political context in which we make this plea for a comprehensive postmortem. Donald Trump was initially dismissive about the impact of COVID-19. Shocked by hospital images, initial reports of high fatality rates, and the pace of viral spread, public health experts and infectious disease epidemiologists may have worried that more frank communication—indicating uncertainty and acknowledging tradeoffs—might have terrible human consequences. No doubt, many professionals, government officials, and citizens still worry about the consequences of a frank assessment of pandemic policy—including the risk that such a conversation will lend credibility to Trump’s renewed attacks on media, universities, and government institutions, both domestic and international.
We recognize these risks. But we think the risks of continuing to evade hard facts and and honest self-assessments are far greater. The questions of public health policy discussed here have staggering implications for human lives. Equally important are questions about the confidence we can reside in expert judgment as a counterweight to openly partisan argument. We think that expert judgment is not simply partisan argument and that it is essential in making good policy. Our three particular questions really boil down to one large question: How best can U.S. institutions—across civil society and government—restore public confidence and strive to be more worthy of the public’s trust?
To start with the first question—whether U.S. government institutions and expert advisory groups accurately represented the balance of scientific opinion about the costs and benefits of pandemic interventions—we believe that any objective assessment must conclude that they did not.
Before the outbreak of COVID-19, scientists and public health officials had long been warning about and preparing for the next pandemic. There were two central messages in the variety of response plans produced by different bodies around the globe. First, there was limited evidence that non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs)—measures designed to reduce person-to-person contact, including business and school closures, mask mandates, and social distancing requirements—could effectively mitigate a pandemic or reduce associated mortality. And second, such interventions would be costly, with the costs falling disproportionately on children, working-class people, and minorities.
For example, just months before the pandemic struck, the World Health Organization (WHO) itself published a report comprehensively assessing the various NPIs proposed as potential tools for pandemic management. The report emphasizes uncertainty, rating the quality of evidence supporting nearly all such measures as “very low.” The executive summary reports “a limited evidence base on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical community mitigation measures.” Rated as “not recommended in any circumstances” were contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry and exit screening, and border closure. Even in late February 2020, the WHO issued an advisory “against the application of travel or trade restrictions to countries experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks.”
Likewise, in September 2019, the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security issued Preparedness for a High-Impact Respiratory Pathogen Pandemic. This report cautioned that the effectiveness of all NPIs “is uncertain and will largely depend on the context, timing, and epidemiology of the outbreak.” The report urged that prior to implementation, “countries must assess each proposed measure” for epidemiological effectiveness and logistical feasibility as well as conduct a “social, economic, and political assessment” of “the possible unintended adverse societal consequences.” In response to a “high-impact respiratory pathogen,” the report specifically counsels that “quarantine may be the least likely NPI to be effective.” The report further warns that governments may implement NPIs in order to “abate fear” or for other political reasons, such as to be seen to be in control. The discussion concludes: “It is important to communicate to political leaders the absence of evidence surrounding many NPI interventions and the adverse consequences that may follow them.”
Earlier still, the UK’s 2011 Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy warned that respiratory pandemics were not containable or controllable. The speed of modern travel and the short incubation period of respiratory viruses means “it almost certainly will not be possible to contain or eradicate a new virus in its country of origin or on arrival in the UK. The expectation must be that the virus will inevitably spread and that any local measures . . . are likely to have very limited or partial success at a national level and cannot be relied on as a way to ‘buy time.’”
Moreover, these and other plans emphasized that social distancing would be costly, not merely or even principally in economic terms. There would be winners and losers, the latter including children who would suffer life-course harms to their education and development and poor, disproportionately minority families who would suffer loss of employment and livelihood. As Robert Dingwall, a sociologist involved in the UK’s pandemic planning from 2005 to 2011, put it, “Close attention was paid to whether we might shut borders, restrict internal travel and shut schools. But we decided these things were unworkable or, worse, counterproductive.” A 2006 assessment coauthored by eminent Johns Hopkins School of Public Health physician and epidemiologist D. A. Henderson cautioned that “if particular measures are applied for many weeks or months, the long-term or cumulative second-and third-order effects could be devastating socially and economically.”
Others did offer more optimistic assessments of the efficacy of pandemic restrictions, in particular mathematical modelers who were especially concerned about children as vectors of disease spread. Modelers viewed school closures, the isolation of children at home, workplace closures, and other society-wide social distancing measures as promising tools for curbing disease transmission. But these tools were untried on any large scale and poorly supported by real-world evidence.
The strongest evidence in favor of NPIs was contained in a study reporting that cities that had imposed NPIs during the 1918 pandemic—closure of schools, churches, and theaters—suffered 50 percent lower “peak death rates.” On the basis of the models in this paper, U.S. pandemic planners in the 2000s, beginning under the administration of George W. Bush, started to call for “early, targeted, and layered use of non-pharmaceutical interventions.” The “containment” strategy they advocated, however, remained controversial at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other health agencies.
To help adjudicate the dispute, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a grant to the Institute of Medicine (IOM)—since reconstituted as the National Academy of Medicine—in order to review the available evidence. The IOM assembled a distinguished group of public health scholars, epidemiologists, and biostatisticians in October 2006. The IOM report concluded that mortality in the 1918 pandemic was only “weakly associated” with the interventions and that the model “does not explain much variation” across cities. The IOM report declined to endorse the new pandemic strategy, warning that “in the midst of a crisis, there will be pressure for government to employ public health interventions, even in the absence of proven benefits, and without consideration of secondary effects.”
Then came COVID-19. To briefly recall the early chronology, news about the outbreak in Wuhan emerged in late December 2019. After withholding information for weeks, Chinese authorities admitted on January 20 that the virus spread between people. Taiwan and South Korea soon canceled all flights to mainland China and quarantined arriving passengers. On January 23, Chinese officials sealed off Wuhan and its 11 million inhabitants, soon extending quarantine to 35 million people. By late February half a billion Chinese people were under partial or total lockdown. By early March, China mandated use of a smartphone application—the Alipay Health Code—to regulate individuals’ movements from their homes and in public spaces.
At the time, prominent U.S. experts criticized China’s strategy. In the Washington Post, Lawrence O. Gostin, a distinguished professor of global health law at Georgetown University, commented, “The first and golden rule of public health is you have to gain the trust of the population, and this is likely to drive the epidemic underground. . . . The truth is those kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective.” “People who are in political leadership always think that if you do something dramatic and visible that you’ll gain popular support,” he said. “They couldn’t have any sound public health advice.”
Another skeptic was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who would go on to be the public face of pandemic response in the United States. In late January 2020, Fauci expressed doubt to reporters that the approach would work in China and, even if so, that it could be exported beyond authoritarian regimes. “That’s something that I don’t think we could possibly do in the United States. I can’t imagine shutting down New York or Los Angeles, but the judgment on the part of the Chinese health authorities is that . . . this is something that in fact is going to help in containing it,” he said. “Whether or not it does or does not is really open to question because historically when you shut things down it doesn’t have a major effect.”
Nevertheless, by March 2020, the measures that the WHO said just months before were “not recommended in any circumstances” were deployed against COVID-19 globally, with policymakers proclaiming that they were “following the science.” When reported cases decreased in Wuhan following the lockdown, WHO’s director-general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, flatly declared that suppression had worked. On March 11, he stated that “several countries have demonstrated that this virus can be suppressed and controlled.” (The first quarantines outside of China were imposed on February 22 in Lombardy and Veneto. On March 9, Italy showed that a Western liberal democracy could lockdown nationwide, with public support.) “If countries detect, test, treat, isolate, trace, and mobilize their people in the response,” Tedros concluded, “those with a handful of cases can prevent those cases becoming clusters, and those clusters becoming community transmission. . . . Even those countries with community transmission or large clusters can turn the tide on this virus.”
Days later, a bombshell report appeared from Imperial College London’s COVID-19 Response Team, led by epidemiologist Neil M. Ferguson. Drawing on mathematical models projecting huge mortality reductions from society-wide NPIs, the report recommended “social distancing of the entire population, case isolation, household quarantine, and school and university closure.” Without such measures, the authors predicted 510,000 UK deaths from COVID-19 and 2.2 million in the United States by August 2020, along with the collapse of health care systems and additional deaths as a result. These predictions were widely reported in the press. And that same day, reportedly drawing on the Imperial College report, Trump advised “all Americans, including the young and healthy” to stay home and avoid gathering in groups of more than ten. The administration distributed a two-page document stating that “in states with evidence of community transmission, bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.” It also advised that governors should close schools in “affected and surrounding areas.”
Prominent experts reacted skeptically to the shift in policy recommendations. In an essay for Vox on March 16, former CDC director Tom Frieden wrote: “We must consider the huge societal costs of closing schools against what may be little or no health benefit.” Michael T. Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, wondered how governors would later reopen schools if they were closed when there were so few cases. “We’ve got people literally just following each other off the edge of a cliff because they’re not thinking,” he said. Physician-scientist John Ioannidis of Stanford echoed these remarks, warning that governments “have gone into a complete panic state” and were overreacting by enacting lockdown policies that could be more damaging in the long run than the virus itself.
Nevertheless, elite opinion coalesced behind lockdowns and plans for continuous testing and contact tracing of every American. In April 2020, Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center on Ethics issued a “comprehensive operational roadmap” that called for “extremely tight coordination” among government, businesses, universities, and information technology companies. This mobilization around “public health needs,” the report stated, was analogous to “wartime mobilization.” The Rockefeller Foundation and other institutions that do not normally take policy positions signed on with the Safra plan in the name of “vital unity” at a time of “national crisis.” The conservative American Enterprise Institute issued a similar plan. Drastic but untested measures were held to be a moral imperative reflecting the wartime credo, “we are all in this together.”
In May 2020, an online video of Ioannidis’s remarks expressing doubts about these measures disappeared; it was removed by YouTube on the grounds of being misinformation. Starting in March 2020, Meta, formerly Facebook, also began removing posts deemed to be misinformation. According to its Oversight Board, “Meta relied exclusively on public health authorities to determine” what was misinformation, and it “removed 27 million pieces of COVID-19 misinformation from Facebook and Instagram between March 2020 and July 2022, 1.3 million of which were restored through appeal.” YouTube declared that it did “not allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts the World Health Organization (WHO) or local health authorities’ medical information about COVID-19.” Censored information included doubts about NPIs (whether cloth masks limited the spread of disease and whether lockdowns were efficacious) and whether the pandemic had originated in a lab leak. (On the latter issue, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci argued in March this year in the New York Times that “we were badly misled.”) According to a federal circuit court of appeals ruling in 2023, government pressure on social media companies included “intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences.” “The FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands,” according to Yoel Roth, former head of trust and safety at Twitter.
Reasonable questions about the feasibility, efficacy, and astronomical costs of lockdown measures became markedly less welcome over the late spring and summer of 2020. With Trump in the White House offering inconsistent and often absurd messaging on the pandemic, and many blue states doubling down on lockdowns, COVID-19 policy became highly politicized.
A month before the fateful 2020 presidential election, the Great Barrington Declaration was published. Responses to it represented a key episode in the moralization of dissent during the crisis, the stigmatizing of people—even subject matter experts—critical of prevailing policy. The authors of the statement were distinguished academics in medicine and epidemiology: Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician then at Harvard Medical School; Sunetra Gupta, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Oxford; and Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and health policy scholar at Stanford and now the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Keeping lockdown policies “in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed,” they wrote. They pointed to COVID-19’s steep age gradient, with “vulnerability to death . . . more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young.” And they argued that “the most compassionate approach . . . is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.” They called their preferred approach “focused protection.”
The response from government officials and other public health agencies was swift and in many cases dismissively contemptuous. In an email to Fauci, Francis Collins, then the NIH director, derided “the three fringe epidemiologists” and called for “a quick and devastating published take down of its premises.” The Washington Post quoted Collins: “This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.” Harsh invective was deployed against the declaration’s authors, including by other epidemiologists and scientists on social media. Some commentators questioned the authors’ motives and integrity because their meeting took place at a free market think tank, the American Institute for Economic Research. But Gupta, at least, identified as part of the political left, and condemnation came from free market–oriented writers as well.
The American Public Health Association published an open letter in response, signed by several other public health groups, “condemning” the declaration, stating that its claims were “NOT based in science.” Meanwhile, Tedros, the WHO director-general, stated that “never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak,” calling such an approach “scientifically and ethically problematic.” In fact, as we have shown, the Declaration echoed decades of pre-pandemic planning in emphasizing the limitations of lockdowns—including the claim that “working class and younger members of society” were “carrying the heaviest burden.”
In November 2020, Stanford’s Faculty Senate censured Hoover Institution fellow and health policy scholar Scott Atlas for questioning the efficacy of face masks, social distancing, and diagnostic testing. Atlas’s skepticism about NPIs was mainstream in late 2019; a year later, Stanford’s faculty pronounced it “anathema to our community.” Atlas had also tweeted “the only way this stops is if people rise up” in response to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s executive orders limiting social gatherings, adding, “You get what you accept. #FreedomMatters #StepUp.” Some interpreted the tweet as a call for violence, leading Atlas to quickly add: “People vote, people peacefully protest. NEVER would I endorse or incite violence. NEVER!!” Nevertheless, the censure motion condemned the tweet as a “dangerous provocation.”
At the end of 2020, epidemiologist Steven Goodman, a colleague of Ioannidis’s, expressed concern about the way Ioannidis and other scientists had sown doubt about pandemic measures. “Debates among scientists about the evidence are healthy. But if conducted in public the rules change,” Goodman told the Washington Post. Such debates, he stressed, “can confuse people and undermine the consistent messaging needed for public health.” But intolerance of public disagreement has its own costs.
How did policies actually play out over the fifty states, and with what effects? Initially, most leaders implemented aggressive NPIs. Although statewide shelter-in-place orders were then unprecedented, within three weeks after March 19, 2020, forty-three governors had issued them. All but one governor—Kristi Noem of South Dakota—closed nonessential businesses. By March 25, all public schools in the United States, serving 50.8 million students, were closed to in-person instruction.
But despite a few weeks of broad consensus, by mid-summer the pandemic had become strikingly partisan. States with Democratic governors maintained stay-at-home orders, on average, more than two-and-a-half times as long as Republican goverors (73 compared to 28 days). School-closure length similarly correlates with state partisanship. Public schools in the predominantly Republican South, Great Plains, and Mountain West mostly returned to in-person instruction in fall 2020, while most schools in the predominantly Democratic West Coast states remained closed until April 2021. The twelve most Republican states as gauged by the 2020 presidential vote had 60 percent more in-person schooling during the 2020–21 school year than the twelve most Democratic states.
Throughout the most serious parts of the crisis, from March 2020 through July 2021, pandemic restrictions were consistently more stringent in Democratic than Republican states. Employing Oxford University’s widely used stringency index—with nine indicators, including school and workplace closures and travel bans—we gauge each state’s restrictiveness on a monthly basis from January 2020 through January 2022. (See Figure 1 below.) Policy only weakly adjusted to changing conditions. While pandemic waves came and went, policy remained sorted by party, with Democratic states maintaining more restrictions than Republican states through summer 2021.
Figure 1. This figure displays the average stringency index score for each month of the pandemic for states grouped by quintiles of their vote for president in 2020, from strongly Republican states shown in dark red to strongly Democratic states in dark blue. Source: Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker
Did more restrictive policies succeed in reducing death and serious illness? As states began reopening in April 2020, there was much doomsaying. “Models Project Sharp Rise in Deaths as States Reopen,” read a New York Times headline on May 4, 2020. The Washington Post published an interactive feature allowing readers to gauge how many people would be infected if restrictions were lifted all at once, in two weeks, or in a month. An article in the Atlantic called Governor Brian Kemp’s decision to reopen Georgia an “experiment in human sacrifice.”
In fact, policy differences did not show up in different pandemic outcomes in our analysis. Reopening did not trigger immediate viral resurgence. As of April 2021—with vaccines available to all adults and restrictions eased everywhere—Republican and Democratic states had maintained measurably distinct pandemic policies for almost a year, but there was barely any difference in their per capita mortality. (See Figure 2 below.) This fact—easily discernible from CDC data—appears to us to have prompted little reflection in mainstream news outlets. Governors with widely divergent approaches to restrictions claimed credit for a job well done, enjoyed public approval, and won reelection at high rates. Republican and Democratic states did eventually diverge in morbidity and mortality, but only after the vaccine rollout. By January 2023, Republican-leaning states, with lower vaccination rates, suffered nearly 30 percent higher mortality than Democratic-leaning states.
Figure 2. This figure displays cumulative COVID-19 mortality per capita as reported to the CDC for each month of the pandemic in states grouped by quintiles of their vote for president in 2020, from strongly Republican states shown in dark red to strongly Democratic states in dark blue.
Our analyses of both policy effects and vaccine effects control for differences in state populations, including age (percent over sixty-five), obesity, urbanization, and insurance coverage. States with higher vaccine uptake fared better on mortality, but NPI variation does not correlate with variation in outcomes. States with longer school closures did not fare better, nor did states with longer stay-at-home orders or more stringent pandemic restrictions. Other research has come to similar conclusions, including a major study published in the Lancet in 2023. Although this study finds an association between restrictions and lower infection rates, as well as between vaccine mandates and lower mortality, it does not find that mask mandates, restrictions on gatherings, or closures of bars, restaurants, schools, or universities were associated with lower COVID-19 mortality.
In sum, there is a dearth of evidence that the previously untried NPIs deployed in 2020 achieved their aims. Reviewing the available research, a 2023 report commissioned by Scotland’s official COVID-19 inquiry concludes: “There was either insufficient evidence in 2020 . . . or alternatively, no evidence” to support most pandemic measures, including “face mask mandates outside of healthcare settings; lockdowns; enforced social distancing; [and] test, trace and isolate measures.” Moreover, the report adds, “the evidence base has not changed materially in the intervening three years.” A 2022 systematic review concludes that the available evidence on NPI remains insufficient “to be actionable by policy-makers.”
While disentangling the effects of the response from those of the pandemic itself is difficult, there is no doubt that the costs of the response were profound and will play out for decades. Early in the pandemic, Stanford economic historian Walter Scheidel asked, “Why is nobody putting some numbers on the economic costs of a monthlong or a yearlong shutdown against the lives saved? The whole discipline is well equipped for it. But there is some reluctance for people to stick their neck out.” We sketch here just the tip of the iceberg.
Excess deaths during and following the pandemic were surprisingly high, even across demographics little affected by COVID-19 itself. Increases in excess mortality were due primarily to rises in deaths from heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer disease, drug overdose, homicide, and motor vehicle accidents. Minority populations were especially adversely affected. Black Americans’ all-cause mortality increased more than any other demographic, among whom more than a third of excess deaths are not explained by COVID-19.
Among young children, pediatricians and educators describe a cohort “less likely to have age-appropriate skills—to be able to hold a pencil, communicate their needs, identify shapes and letters, manage their emotions or solve problems with peers.” Karyn Lewis, an education researcher with a nonprofit that creates student assessments, told PBS NewsHour in 2023 that “levels of unfinished learning . . . will take many years to recoup. . . . That’s problematic for the average kid, but it’s catastrophic for the kids that have been hardest hit, which are students in high-poverty areas, Black and Hispanic students.”
Meanwhile, many non-essential workers lost their jobs, with unemployment most pronounced in the low-wage service sector, particularly among women. The United States went from historically low levels of unemployment in 2019 to the highest levels since before World War II, peaking at 14.8 percent in April 2020 and causing turmoil for millions of Americans. Unemployment would have risen in the absence of closures, but there were no equivalent unemployment spikes during twentieth-century pandemics. Workers endured months-long waits for unemployment benefits from overwhelmed state systems. Such involuntary job losses often have “scarring effects” that harm workers’ long-term earnings. Businesses in states with tighter restrictions were more likely to close permanently, with the effects most pronounced on minority owned businesses and on smaller firms.
All of these expenditures were added to the public debt. This higher level of indebtedness—and associated increases in federal outlays for interest payments on this debt—limits opportunities to expand spending on other priorities and creates new challenges when the United States next faces another crisis or recession. In conjunction with a 40 percent increase in the money supply and ultra-low interest rates throughout the crisis, some have argued—though it is a matter of expert disagreement—that COVID-19 policy contributed to inflation, with far-reaching consequences for governance and electoral politics in the United States and globally.
If more ambitious NPI policies were effective in saving lives, these costs may have been worth paying. But as we have said, we do not have clear evidence that they were effective: imposing stricter policies appears not to have saved lives. More analysis of policy costs should have been done and should have been more widely and publicly discussed. This is not to say that citizens would not have disagreed about what to make of such discussion—about what level of costs should be tolerated, and who should bear them—nor that pandemic policy would certainly, in the end, have proved any less controversial or politically divisive had there been more such discussion. There is no royal road from expert discussion and media coverage to public trust; climate change is a case in point. But more balanced and robust expert analysis certainly would have informed and improved public debate.
Instead, politicians and public health officials suffered tunnel vision, fixating on slowing the virus’s spread and ignoring their policies’ collateral consequences. Public transparency and candor also took a back seat. Too often, elected officials and public health experts failed to tell the whole truth or acknowledge uncertainties around their prescriptions. Public health officials in many cases seem to have decided that they were justified in not telling the whole truth for the public’s own good as they saw it: to discourage mask use when masks were needed by health workers, for example; or to exaggerate evidence of masks’ effectiveness when they wanted masks to be worn; or to avoid the distraction of a confidence-undermining debate on the virus’s origins. Moreover, given the scale of the impacts, we think there was a dearth of careful reporting from prominent news organizations on scientific debate about the effectiveness of NPIs, even after outcomes began to diverge quite substantially from models. (This problem was not confined to liberal-affiliated media. Rather, it ranged from the New York Times to Fox News—the latter of which tended to focus, so far as we can tell, on the harms of lockdown, not on questions about its effectiveness.)
In addition to partisan identity, class biases undoubtedly distorted the perceptions of the elites in charge of policymaking. Restrictions generally suited these members of the laptop class, whose socioeconomic status and profession insulated them from the worst harms of pandemic policy as well as from the experiences of communities most burdened by it. Knowledge workers occupying leadership positions in science, journalism, and universities suffered less from pandemic policies than did economically and political disadvantaged groups, saw their asset values grow, and enjoyed opportunities for remote work. This is not to say we think that popular support for pandemic restrictions was driven primarily by class; teachers’ unions pushed for prolonged school closures, for example, but the strongest predictor of the length of closures was the partisan lean of the jurisdiction. Still, the class and social position of policymaking and opinion-shaping elites helps to explain why so many were insensitive to harms, costs, and tradeoffs.
In all these ways, the pandemic provides a depressing window onto the depths of our moral and epistemic tribalism. To many on the left, the willingness to listen fair-mindedly to those on the right was a luxury we could not afford—not while Trump occupied the White House and not so long as the Republican Party remained in thrall to election deniers and skeptics of climate change and structural racism. This was a mistake. Rather than weighing emerging evidence, too many refused to consider that pandemic policies might not be working as intended or that they were imposing outsized costs on the less advantaged. Affective polarization—mutual loathing across the partisan divide—inhibited dialogue and apprehension of our empirical and moral realities.
The truth is that pandemic policies had profound, life-altering effects. But the key truth-seeking institutions of liberal democracy—journalism, science, and universities—have basically moved on, with an occasional admission to the effect that “yes, of course, things could have been handled better, but hindsight is, after all, always 20-20.” One might argue that decisionmakers did what they could, given what was known at the time. But the weight of pre-COVID pandemic planning was against society-wide implementation of NPIs. Moreover, such analyses warned that officials would be pressured to employ unproven policies. Before March 2020, no one—not even later vocal advocates of NPIs—had advocated anything like the sweeping policies that were implemented.
One pervasive and especially corrosive form of this denialism is to attribute all negative consequences to the pandemic itself rather than to the policies enacted to respond to it. The pandemic itself was not responsible for the great extent of learning loss, for example; school closures were. We need a sober assessment of pandemic policies’ costs as well as their benefits, including their stark human consequences.
It is our duty as democratic citizens to take this hard look, even if it means criticizing co-partisans. Educated elites—scientists, journalists, academics, and other researchers—have a special responsibility to look honestly at the policies we imposed and defended, the claims we failed to question, and the arguments and counter-claims that we simply dismissed. Accountability is a basic democratic value. It is irresponsible to forsake analysis and discussion simply on the grounds of our deep political polarization. Given what happened—the many who died, the many lives disrupted, the massive debt imposed on future generations—defenders of liberal democracy, and of the essential role of nonpartisan, expert judgment in successful public policy, must not retreat from, indeed should lead in providing, a frank and open evaluation. We hope this conversation serves as an opening to that overdue and necessary reckoning.
The post How Did We Fare on COVID-19? appeared first on Boston Review.
March 8, 2026 When you lead statewide economic development, the department’s annual conference is a…
“Good evening,” said Alfred Hitchcock to the television viewers of America on March 25, 1959.…
“Good evening,” said Alfred Hitchcock to the television viewers of America on March 25, 1959.…
The team behind Project Motor Racing has acknowledged the game did not meet expectations upon…
There are a handful of domains that don’t just describe a category — they own…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have moved quickly from research labs into real products. Chatbots, copilots,…
This website uses cookies.