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0:01:12 There are lots of stories to tell about the COVID pandemic.
0:01:17 But almost all of them, if you drill down, are about politics.
0:01:27 About who makes the decisions, who questions those decisions, who matters, who suffers, who survives, who doesn’t, and why.
0:01:31 But what did we get right?
0:01:34 What did we get wrong?
0:01:39 And what do all those choices say about the health of our democracy?
0:01:45 I think it’s safe to say we’ll be living in COVID’s shadow for a long time.
0:01:53 But perhaps there’s enough distance now to have a serious conversation about all these questions.
0:01:58 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:04 Today’s guest is Frances Lee.
0:02:15 She’s a professor of political science and public affairs at Princeton University, and a co-author of a book called In COVID’s Wake, How Our Politics Failed Us.
0:02:21 It treats our response to COVID as a kind of stress test of our political system.
0:02:34 Lee and her co-author, Stephen Macedo, look at all the institutions responsible for truth-seeking, journalism, science, universities, and asks, how did they perform?
0:02:37 Were they committed to truth?
0:02:38 Open to criticism?
0:02:43 Did they live up to the basic norms of liberalism and science?
0:02:48 Were we able to have a reasonable conversation about what was happening?
0:02:51 And if we weren’t, why not?
0:02:52 And can we have it now?
0:02:59 Frances Lee, welcome to the show.
0:03:01 Thank you, Sean.
0:03:13 I’m going to start this conversation where you start the book, which is with a, I think, a pretty revealing quote by Francis Collins.
0:03:17 And if you don’t mind, I’m just going to read it very quickly.
0:03:24 We failed to say every time there was a recommendation, guys, this is the best we can do right now.
0:03:26 It’s a good chance this is wrong.
0:03:27 We didn’t say that.
0:03:36 We wanted to be sure people actually motivated themselves by what we said, because we wanted change to happen in case it was right.
0:03:41 But we did not admit our ignorance, and that was a profound mistake.
0:03:45 And we lost a lot of credibility along the way.
0:03:48 So, who is Francis Collins?
0:03:52 What does he represent in this story?
0:03:55 And how does that quote really anchor this book?
0:04:00 So, Francis Collins is the head of the National Institutes of Health.
0:04:09 And in that passage, he is reflecting back on the way in which science agencies in the U.S. handled the pandemic.
0:04:21 He’s on a panel with a trucker from Minnesota, and it’s at a Braver Angels event, which tries to bring together people from diverse perspectives for dialogues.
0:04:29 And he is just being remarkably candid in reflecting back on what he saw as the failings of the pandemic response.
0:04:45 You know, we saw what he had to say at that panel as sort of summing up the argument of the book, which is that experts were not frank with the public about the limits of their knowledge and their uncertainties.
0:04:50 They were improvising through the pandemic to a very considerable degree.
0:04:56 They got a lot of things wrong, and they lost a lot of credibility, just as Francis Collins said.
0:05:03 And that they should have been more honest with people about what they knew and did not know.
0:05:07 And they would have retained the public’s trust to a greater degree.
0:05:16 How would you characterize the debate we had in this country about our response to COVID as we were responding?
0:05:19 From your point of view, what went wrong?
0:05:23 Well, it was a crisis, a fast-moving crisis.
0:05:28 And so it’s not surprising in retrospect that the debate was truncated.
0:05:43 But it is surprising, as we looked back and did the research for this book, the extent to which the decisions that were made in the early going of the pandemic departed from conventional wisdom about how to handle a pandemic.
0:05:55 And violated recommendations that had been put on paper in calmer times about how a crisis like this should be handled.
0:06:13 So countries around the world sort of scrapped pre-existing pandemic plans in order to follow the example set in Wuhan and then in Italy, with Italy having the first nationwide lockdown, and improvising along the way.
0:06:24 There wasn’t a scientific basis for the actions that were taken in the sense that there was no accumulated body of evidence that these measures would be effective.
0:06:30 That it was hoped that they would be, but there was the lack of evidence.
0:06:41 And, you know, if you go back and take a look at a report that was prepared by the World Health Organization in 2019, so just months before the pandemic broke out,
0:07:00 that document goes through each of the proposed non-pharmaceutical interventions, meaning the measures that are taken to keep people apart in the context of an infectious disease pandemic, like, you know, masking or social distancing, business closures, school closures.
0:07:06 Takes a look at each of those measures in turn and discusses the evidence base around them.
0:07:10 And across the board, the evidence base is rated as poor quality.
0:07:19 And several such measures are recommended not to be used under any circumstances in the context of a respiratory pandemic.
0:07:27 And among those were border closures, quarantine of exposed individuals, and testing and contact tracing.
0:07:42 And then all those measures were, of course, employed here in the U.S. and around the world in the context of the COVID pandemic without any kind of reckoning with the reasons why those measures were recommended against in the pre-pandemic planning.
0:07:47 Well, that seems like an important point. It wasn’t just here. This is pretty much what everybody was doing, right?
0:07:48 Yes, that’s right.
0:07:54 Okay. Why do you suppose that was? Why the departure from these pre-pandemic plans?
0:08:06 Well, it was the example in Wuhan. So the first such measures, you know, lockdowns, were imposed in Hubei province in China.
0:08:17 And the World Health Organization sent a delegation. There were a couple of Americans on that delegation to Wuhan in early February 2020.
0:08:23 They spent a week there. They saw the scale of the society-wide response.
0:08:31 And they admired it tremendously, the extent to which everyone seemed to be pulling together to try to suppress the spread of the disease.
0:08:34 And then you see cases start to fall.
0:08:40 And the temporary hospitals that had been put up were taken down.
0:08:47 And the report declares the Chinese response a success and recommends that same approach to the whole world.
0:08:53 So there wasn’t a—I mean, I think there should have been more skepticism at the time.
0:08:56 We knew that pandemics come in waves.
0:09:04 And so it was hard to know to what extent the fall in cases was just the natural patterns that we’d previously seen with pandemics,
0:09:07 and to what extent it was a result of the actions taken.
0:09:13 And the public around the world are clamoring for action to protect us from this crisis.
0:09:19 And here in the U.S., when the closures were first announced in March 2020, they were enormously popular.
0:09:29 A Pew Research Center study that we cite in the book shows that 87% of Americans approved of those closures, large majorities of both parties.
0:09:33 So the initial response was, this makes sense to us.
0:09:38 Let’s do this on the part of the public at large.
0:09:48 There was a lot of consensus at that time, and then that consensus fades pretty quickly for reasons we’ll get into.
0:09:56 But before we do that, I think it’s important for you to set up the story you tell in the book.
0:10:05 And a big part of that story is about how certain groups of people were disproportionately harmed by our COVID policies.
0:10:07 Can you say a bit about that?
0:10:13 Well, the effects are wide-ranging, the effects of the pandemic response.
0:10:17 And across the board, they tend to fall harder on the less well-off.
0:10:19 So let’s start with the closures themselves.
0:10:22 Not everyone can stay home.
0:10:27 In order for society to continue to function, for us to stay alive, some people have to keep working.
0:10:34 Well, disproportionately, that’s working-class people who had to keep working through the pandemic, the so-called essential workers.
0:10:40 I mean, you think of medical personnel, and so those are essential workers, too.
0:10:56 But the bulk of the people who had to collect the trash, keep the utilities working, deliver the food, drive the trucks, you know, all the things that needed to be done during the pandemic were largely being done by working-class people.
0:10:59 So the closures are not protecting them.
0:11:01 Meanwhile, their kids can’t go to school.
0:11:07 It’s hard for me to even understand exactly how people got through this crisis under those circumstances.
0:11:08 They certainly had to scramble.
0:11:25 As you look at the effects of those school closures, the learning losses are greater among high-poverty areas on disadvantaged students, on students who were lagging academically before the pandemic, they lost more so that the gaps became wider.
0:11:38 The inflation that resulted from the pandemic response here and around the world, that also places a greater pinch on people who are not doing as well.
0:11:43 The enormous rise in housing costs that followed the pandemic.
0:11:45 You just go through the list.
0:11:51 Every case, as you look at the response, it hits harder in some parts of society than others.
0:11:58 I noticed in a lot of the descriptions of the pandemic that journalists would write about it as that the pandemic exposed inequalities.
0:11:59 Well, it did.
0:12:02 It exposed them, but it also exacerbated them.
0:12:04 It made them bigger.
0:12:09 Say more about the class biases at work here.
0:12:12 What were the blind spots on the part of the decision makers?
0:12:14 What trade-offs did they miss?
0:12:19 What potential harms did they discount or overlook?
0:12:25 It was not a deliberative process, and there were biases in who was at the table making these decisions.
0:12:36 Decisions around COVID policy tended to be made by small groups of people, and it’s basically some generalist government officials and specialists in infectious disease.
0:12:41 So there just weren’t a diversity of voices being brought to bear.
0:12:43 Is that avoidable?
0:12:48 This seems to be—not to say it isn’t a problem, but it seems kind of unavoidable on some level.
0:13:06 Remember, this is a long crisis that, you know, so we can talk about March 2020 and what was done then, but then we have to ask, you know, what was the capacity of governments to take on board new information, listen to more voices, and adjust course?
0:13:28 When you look at our response comparatively to the rest of the world, does it seem to you from the perch of the present that we performed more or less on par with most other countries?
0:13:35 Or was there something exceptional about our responses and these sorts of effects, either in a good way or a bad way?
0:13:42 Well, our handling of the pandemic became more party polarized than is characteristic around the world.
0:13:58 That 2020 was a presidential election year, and with Trump in the White House when the crisis began, you saw sort of an in-power, out-of-power dynamic where Democrats—I mean, Democrats didn’t like or trust President Trump before the crisis.
0:14:08 And so then to have him at the helm, while there was so much fear, there was a tendency to reject anything he had to say, you know, to sort of assume that if he said it, it had to be wrong.
0:14:27 And so you saw a sorting out process where Democrats reacting against President Trump and Trump’s inconsistent stances on, you know, what to do in the context of the crisis was certainly not confidence-inspiring even for independents during that time.
0:14:36 So what we see is this enormous partisan structuring of the pandemic response, not just at the level of policy, but also at the level of individual behavior.
0:14:48 It’s very remarkable to the extent to which party is your key variable for predicting how any individual or how any jurisdiction would respond to the crisis.
0:14:53 Yeah, this part of the story is pretty startling and pretty depressing.
0:15:00 Why do you think our COVID strategies became so strongly associated with political partisanship?
0:15:02 Trump is part of the story here, but not all of it.
0:15:14 To be honest, I don’t think that we have an entirely satisfactory account because, I mean, certainly you can see the reaction around the president, the reaction against Trump.
0:15:21 And Democrats had already had a higher opinion of science and science agencies.
0:15:26 You know, you’d already had the March for Science under Trump before the pandemic, you know.
0:15:40 And so the political dichotomy that Americans perceived during the crisis was there’s Trump versus the scientists, Trump versus Fauci, politicians versus the scientists.
0:15:44 And presented with that choice, Democrats said, well, I trust the scientists.
0:15:51 That began to be the dichotomy on which the attitudes towards the pandemic broke down.
0:15:54 Trump is obviously mentioned in the book.
0:15:57 There’s no way to tell this story without him.
0:16:01 But he’s not a central focus.
0:16:02 Why is that?
0:16:12 We don’t focus on Trump because the U.S. response is not so different from other countries, at least, you know, in the early going.
0:16:17 It evolves in different ways, but that’s not really a Trump story so much as a story of U.S. federalism.
0:16:22 The governors are the primary decision makers over the course of the crisis.
0:16:31 I mean, Trump was on television a lot, and the coronavirus task force made recommendations about what to do and, you know, offered guidance.
0:16:39 And you might remember the gating processes and the color-coded schemes that they came up with about when states could reopen.
0:16:40 But all of that was advisory.
0:16:43 The key decisions were made by the governors.
0:16:51 And so we see those as more central actors in a policy making sense in the U.S. response.
0:17:00 You know, as far as the broader partisanship problem, I mean, I think it has become very clear that this intense polarization, especially in this information environment,
0:17:05 it means a lot of people aren’t really committed to any stable set of ideas.
0:17:08 Like, the only thing they’re committed to is disliking the people on the other side.
0:17:13 And that kind of negative partisanship really does blinker our intuitions on almost every other front.
0:17:18 I mean, the term we use in the book for that phenomenon is moralized antagonism,
0:17:23 where you see people who have different views on a policy issue as bad people.
0:17:28 And so you don’t look at whether there are any reasons why they hold those views.
0:17:33 You don’t consider it as, you know, potentially worthwhile.
0:17:35 You know, what is there to be learned from bad people?
0:17:43 And I think that was to a great extent where we saw failures in the truth-seeking institutions of American democracy,
0:17:51 in the academy, among journalists, some reporting, and also among scientists.
0:17:55 Okay, so the partisan split is very apparent.
0:17:57 And it’s very apparent very early.
0:18:07 And you note in the book that there was no real gap in health outcomes in red and blue states until the vaccine was released.
0:18:11 What starts to change post-vaccine and why?
0:18:23 So it’s so fascinating, like when you track cumulative COVID mortality over time in the states grouped by partisanship.
0:18:28 You can see that red and blue states track pretty close together in that first year.
0:18:39 And in fact, in December 2020, when the vaccine was rolled out, there’s no difference at that point in per capita cumulative COVID mortality in red and blue states.
0:18:42 But it starts to emerge right away.
0:18:50 And, you know, from the work that, you know, was done at the level of public opinion and attitudes towards the vaccine,
0:18:56 it was evident immediately that Democrats were just chomping at the bit to get the vaccine.
0:18:58 They were so much more eager to get vaccinated.
0:19:00 So you saw that in public opinion polling.
0:19:05 You also saw it in the press to get appointments for vaccines,
0:19:12 that it was much more difficult to get an appointment in blue states and blue jurisdictions than in red states.
0:19:13 Yeah, I was in Mississippi.
0:19:14 I had no problem.
0:19:15 No problem, that’s right.
0:19:16 I was in and out.
0:19:19 I took my mom down to get hers from the National Guard.
0:19:22 And, yes, there was no problem for her to get the vaccine early.
0:19:27 But it was more challenging, you know, in the strongly democratic parts of the country.
0:19:38 And so you see just a quick divergence in vaccine uptake across Republican and Democratic leaning jurisdictions.
0:19:43 And, again, you know, thinking of this from a social science point of view,
0:19:51 it’s a nice linear relationship between the partisan lean of the state and the rate of vaccine uptake.
0:19:57 And then that relationship also tracks COVID mortality over the coming year.
0:20:02 So that states with higher vaccine uptake have lower COVID mortality starting in 2021.
0:20:11 You know, one key point, you know, I want to emphasize that our book does find that Democratic states did better than Republican states over the course of the pandemic.
0:20:12 They absolutely did.
0:20:14 It’s a clear difference.
0:20:18 But that difference emerges in year two of the pandemic, not in year one.
0:20:20 So what did work?
0:20:26 A lot more research needs to be done on what succeeded and what failed.
0:20:35 What we have in the book is pretty highly aggregated analysis so that we can show that places that had kept their schools closed longer didn’t do better.
0:20:40 That places with longer lockdowns didn’t do better than places with shorter lockdowns.
0:20:46 Places that locked down more quickly don’t do better than places that were slower to announce stay-at-home orders.
0:20:51 So we can show that, you know, that there’s a lack of correlation there.
0:20:53 But why?
0:20:54 What drives that lack of correlation?
0:21:09 Is it because these measures are not sustainable for human beings over the long timeline necessary to get from the start of a crisis to a vaccine that had been tested and shown to be efficacious and safe?
0:21:22 Is that because a large share of the workforce always had to keep on working regardless so that the virus just continued to spread?
0:21:31 And if anything, maybe the lockdowns had the effect of just ensuring that that spread took place disproportionately among essential workers, but really didn’t reduce it that much.
0:21:32 You know, again, we don’t know what the peaks are.
0:21:39 Like, pandemics unfold in waves, which means that in that first wave, you don’t get full population exposure.
0:21:46 what I would argue here is that there’s an awful lot we still don’t know.
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0:24:32 This week on Net Worth and Chill, I’m talking to Mike, the situation Sorrentino, who skyrocketed to fame on Jersey Shore earning millions before it all came crashing down.
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0:24:54 Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff.
0:25:18 Well, I think this is a good spot to talk a little more in detail about the decision makers and how they made those decisions.
0:25:24 Now, I want to read to you a quote that gets at what I’m really asking here.
0:25:27 It’s from one of the health officials in your book.
0:25:52 What is wrong with saying and adopting, as a matter of policy, that the most important thing is saving lives, and we should save lives at all costs.
0:25:59 I believe that that’s a quote from Deborah Birx, and so she was the coordinator on the coronavirus task force.
0:26:08 She was not able, she said, to do a kind of cost-benefit analysis where she could calculate how much a life was worth.
0:26:13 I mean, that’s a very understandable response, an attitude.
0:26:25 But you have to remember that as policymakers faced with the kinds of measures that were being employed to control the spread of a disease, lives are on both sides of the equation.
0:26:33 Let’s begin with one of the first measures taken, was the shutting down of so-called non-essential health care.
0:26:37 And it was defined quite broadly.
0:26:46 There were a lot of cancer treatments that were canceled and regarded as non-essential, depending on how advanced the cancer was.
0:26:56 So you’re trading off future risks to life to preserve health care capacity now.
0:27:06 When you are exacerbating inequalities, when you are depriving people of education, that has long-term health effects.
0:27:10 I mean, education is one of the best predictors of people’s longevity.
0:27:14 So you’re trading off present and future.
0:27:17 It’s not so simple.
0:27:18 These are very difficult choices.
0:27:29 The reason why we do cost-benefit analysis is in order to be responsible as policymakers, that you can’t only focus on one threat to human beings, that we’re faced with many.
0:27:34 And look, it’s even more excruciating in terms of the trade-offs, right?
0:27:48 Because different population groups were not equally vulnerable here, even if you’re talking about saving lives at the highest priority, well, okay, old people were more vulnerable than young people, right?
0:27:56 And so there may be policies that would save the lives of older population groups or more, you know, health-compromised people.
0:28:03 And that might come at the expense of real harm to children in school, right?
0:28:04 How do you weigh that?
0:28:07 You know, it’s just, there’s no formula for that.
0:28:14 Well, there was a refusal to weigh it during the crisis, that there was sort of a denial that that was what was happening.
0:28:16 Do you think it was a denial, though?
0:28:17 How do we know it was a denial?
0:28:22 And how do we know they just did their best and made their choices?
0:28:23 Some of them were good, some of them were bad.
0:28:28 Well, they acknowledged that they didn’t discuss the costs or the trade-offs.
0:28:37 So, you know, we have a lot of quotations to that effect from policymakers involved, saying that that was really somebody else’s job and not their job to consider the costs.
0:28:42 So they’re pretty frank about that, that they simply weren’t doing it.
0:28:44 And who’s they?
0:28:46 You’re talking about the health officials mostly?
0:28:47 Yeah, health officials.
0:28:47 That’s right.
0:28:58 So when you think about the policy process around COVID, you’ve got government officials, elected officials, and you have health virologists and public health officials.
0:29:01 And that’s basically who’s in the room.
0:29:09 And so then it would be the elected officials’ job to consider everything else.
0:29:22 But how would they do it if they’re not being advised, if they have no perspectives being brought to bear that would shed light on the trade-offs and on the costs present in the room?
0:29:29 Now, you know, I think they certainly deserve blame here, too, that it doesn’t all rest on public health.
0:29:38 You know, elected officials had a tendency to want to hide behind public health, to say we’re just following the science, as if that’s possible in the presence of all these value trade-offs.
0:29:49 But it made their lives easier to pretend like they were not exercising any discretion, and that they were doing the only thing that could be done.
0:30:03 Part of the critique here, at least of the public officials and the health experts, is that they were intolerant of criticism, or they were intolerant of skepticism.
0:30:10 And, again, I’m trying to be fair in retrospect to the people that were in the fire here.
0:30:21 And I can imagine that one reason for that intolerance of skepticism, whatever one thinks of it, is that they really were in a very tough position.
0:30:27 Do you have sympathy for the predicament that these people were facing?
0:30:30 I mean, how would you have weighed the trade-offs here?
0:30:33 Well, I do have empathy.
0:30:41 I also know, and experts should be cognizant of this as well, that they have their limitations.
0:30:43 We have our limitations.
0:30:46 And that there’s always a risk of hubris.
0:30:52 And that they should have acknowledged the possibility of failure.
0:30:57 That these measures wouldn’t work as well as they hoped that they would.
0:31:01 And that should have been factored into their decision-making.
0:31:04 It’s not just, you know, lives versus the economy.
0:31:07 It’s also the question of, how many lives are you even saving?
0:31:10 Like, is this really, are these policies workable for society?
0:31:14 There was a lack of evidence based on that.
0:31:21 And so you can’t just make policy affecting the whole of society on a wing and a prayer.
0:31:24 And to a great extent, that is what they were doing.
0:31:42 You implied earlier, and you certainly talk about this in the book, that some of these health officials, people like Fauci and Birx, who were the face of these measures, that there was a bit of a disjunction between what they were saying in private and what they were saying in public.
0:31:50 That they were lying at worst, that they were lying at worst, or being misleading at best when facing the public and talking about this.
0:32:01 I just don’t want that to hang out there without being, without examples being offered, because I know there is a lot of bad faith attacks out there, and I don’t want to do that.
0:32:05 So, can you give me an example of what you mean by that?
0:32:08 How do we know that there was this disjunction?
0:32:14 Well, in her memoir, Deborah Birx is quite frank that two weeks to slow the spread was just a pretext.
0:32:25 And it was just an effort to get Trump on board for initial closures, and that as soon as those closures were in place, she says, we immediately began to look for ways to extend them.
0:32:50 I think one of the more devastating noble lies that was told during the pandemic was to go out there in summer, spring and summer 2021, even into the fall of 2021, with the vaccine mandates and tell people that if you get vaccinated, you can protect your loved ones from catching the disease from you, that you will become a dead end to the virus.
0:32:55 They did not have a scientific basis for making that claim.
0:32:59 The vaccine trials had not tested for an outcome on transmission.
0:33:10 We knew that, you know, based on the trials, that people who were vaccinated were less likely to report symptoms consistent with it and less likely to test positive for COVID.
0:33:18 But there weren’t tests conducted on whether getting vaccinated would protect people in your household, for example.
0:33:23 Like, they could have done tests for transmission, but that was not part of the endpoint of the trials.
0:33:29 And so when they went out and made claims that it would affect or stop transmission, they were going beyond their data.
0:33:45 We also knew that a systemically administered vaccine, meaning a shot, it’s not a nasal vaccine, doesn’t prevent you from contracting the virus and for it proliferating in your nasal cavity so that you can transmit.
0:33:47 That was known.
0:33:56 And so you shouldn’t have gone out there and just reassured people that this would work and you’d be able to protect your loved ones.
0:34:05 Everybody found out in rather short order that getting vaccinated for COVID didn’t prevent you from getting COVID and also from transmitting it to others.
0:34:34 If you were in one of those rooms making these decisions in that moment about what to tell the public, what would you do if you were faced with a choice where you could either mislead the public with a noble lie that you were absolutely convinced would say thousands of lies, but you also knew that if the public were to learn about the lie later, it would shatter trust in scientific institutions for maybe a generation.
0:34:39 Honestly, Francis, I don’t know what I would actually do in that position.
0:34:40 I know what I would tell you.
0:34:42 I would do if you asked me now.
0:34:45 I’d say, well, I’d tell the truth and let the chips fall.
0:34:52 But that’s very easy to say from a distance and probably a lot more difficult when you’re in the fire like that.
0:34:54 But is this something you thought about?
0:34:55 What would you have done?
0:34:59 This is a very important question.
0:35:11 I mean, what I, what I, again, I would turn to is what is the basis for believing that these measures would work, that that you have to, you have to be able to accept uncertainty.
0:35:15 If you’re a scientist, you know, there’s a lot we just don’t know about the world.
0:35:20 To a great extent, the more expertise you develop, the more you learn about what we don’t know.
0:35:26 And so you have, you have to come to terms with your ignorance as a policymaker.
0:35:31 And so you may be wrong about what you think is going to work.
0:35:41 And so under those conditions, now you’re trading your future credibility for some, for measures that will be suboptimal, may not have nearly the effectiveness that you hope for.
0:35:50 That, that I think is the greater failing that, you know, to, to, to, to not confront the limits of our knowledge.
0:36:03 It’s hubris because, you know, if you ask them, well, on what basis do you make this claim that if you get this vaccine, which is a shot, that will stop you from transmitting a respiratory virus?
0:36:04 Like, well, on what basis?
0:36:09 And so here’s where I think, you know, we see failures in other truth-seeking institutions.
0:36:11 Where were the academics?
0:36:16 Where were the journalists asking hard questions of policymakers during that time?
0:36:20 Critical thinking, I think, got suspended during the pandemic.
0:36:27 And so then government officials, including public health officials, are not being held accountable in the way they should be to justify themselves.
0:36:38 We are talking about the lines between scientific judgments and political judgments or scientific judgments and value judgments.
0:36:51 Do you think COVID shattered the delusion, if anyone still held on to it, that there’s a value-free science, that we can make policy choices like these based on science alone?
0:37:06 One should not think that it is possible for science to settle political questions in the way that politicians talked about the COVID response, that they’re just following the science.
0:37:09 That was never a responsible rhetoric.
0:37:12 It was never a responsible way to make policy.
0:37:24 That you have to come to terms with the reality of politics, you know, which is diverse values and diverse interests.
0:37:29 And that when you make policy choices, there are always winners and losers.
0:37:33 And you have to see that with clear eyes.
0:37:35 And you try to make as many winners as possible.
0:37:38 And you try not to harm people unnecessarily.
0:37:48 But you can’t blind yourself to the effects of the choices that you make by sort of pretending like there was no choice at all.
0:37:50 Which, you know, I think we saw a lot of that during the pandemic.
0:37:58 There’s no version of a crisis like this that won’t involve mistakes, obviously, because of all the uncertainty.
0:38:02 So how do we draw a line between mistakes and deceptions?
0:38:06 I mean, I think mostly what we’re talking about are mistakes.
0:38:12 But they were compounded by failures of accountability relationships.
0:38:26 That, you know, had there been more tough questions being asked, I think it would have exposed some of the weaknesses of the assumptions that were being made or the claims that were being made.
0:38:31 So with the start, tremendous uncertainty choices are made.
0:38:40 But under those conditions, recognizing how little you know, you should be on a quest, on a mission to try to learn as much as you can.
0:38:58 There should have been enormous interest in the successes in school reopening in spring of 2020 in Europe, in the handful of schools that reopened in Montana and Wyoming here in the U.S. in the 2019-2020 school year.
0:39:02 So there were some schools that did reopen even then, not very many, but some.
0:39:07 Lots reopened in the fall across whole swaths of the U.S.
0:39:17 And it seemed to make little impression on the outlets of elite opinion leadership, major newspapers and news magazines.
0:39:28 There wasn’t a quest for information on the scale that I would have thought officials would want to launch if they had recognized to their ignorance.
0:39:33 But they made a set of policy decisions like they knew how to handle this crisis.
0:39:35 And then they were not really open to learning.
0:39:50 On March 12th, Quilmar Abrego Garcia was picked up by ICE in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
0:40:00 In the days that followed, he was deported to the country where he was born, El Salvador, except this time he wound up in its infamous Seacott prison.
0:40:05 At Seacott, they don’t let any of the prisoners have access to the outside world.
0:40:12 On March 31st, the Trump administration said it had mistakenly deported Abrego Garcia, calling it an administrative error.
0:40:14 On April 4th, a U.S.
0:40:19 District Judge told the Trump administration to have Abrego Garcia back in the United States by April 7th.
0:40:26 On April 10th, the Supreme Court entered the chat and more or less agreed, saying the Trump administration needed to get Abrego Garcia back.
0:40:29 But it’s April 23rd, and he’s still not back.
0:40:43 On Today Explained, we’re going to speak with the Maryland senator who sat down with Abrego Garcia in El Salvador last week and figure out how this legal standoff between the Trump administration and the courts might play out.
0:40:48 The regular season is in the rearview, and now it’s time for the games that matter the most.
0:40:51 This is Kenny Beecham, and playoff basketball is finally here.
0:40:59 On Small Ball, we’re diving deep into every series, every crunch time finish, every coaching adjustment that can make or break a championship run.
0:41:01 Who’s building for a 16-win marathon?
0:41:04 Which superstar will submit their legacy?
0:41:07 And which role player is about to become a household name?
0:41:12 With so many fascinating first-round matchups, will the West be the bloodbath we anticipate?
0:41:14 Will the East be as predictable as we think?
0:41:16 Can the Celtics defend their title?
0:41:20 Can Steph Curry, LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard push the young teams at the top?
0:41:26 I’ll be bringing the expertise, the passionate, genuine opinion you need for the most exciting time of the NBA calendar.
0:41:30 Small Ball is your essential companion for the NBA postseason.
0:41:34 Join me, Kenny Beecham, for new episodes of Small Ball throughout the playoffs.
0:41:40 Don’t miss Small Ball at Kenny Beecham, new episodes dropping through the playoffs, available on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.
0:41:51 This week on Prof G Markets, we speak with Ryan Peterson, founder and CEO of Flexport, a leader in global supply chain management.
0:41:59 We discuss how tariffs are actually impacting businesses, and we get Ryan’s take on the likely outcomes of this ongoing trade war.
0:42:05 If they don’t change anything and this 145% duty sticks on China, it’ll take out, like, mass bankruptcies.
0:42:09 We’re talking, like, 80% of small business that buys from China will just die.
0:42:12 And millions of employees will go, you know, we’ll be unemployed.
0:42:17 I mean, it’s sort of why I’m like, they obviously have to back off the trade.
0:42:19 Like, that can’t be that they just do that.
0:42:21 I don’t believe that they’re that crazy.
0:42:25 You can find that conversation exclusively on the Prof G Markets podcast.
0:42:49 A book like this, a conversation like this, is ultimately only valuable if there are lessons to be drawn from the failures.
0:42:52 Can you tell me about some of those lessons?
0:43:06 Well, I think, you know, for me, the key lesson, you know, as I look back on it, is that policymakers have to be honest with themselves and with the public about what they know and they don’t know.
0:43:21 You can’t just wing it and you can’t pretend, you know, tremendous loss of credibility in terms of your relationship with the public and also bad judgments when you don’t acknowledge what you don’t know and don’t seek to learn.
0:43:24 So I see that as really at the core.
0:43:27 The book Steve and I have written is not a muckraking book.
0:43:38 You know, we’re not accusing officials of nefarious motives or corruption or, you know, it’s not the plandemic that sometimes—
0:43:38 Yeah, it’s interesting.
0:43:40 There are no real villains in this book.
0:43:41 It’s not that kind of story.
0:43:46 It’s more a story of folly than villainy.
0:43:58 So that kind of honesty about what you know and don’t know, and this is a trick—policy making in our highly complex world is rife with uncertainty.
0:44:05 And we have to confront that squarely in order to avoid making big mistakes.
0:44:11 What do we know about the loss of public trust in our institutions and our government?
0:44:13 Do we have good data on this yet?
0:44:17 Was there a clear erosion of trust after COVID?
0:44:18 Yes, there has been.
0:44:21 I mean, it was already on a downward trend.
0:44:28 I mean, trust in institutions had been on the decline for a long time, but you can see it really does markedly drop.
0:44:35 And so it’s not just public health that is affected, also universities, and it’s also the media.
0:44:41 They have all taken a hit, and they were all not in great shape before COVID, but they’re—well, I take that back.
0:44:53 Public health was in pretty good shape before COVID, but I regret to say universities and the media were not in such great shape, and they’ve all suffered.
0:44:55 I can see it in the people around me.
0:44:59 Something was ruptured.
0:45:00 For a lot of people.
0:45:04 And I don’t think we quite understand it yet, but I think it was significant.
0:45:12 And I think it has some really alarming downstream implications for our society.
0:45:25 That is at the root of our motives in writing the book, that we want to confront this history and try to reach some kind of broader shared understanding about what happened and what it means.
0:45:41 And so we’re trying to push that conversation so that we can, instead of just turning away from this episode, we can process it and come to at least the contours of a common understanding.
0:45:50 Maybe that’s too much to hope for in our polarized context, but that is what we hope to be able to advance.
0:45:52 I agree with you in principle.
0:45:55 I also don’t know what that would actually look like.
0:46:03 What would it mean for public officials like that to be held accountable in that way?
0:46:10 Are we capable of doing that right now in this polarized climate in a civilized and productive way?
0:46:22 I don’t know if, you know, it would work to sort of haul them in front of a congressional committee and watch them get roasted, if that’s what, you know, if that’s what we mean by accountability.
0:46:33 I think accountability can happen more in society with conversations like the one we are having, with conferences and academia and the classrooms.
0:46:45 There are some policymakers who had positions of great responsibility during the crisis who are able to have a conversation about what they got right and what they got wrong.
0:46:47 And certainly that should be encouraged.
0:46:50 Those can happen in societal settings.
0:46:56 It doesn’t have to be a highly charged political setting where those conversations occur.
0:47:01 But I think that’s the path forward towards healing these ruptures.
0:47:08 And I do agree with you that there were profound ruptures during the pandemic in society.
0:47:16 You know, divisions between families and friends over how they were interpreting the pandemic response.
0:47:23 Presumably we can draw lessons from this that will help us navigate the next societal crisis.
0:47:29 To that end, what do you think is the most important takeaway here?
0:47:33 What lesson must we absolutely learn for the next storm?
0:47:34 Whatever form that takes.
0:47:42 Killer comet or climate catastrophe, fill in the blank, you know, with your favorite extinction threat.
0:47:48 So the acknowledgement of uncertainty, the willingness to keep learning,
0:47:54 and then resist that impulse towards moralized antagonism.
0:48:01 You know, dismissing the perspectives of people you disagree with or that on the other side politically.
0:48:03 Resist that.
0:48:06 Listen to them and try to evaluate what they say on the merits.
0:48:12 And don’t assume that you have nothing to learn from people you think are bad people.
0:48:16 What we saw in the pandemic was, you know, society sort of turning on itself.
0:48:23 So Democrats blaming Republicans, Republicans blaming Democrats, you know, all these different divides,
0:48:31 where the root problem was that this crisis was not within our, we did not have the technology to control or stop this crisis.
0:48:40 All we could really do is mitigate it and sort of acknowledging our frailties as human beings.
0:48:41 That’s difficult.
0:48:48 It’s much easier and more comfortable just to blame the bad things that are happening on the people you don’t like anyway.
0:48:50 And so we saw an awful lot of that.
0:48:52 I’m going to leave it right there.
0:48:58 Once again, the book is called In COVID’s Wake, How Our Politics Failed Us.
0:49:01 Frances Lee, this was a pleasure.
0:49:02 Thank you.
0:49:02 Thank you, Sean.
0:49:10 All right.
0:49:12 I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:49:22 I certainly did in the sense that it was a reminder of how chaotic and complicated this time was
0:49:28 and how agonizing the decisions that had to be made really were.
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0:01:12 There are lots of stories to tell about the COVID pandemic.
0:01:17 But almost all of them, if you drill down, are about politics.
0:01:27 About who makes the decisions, who questions those decisions, who matters, who suffers, who survives, who doesn’t, and why.
0:01:31 But what did we get right?
0:01:34 What did we get wrong?
0:01:39 And what do all those choices say about the health of our democracy?
0:01:45 I think it’s safe to say we’ll be living in COVID’s shadow for a long time.
0:01:53 But perhaps there’s enough distance now to have a serious conversation about all these questions.
0:01:58 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:04 Today’s guest is Frances Lee.
0:02:15 She’s a professor of political science and public affairs at Princeton University, and a co-author of a book called In COVID’s Wake, How Our Politics Failed Us.
0:02:21 It treats our response to COVID as a kind of stress test of our political system.
0:02:34 Lee and her co-author, Stephen Macedo, look at all the institutions responsible for truth-seeking, journalism, science, universities, and asks, how did they perform?
0:02:37 Were they committed to truth?
0:02:38 Open to criticism?
0:02:43 Did they live up to the basic norms of liberalism and science?
0:02:48 Were we able to have a reasonable conversation about what was happening?
0:02:51 And if we weren’t, why not?
0:02:52 And can we have it now?
0:02:59 Frances Lee, welcome to the show.
0:03:01 Thank you, Sean.
0:03:13 I’m going to start this conversation where you start the book, which is with a, I think, a pretty revealing quote by Francis Collins.
0:03:17 And if you don’t mind, I’m just going to read it very quickly.
0:03:24 We failed to say every time there was a recommendation, guys, this is the best we can do right now.
0:03:26 It’s a good chance this is wrong.
0:03:27 We didn’t say that.
0:03:36 We wanted to be sure people actually motivated themselves by what we said, because we wanted change to happen in case it was right.
0:03:41 But we did not admit our ignorance, and that was a profound mistake.
0:03:45 And we lost a lot of credibility along the way.
0:03:48 So, who is Francis Collins?
0:03:52 What does he represent in this story?
0:03:55 And how does that quote really anchor this book?
0:04:00 So, Francis Collins is the head of the National Institutes of Health.
0:04:09 And in that passage, he is reflecting back on the way in which science agencies in the U.S. handled the pandemic.
0:04:21 He’s on a panel with a trucker from Minnesota, and it’s at a Braver Angels event, which tries to bring together people from diverse perspectives for dialogues.
0:04:29 And he is just being remarkably candid in reflecting back on what he saw as the failings of the pandemic response.
0:04:45 You know, we saw what he had to say at that panel as sort of summing up the argument of the book, which is that experts were not frank with the public about the limits of their knowledge and their uncertainties.
0:04:50 They were improvising through the pandemic to a very considerable degree.
0:04:56 They got a lot of things wrong, and they lost a lot of credibility, just as Francis Collins said.
0:05:03 And that they should have been more honest with people about what they knew and did not know.
0:05:07 And they would have retained the public’s trust to a greater degree.
0:05:16 How would you characterize the debate we had in this country about our response to COVID as we were responding?
0:05:19 From your point of view, what went wrong?
0:05:23 Well, it was a crisis, a fast-moving crisis.
0:05:28 And so it’s not surprising in retrospect that the debate was truncated.
0:05:43 But it is surprising, as we looked back and did the research for this book, the extent to which the decisions that were made in the early going of the pandemic departed from conventional wisdom about how to handle a pandemic.
0:05:55 And violated recommendations that had been put on paper in calmer times about how a crisis like this should be handled.
0:06:13 So countries around the world sort of scrapped pre-existing pandemic plans in order to follow the example set in Wuhan and then in Italy, with Italy having the first nationwide lockdown, and improvising along the way.
0:06:24 There wasn’t a scientific basis for the actions that were taken in the sense that there was no accumulated body of evidence that these measures would be effective.
0:06:30 That it was hoped that they would be, but there was the lack of evidence.
0:06:41 And, you know, if you go back and take a look at a report that was prepared by the World Health Organization in 2019, so just months before the pandemic broke out,
0:07:00 that document goes through each of the proposed non-pharmaceutical interventions, meaning the measures that are taken to keep people apart in the context of an infectious disease pandemic, like, you know, masking or social distancing, business closures, school closures.
0:07:06 Takes a look at each of those measures in turn and discusses the evidence base around them.
0:07:10 And across the board, the evidence base is rated as poor quality.
0:07:19 And several such measures are recommended not to be used under any circumstances in the context of a respiratory pandemic.
0:07:27 And among those were border closures, quarantine of exposed individuals, and testing and contact tracing.
0:07:42 And then all those measures were, of course, employed here in the U.S. and around the world in the context of the COVID pandemic without any kind of reckoning with the reasons why those measures were recommended against in the pre-pandemic planning.
0:07:47 Well, that seems like an important point. It wasn’t just here. This is pretty much what everybody was doing, right?
0:07:48 Yes, that’s right.
0:07:54 Okay. Why do you suppose that was? Why the departure from these pre-pandemic plans?
0:08:06 Well, it was the example in Wuhan. So the first such measures, you know, lockdowns, were imposed in Hubei province in China.
0:08:17 And the World Health Organization sent a delegation. There were a couple of Americans on that delegation to Wuhan in early February 2020.
0:08:23 They spent a week there. They saw the scale of the society-wide response.
0:08:31 And they admired it tremendously, the extent to which everyone seemed to be pulling together to try to suppress the spread of the disease.
0:08:34 And then you see cases start to fall.
0:08:40 And the temporary hospitals that had been put up were taken down.
0:08:47 And the report declares the Chinese response a success and recommends that same approach to the whole world.
0:08:53 So there wasn’t a—I mean, I think there should have been more skepticism at the time.
0:08:56 We knew that pandemics come in waves.
0:09:04 And so it was hard to know to what extent the fall in cases was just the natural patterns that we’d previously seen with pandemics,
0:09:07 and to what extent it was a result of the actions taken.
0:09:13 And the public around the world are clamoring for action to protect us from this crisis.
0:09:19 And here in the U.S., when the closures were first announced in March 2020, they were enormously popular.
0:09:29 A Pew Research Center study that we cite in the book shows that 87% of Americans approved of those closures, large majorities of both parties.
0:09:33 So the initial response was, this makes sense to us.
0:09:38 Let’s do this on the part of the public at large.
0:09:48 There was a lot of consensus at that time, and then that consensus fades pretty quickly for reasons we’ll get into.
0:09:56 But before we do that, I think it’s important for you to set up the story you tell in the book.
0:10:05 And a big part of that story is about how certain groups of people were disproportionately harmed by our COVID policies.
0:10:07 Can you say a bit about that?
0:10:13 Well, the effects are wide-ranging, the effects of the pandemic response.
0:10:17 And across the board, they tend to fall harder on the less well-off.
0:10:19 So let’s start with the closures themselves.
0:10:22 Not everyone can stay home.
0:10:27 In order for society to continue to function, for us to stay alive, some people have to keep working.
0:10:34 Well, disproportionately, that’s working-class people who had to keep working through the pandemic, the so-called essential workers.
0:10:40 I mean, you think of medical personnel, and so those are essential workers, too.
0:10:56 But the bulk of the people who had to collect the trash, keep the utilities working, deliver the food, drive the trucks, you know, all the things that needed to be done during the pandemic were largely being done by working-class people.
0:10:59 So the closures are not protecting them.
0:11:01 Meanwhile, their kids can’t go to school.
0:11:07 It’s hard for me to even understand exactly how people got through this crisis under those circumstances.
0:11:08 They certainly had to scramble.
0:11:25 As you look at the effects of those school closures, the learning losses are greater among high-poverty areas on disadvantaged students, on students who were lagging academically before the pandemic, they lost more so that the gaps became wider.
0:11:38 The inflation that resulted from the pandemic response here and around the world, that also places a greater pinch on people who are not doing as well.
0:11:43 The enormous rise in housing costs that followed the pandemic.
0:11:45 You just go through the list.
0:11:51 Every case, as you look at the response, it hits harder in some parts of society than others.
0:11:58 I noticed in a lot of the descriptions of the pandemic that journalists would write about it as that the pandemic exposed inequalities.
0:11:59 Well, it did.
0:12:02 It exposed them, but it also exacerbated them.
0:12:04 It made them bigger.
0:12:09 Say more about the class biases at work here.
0:12:12 What were the blind spots on the part of the decision makers?
0:12:14 What trade-offs did they miss?
0:12:19 What potential harms did they discount or overlook?
0:12:25 It was not a deliberative process, and there were biases in who was at the table making these decisions.
0:12:36 Decisions around COVID policy tended to be made by small groups of people, and it’s basically some generalist government officials and specialists in infectious disease.
0:12:41 So there just weren’t a diversity of voices being brought to bear.
0:12:43 Is that avoidable?
0:12:48 This seems to be—not to say it isn’t a problem, but it seems kind of unavoidable on some level.
0:13:06 Remember, this is a long crisis that, you know, so we can talk about March 2020 and what was done then, but then we have to ask, you know, what was the capacity of governments to take on board new information, listen to more voices, and adjust course?
0:13:28 When you look at our response comparatively to the rest of the world, does it seem to you from the perch of the present that we performed more or less on par with most other countries?
0:13:35 Or was there something exceptional about our responses and these sorts of effects, either in a good way or a bad way?
0:13:42 Well, our handling of the pandemic became more party polarized than is characteristic around the world.
0:13:58 That 2020 was a presidential election year, and with Trump in the White House when the crisis began, you saw sort of an in-power, out-of-power dynamic where Democrats—I mean, Democrats didn’t like or trust President Trump before the crisis.
0:14:08 And so then to have him at the helm, while there was so much fear, there was a tendency to reject anything he had to say, you know, to sort of assume that if he said it, it had to be wrong.
0:14:27 And so you saw a sorting out process where Democrats reacting against President Trump and Trump’s inconsistent stances on, you know, what to do in the context of the crisis was certainly not confidence-inspiring even for independents during that time.
0:14:36 So what we see is this enormous partisan structuring of the pandemic response, not just at the level of policy, but also at the level of individual behavior.
0:14:48 It’s very remarkable to the extent to which party is your key variable for predicting how any individual or how any jurisdiction would respond to the crisis.
0:14:53 Yeah, this part of the story is pretty startling and pretty depressing.
0:15:00 Why do you think our COVID strategies became so strongly associated with political partisanship?
0:15:02 Trump is part of the story here, but not all of it.
0:15:14 To be honest, I don’t think that we have an entirely satisfactory account because, I mean, certainly you can see the reaction around the president, the reaction against Trump.
0:15:21 And Democrats had already had a higher opinion of science and science agencies.
0:15:26 You know, you’d already had the March for Science under Trump before the pandemic, you know.
0:15:40 And so the political dichotomy that Americans perceived during the crisis was there’s Trump versus the scientists, Trump versus Fauci, politicians versus the scientists.
0:15:44 And presented with that choice, Democrats said, well, I trust the scientists.
0:15:51 That began to be the dichotomy on which the attitudes towards the pandemic broke down.
0:15:54 Trump is obviously mentioned in the book.
0:15:57 There’s no way to tell this story without him.
0:16:01 But he’s not a central focus.
0:16:02 Why is that?
0:16:12 We don’t focus on Trump because the U.S. response is not so different from other countries, at least, you know, in the early going.
0:16:17 It evolves in different ways, but that’s not really a Trump story so much as a story of U.S. federalism.
0:16:22 The governors are the primary decision makers over the course of the crisis.
0:16:31 I mean, Trump was on television a lot, and the coronavirus task force made recommendations about what to do and, you know, offered guidance.
0:16:39 And you might remember the gating processes and the color-coded schemes that they came up with about when states could reopen.
0:16:40 But all of that was advisory.
0:16:43 The key decisions were made by the governors.
0:16:51 And so we see those as more central actors in a policy making sense in the U.S. response.
0:17:00 You know, as far as the broader partisanship problem, I mean, I think it has become very clear that this intense polarization, especially in this information environment,
0:17:05 it means a lot of people aren’t really committed to any stable set of ideas.
0:17:08 Like, the only thing they’re committed to is disliking the people on the other side.
0:17:13 And that kind of negative partisanship really does blinker our intuitions on almost every other front.
0:17:18 I mean, the term we use in the book for that phenomenon is moralized antagonism,
0:17:23 where you see people who have different views on a policy issue as bad people.
0:17:28 And so you don’t look at whether there are any reasons why they hold those views.
0:17:33 You don’t consider it as, you know, potentially worthwhile.
0:17:35 You know, what is there to be learned from bad people?
0:17:43 And I think that was to a great extent where we saw failures in the truth-seeking institutions of American democracy,
0:17:51 in the academy, among journalists, some reporting, and also among scientists.
0:17:55 Okay, so the partisan split is very apparent.
0:17:57 And it’s very apparent very early.
0:18:07 And you note in the book that there was no real gap in health outcomes in red and blue states until the vaccine was released.
0:18:11 What starts to change post-vaccine and why?
0:18:23 So it’s so fascinating, like when you track cumulative COVID mortality over time in the states grouped by partisanship.
0:18:28 You can see that red and blue states track pretty close together in that first year.
0:18:39 And in fact, in December 2020, when the vaccine was rolled out, there’s no difference at that point in per capita cumulative COVID mortality in red and blue states.
0:18:42 But it starts to emerge right away.
0:18:50 And, you know, from the work that, you know, was done at the level of public opinion and attitudes towards the vaccine,
0:18:56 it was evident immediately that Democrats were just chomping at the bit to get the vaccine.
0:18:58 They were so much more eager to get vaccinated.
0:19:00 So you saw that in public opinion polling.
0:19:05 You also saw it in the press to get appointments for vaccines,
0:19:12 that it was much more difficult to get an appointment in blue states and blue jurisdictions than in red states.
0:19:13 Yeah, I was in Mississippi.
0:19:14 I had no problem.
0:19:15 No problem, that’s right.
0:19:16 I was in and out.
0:19:19 I took my mom down to get hers from the National Guard.
0:19:22 And, yes, there was no problem for her to get the vaccine early.
0:19:27 But it was more challenging, you know, in the strongly democratic parts of the country.
0:19:38 And so you see just a quick divergence in vaccine uptake across Republican and Democratic leaning jurisdictions.
0:19:43 And, again, you know, thinking of this from a social science point of view,
0:19:51 it’s a nice linear relationship between the partisan lean of the state and the rate of vaccine uptake.
0:19:57 And then that relationship also tracks COVID mortality over the coming year.
0:20:02 So that states with higher vaccine uptake have lower COVID mortality starting in 2021.
0:20:11 You know, one key point, you know, I want to emphasize that our book does find that Democratic states did better than Republican states over the course of the pandemic.
0:20:12 They absolutely did.
0:20:14 It’s a clear difference.
0:20:18 But that difference emerges in year two of the pandemic, not in year one.
0:20:20 So what did work?
0:20:26 A lot more research needs to be done on what succeeded and what failed.
0:20:35 What we have in the book is pretty highly aggregated analysis so that we can show that places that had kept their schools closed longer didn’t do better.
0:20:40 That places with longer lockdowns didn’t do better than places with shorter lockdowns.
0:20:46 Places that locked down more quickly don’t do better than places that were slower to announce stay-at-home orders.
0:20:51 So we can show that, you know, that there’s a lack of correlation there.
0:20:53 But why?
0:20:54 What drives that lack of correlation?
0:21:09 Is it because these measures are not sustainable for human beings over the long timeline necessary to get from the start of a crisis to a vaccine that had been tested and shown to be efficacious and safe?
0:21:22 Is that because a large share of the workforce always had to keep on working regardless so that the virus just continued to spread?
0:21:31 And if anything, maybe the lockdowns had the effect of just ensuring that that spread took place disproportionately among essential workers, but really didn’t reduce it that much.
0:21:32 You know, again, we don’t know what the peaks are.
0:21:39 Like, pandemics unfold in waves, which means that in that first wave, you don’t get full population exposure.
0:21:46 what I would argue here is that there’s an awful lot we still don’t know.
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0:23:18 The world certainly seems a bit alarming at the moment.
0:23:19 And that’s putting it lightly.
0:23:23 And sometimes it can feel as if no one is really doing anything to fix it.
0:23:26 Now, a lot of podcasts focus on that.
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0:24:32 This week on Net Worth and Chill, I’m talking to Mike, the situation Sorrentino, who skyrocketed to fame on Jersey Shore earning millions before it all came crashing down.
0:24:34 Tax evasion, prison time, addiction battles.
0:24:41 Mike is rebuilding his wealth with purpose and helping the people and communities that lifted him up during his darkest days.
0:24:46 I believe that you are the writer, director, and producer of your life.
0:24:50 And if you want a better outcome, then you need to make it so.
0:24:54 Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff.
0:25:18 Well, I think this is a good spot to talk a little more in detail about the decision makers and how they made those decisions.
0:25:24 Now, I want to read to you a quote that gets at what I’m really asking here.
0:25:27 It’s from one of the health officials in your book.
0:25:52 What is wrong with saying and adopting, as a matter of policy, that the most important thing is saving lives, and we should save lives at all costs.
0:25:59 I believe that that’s a quote from Deborah Birx, and so she was the coordinator on the coronavirus task force.
0:26:08 She was not able, she said, to do a kind of cost-benefit analysis where she could calculate how much a life was worth.
0:26:13 I mean, that’s a very understandable response, an attitude.
0:26:25 But you have to remember that as policymakers faced with the kinds of measures that were being employed to control the spread of a disease, lives are on both sides of the equation.
0:26:33 Let’s begin with one of the first measures taken, was the shutting down of so-called non-essential health care.
0:26:37 And it was defined quite broadly.
0:26:46 There were a lot of cancer treatments that were canceled and regarded as non-essential, depending on how advanced the cancer was.
0:26:56 So you’re trading off future risks to life to preserve health care capacity now.
0:27:06 When you are exacerbating inequalities, when you are depriving people of education, that has long-term health effects.
0:27:10 I mean, education is one of the best predictors of people’s longevity.
0:27:14 So you’re trading off present and future.
0:27:17 It’s not so simple.
0:27:18 These are very difficult choices.
0:27:29 The reason why we do cost-benefit analysis is in order to be responsible as policymakers, that you can’t only focus on one threat to human beings, that we’re faced with many.
0:27:34 And look, it’s even more excruciating in terms of the trade-offs, right?
0:27:48 Because different population groups were not equally vulnerable here, even if you’re talking about saving lives at the highest priority, well, okay, old people were more vulnerable than young people, right?
0:27:56 And so there may be policies that would save the lives of older population groups or more, you know, health-compromised people.
0:28:03 And that might come at the expense of real harm to children in school, right?
0:28:04 How do you weigh that?
0:28:07 You know, it’s just, there’s no formula for that.
0:28:14 Well, there was a refusal to weigh it during the crisis, that there was sort of a denial that that was what was happening.
0:28:16 Do you think it was a denial, though?
0:28:17 How do we know it was a denial?
0:28:22 And how do we know they just did their best and made their choices?
0:28:23 Some of them were good, some of them were bad.
0:28:28 Well, they acknowledged that they didn’t discuss the costs or the trade-offs.
0:28:37 So, you know, we have a lot of quotations to that effect from policymakers involved, saying that that was really somebody else’s job and not their job to consider the costs.
0:28:42 So they’re pretty frank about that, that they simply weren’t doing it.
0:28:44 And who’s they?
0:28:46 You’re talking about the health officials mostly?
0:28:47 Yeah, health officials.
0:28:47 That’s right.
0:28:58 So when you think about the policy process around COVID, you’ve got government officials, elected officials, and you have health virologists and public health officials.
0:29:01 And that’s basically who’s in the room.
0:29:09 And so then it would be the elected officials’ job to consider everything else.
0:29:22 But how would they do it if they’re not being advised, if they have no perspectives being brought to bear that would shed light on the trade-offs and on the costs present in the room?
0:29:29 Now, you know, I think they certainly deserve blame here, too, that it doesn’t all rest on public health.
0:29:38 You know, elected officials had a tendency to want to hide behind public health, to say we’re just following the science, as if that’s possible in the presence of all these value trade-offs.
0:29:49 But it made their lives easier to pretend like they were not exercising any discretion, and that they were doing the only thing that could be done.
0:30:03 Part of the critique here, at least of the public officials and the health experts, is that they were intolerant of criticism, or they were intolerant of skepticism.
0:30:10 And, again, I’m trying to be fair in retrospect to the people that were in the fire here.
0:30:21 And I can imagine that one reason for that intolerance of skepticism, whatever one thinks of it, is that they really were in a very tough position.
0:30:27 Do you have sympathy for the predicament that these people were facing?
0:30:30 I mean, how would you have weighed the trade-offs here?
0:30:33 Well, I do have empathy.
0:30:41 I also know, and experts should be cognizant of this as well, that they have their limitations.
0:30:43 We have our limitations.
0:30:46 And that there’s always a risk of hubris.
0:30:52 And that they should have acknowledged the possibility of failure.
0:30:57 That these measures wouldn’t work as well as they hoped that they would.
0:31:01 And that should have been factored into their decision-making.
0:31:04 It’s not just, you know, lives versus the economy.
0:31:07 It’s also the question of, how many lives are you even saving?
0:31:10 Like, is this really, are these policies workable for society?
0:31:14 There was a lack of evidence based on that.
0:31:21 And so you can’t just make policy affecting the whole of society on a wing and a prayer.
0:31:24 And to a great extent, that is what they were doing.
0:31:42 You implied earlier, and you certainly talk about this in the book, that some of these health officials, people like Fauci and Birx, who were the face of these measures, that there was a bit of a disjunction between what they were saying in private and what they were saying in public.
0:31:50 That they were lying at worst, that they were lying at worst, or being misleading at best when facing the public and talking about this.
0:32:01 I just don’t want that to hang out there without being, without examples being offered, because I know there is a lot of bad faith attacks out there, and I don’t want to do that.
0:32:05 So, can you give me an example of what you mean by that?
0:32:08 How do we know that there was this disjunction?
0:32:14 Well, in her memoir, Deborah Birx is quite frank that two weeks to slow the spread was just a pretext.
0:32:25 And it was just an effort to get Trump on board for initial closures, and that as soon as those closures were in place, she says, we immediately began to look for ways to extend them.
0:32:50 I think one of the more devastating noble lies that was told during the pandemic was to go out there in summer, spring and summer 2021, even into the fall of 2021, with the vaccine mandates and tell people that if you get vaccinated, you can protect your loved ones from catching the disease from you, that you will become a dead end to the virus.
0:32:55 They did not have a scientific basis for making that claim.
0:32:59 The vaccine trials had not tested for an outcome on transmission.
0:33:10 We knew that, you know, based on the trials, that people who were vaccinated were less likely to report symptoms consistent with it and less likely to test positive for COVID.
0:33:18 But there weren’t tests conducted on whether getting vaccinated would protect people in your household, for example.
0:33:23 Like, they could have done tests for transmission, but that was not part of the endpoint of the trials.
0:33:29 And so when they went out and made claims that it would affect or stop transmission, they were going beyond their data.
0:33:45 We also knew that a systemically administered vaccine, meaning a shot, it’s not a nasal vaccine, doesn’t prevent you from contracting the virus and for it proliferating in your nasal cavity so that you can transmit.
0:33:47 That was known.
0:33:56 And so you shouldn’t have gone out there and just reassured people that this would work and you’d be able to protect your loved ones.
0:34:05 Everybody found out in rather short order that getting vaccinated for COVID didn’t prevent you from getting COVID and also from transmitting it to others.
0:34:34 If you were in one of those rooms making these decisions in that moment about what to tell the public, what would you do if you were faced with a choice where you could either mislead the public with a noble lie that you were absolutely convinced would say thousands of lies, but you also knew that if the public were to learn about the lie later, it would shatter trust in scientific institutions for maybe a generation.
0:34:39 Honestly, Francis, I don’t know what I would actually do in that position.
0:34:40 I know what I would tell you.
0:34:42 I would do if you asked me now.
0:34:45 I’d say, well, I’d tell the truth and let the chips fall.
0:34:52 But that’s very easy to say from a distance and probably a lot more difficult when you’re in the fire like that.
0:34:54 But is this something you thought about?
0:34:55 What would you have done?
0:34:59 This is a very important question.
0:35:11 I mean, what I, what I, again, I would turn to is what is the basis for believing that these measures would work, that that you have to, you have to be able to accept uncertainty.
0:35:15 If you’re a scientist, you know, there’s a lot we just don’t know about the world.
0:35:20 To a great extent, the more expertise you develop, the more you learn about what we don’t know.
0:35:26 And so you have, you have to come to terms with your ignorance as a policymaker.
0:35:31 And so you may be wrong about what you think is going to work.
0:35:41 And so under those conditions, now you’re trading your future credibility for some, for measures that will be suboptimal, may not have nearly the effectiveness that you hope for.
0:35:50 That, that I think is the greater failing that, you know, to, to, to, to not confront the limits of our knowledge.
0:36:03 It’s hubris because, you know, if you ask them, well, on what basis do you make this claim that if you get this vaccine, which is a shot, that will stop you from transmitting a respiratory virus?
0:36:04 Like, well, on what basis?
0:36:09 And so here’s where I think, you know, we see failures in other truth-seeking institutions.
0:36:11 Where were the academics?
0:36:16 Where were the journalists asking hard questions of policymakers during that time?
0:36:20 Critical thinking, I think, got suspended during the pandemic.
0:36:27 And so then government officials, including public health officials, are not being held accountable in the way they should be to justify themselves.
0:36:38 We are talking about the lines between scientific judgments and political judgments or scientific judgments and value judgments.
0:36:51 Do you think COVID shattered the delusion, if anyone still held on to it, that there’s a value-free science, that we can make policy choices like these based on science alone?
0:37:06 One should not think that it is possible for science to settle political questions in the way that politicians talked about the COVID response, that they’re just following the science.
0:37:09 That was never a responsible rhetoric.
0:37:12 It was never a responsible way to make policy.
0:37:24 That you have to come to terms with the reality of politics, you know, which is diverse values and diverse interests.
0:37:29 And that when you make policy choices, there are always winners and losers.
0:37:33 And you have to see that with clear eyes.
0:37:35 And you try to make as many winners as possible.
0:37:38 And you try not to harm people unnecessarily.
0:37:48 But you can’t blind yourself to the effects of the choices that you make by sort of pretending like there was no choice at all.
0:37:50 Which, you know, I think we saw a lot of that during the pandemic.
0:37:58 There’s no version of a crisis like this that won’t involve mistakes, obviously, because of all the uncertainty.
0:38:02 So how do we draw a line between mistakes and deceptions?
0:38:06 I mean, I think mostly what we’re talking about are mistakes.
0:38:12 But they were compounded by failures of accountability relationships.
0:38:26 That, you know, had there been more tough questions being asked, I think it would have exposed some of the weaknesses of the assumptions that were being made or the claims that were being made.
0:38:31 So with the start, tremendous uncertainty choices are made.
0:38:40 But under those conditions, recognizing how little you know, you should be on a quest, on a mission to try to learn as much as you can.
0:38:58 There should have been enormous interest in the successes in school reopening in spring of 2020 in Europe, in the handful of schools that reopened in Montana and Wyoming here in the U.S. in the 2019-2020 school year.
0:39:02 So there were some schools that did reopen even then, not very many, but some.
0:39:07 Lots reopened in the fall across whole swaths of the U.S.
0:39:17 And it seemed to make little impression on the outlets of elite opinion leadership, major newspapers and news magazines.
0:39:28 There wasn’t a quest for information on the scale that I would have thought officials would want to launch if they had recognized to their ignorance.
0:39:33 But they made a set of policy decisions like they knew how to handle this crisis.
0:39:35 And then they were not really open to learning.
0:39:50 On March 12th, Quilmar Abrego Garcia was picked up by ICE in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
0:40:00 In the days that followed, he was deported to the country where he was born, El Salvador, except this time he wound up in its infamous Seacott prison.
0:40:05 At Seacott, they don’t let any of the prisoners have access to the outside world.
0:40:12 On March 31st, the Trump administration said it had mistakenly deported Abrego Garcia, calling it an administrative error.
0:40:14 On April 4th, a U.S.
0:40:19 District Judge told the Trump administration to have Abrego Garcia back in the United States by April 7th.
0:40:26 On April 10th, the Supreme Court entered the chat and more or less agreed, saying the Trump administration needed to get Abrego Garcia back.
0:40:29 But it’s April 23rd, and he’s still not back.
0:40:43 On Today Explained, we’re going to speak with the Maryland senator who sat down with Abrego Garcia in El Salvador last week and figure out how this legal standoff between the Trump administration and the courts might play out.
0:40:48 The regular season is in the rearview, and now it’s time for the games that matter the most.
0:40:51 This is Kenny Beecham, and playoff basketball is finally here.
0:40:59 On Small Ball, we’re diving deep into every series, every crunch time finish, every coaching adjustment that can make or break a championship run.
0:41:01 Who’s building for a 16-win marathon?
0:41:04 Which superstar will submit their legacy?
0:41:07 And which role player is about to become a household name?
0:41:12 With so many fascinating first-round matchups, will the West be the bloodbath we anticipate?
0:41:14 Will the East be as predictable as we think?
0:41:16 Can the Celtics defend their title?
0:41:20 Can Steph Curry, LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard push the young teams at the top?
0:41:26 I’ll be bringing the expertise, the passionate, genuine opinion you need for the most exciting time of the NBA calendar.
0:41:30 Small Ball is your essential companion for the NBA postseason.
0:41:34 Join me, Kenny Beecham, for new episodes of Small Ball throughout the playoffs.
0:41:40 Don’t miss Small Ball at Kenny Beecham, new episodes dropping through the playoffs, available on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.
0:41:51 This week on Prof G Markets, we speak with Ryan Peterson, founder and CEO of Flexport, a leader in global supply chain management.
0:41:59 We discuss how tariffs are actually impacting businesses, and we get Ryan’s take on the likely outcomes of this ongoing trade war.
0:42:05 If they don’t change anything and this 145% duty sticks on China, it’ll take out, like, mass bankruptcies.
0:42:09 We’re talking, like, 80% of small business that buys from China will just die.
0:42:12 And millions of employees will go, you know, we’ll be unemployed.
0:42:17 I mean, it’s sort of why I’m like, they obviously have to back off the trade.
0:42:19 Like, that can’t be that they just do that.
0:42:21 I don’t believe that they’re that crazy.
0:42:25 You can find that conversation exclusively on the Prof G Markets podcast.
0:42:49 A book like this, a conversation like this, is ultimately only valuable if there are lessons to be drawn from the failures.
0:42:52 Can you tell me about some of those lessons?
0:43:06 Well, I think, you know, for me, the key lesson, you know, as I look back on it, is that policymakers have to be honest with themselves and with the public about what they know and they don’t know.
0:43:21 You can’t just wing it and you can’t pretend, you know, tremendous loss of credibility in terms of your relationship with the public and also bad judgments when you don’t acknowledge what you don’t know and don’t seek to learn.
0:43:24 So I see that as really at the core.
0:43:27 The book Steve and I have written is not a muckraking book.
0:43:38 You know, we’re not accusing officials of nefarious motives or corruption or, you know, it’s not the plandemic that sometimes—
0:43:38 Yeah, it’s interesting.
0:43:40 There are no real villains in this book.
0:43:41 It’s not that kind of story.
0:43:46 It’s more a story of folly than villainy.
0:43:58 So that kind of honesty about what you know and don’t know, and this is a trick—policy making in our highly complex world is rife with uncertainty.
0:44:05 And we have to confront that squarely in order to avoid making big mistakes.
0:44:11 What do we know about the loss of public trust in our institutions and our government?
0:44:13 Do we have good data on this yet?
0:44:17 Was there a clear erosion of trust after COVID?
0:44:18 Yes, there has been.
0:44:21 I mean, it was already on a downward trend.
0:44:28 I mean, trust in institutions had been on the decline for a long time, but you can see it really does markedly drop.
0:44:35 And so it’s not just public health that is affected, also universities, and it’s also the media.
0:44:41 They have all taken a hit, and they were all not in great shape before COVID, but they’re—well, I take that back.
0:44:53 Public health was in pretty good shape before COVID, but I regret to say universities and the media were not in such great shape, and they’ve all suffered.
0:44:55 I can see it in the people around me.
0:44:59 Something was ruptured.
0:45:00 For a lot of people.
0:45:04 And I don’t think we quite understand it yet, but I think it was significant.
0:45:12 And I think it has some really alarming downstream implications for our society.
0:45:25 That is at the root of our motives in writing the book, that we want to confront this history and try to reach some kind of broader shared understanding about what happened and what it means.
0:45:41 And so we’re trying to push that conversation so that we can, instead of just turning away from this episode, we can process it and come to at least the contours of a common understanding.
0:45:50 Maybe that’s too much to hope for in our polarized context, but that is what we hope to be able to advance.
0:45:52 I agree with you in principle.
0:45:55 I also don’t know what that would actually look like.
0:46:03 What would it mean for public officials like that to be held accountable in that way?
0:46:10 Are we capable of doing that right now in this polarized climate in a civilized and productive way?
0:46:22 I don’t know if, you know, it would work to sort of haul them in front of a congressional committee and watch them get roasted, if that’s what, you know, if that’s what we mean by accountability.
0:46:33 I think accountability can happen more in society with conversations like the one we are having, with conferences and academia and the classrooms.
0:46:45 There are some policymakers who had positions of great responsibility during the crisis who are able to have a conversation about what they got right and what they got wrong.
0:46:47 And certainly that should be encouraged.
0:46:50 Those can happen in societal settings.
0:46:56 It doesn’t have to be a highly charged political setting where those conversations occur.
0:47:01 But I think that’s the path forward towards healing these ruptures.
0:47:08 And I do agree with you that there were profound ruptures during the pandemic in society.
0:47:16 You know, divisions between families and friends over how they were interpreting the pandemic response.
0:47:23 Presumably we can draw lessons from this that will help us navigate the next societal crisis.
0:47:29 To that end, what do you think is the most important takeaway here?
0:47:33 What lesson must we absolutely learn for the next storm?
0:47:34 Whatever form that takes.
0:47:42 Killer comet or climate catastrophe, fill in the blank, you know, with your favorite extinction threat.
0:47:48 So the acknowledgement of uncertainty, the willingness to keep learning,
0:47:54 and then resist that impulse towards moralized antagonism.
0:48:01 You know, dismissing the perspectives of people you disagree with or that on the other side politically.
0:48:03 Resist that.
0:48:06 Listen to them and try to evaluate what they say on the merits.
0:48:12 And don’t assume that you have nothing to learn from people you think are bad people.
0:48:16 What we saw in the pandemic was, you know, society sort of turning on itself.
0:48:23 So Democrats blaming Republicans, Republicans blaming Democrats, you know, all these different divides,
0:48:31 where the root problem was that this crisis was not within our, we did not have the technology to control or stop this crisis.
0:48:40 All we could really do is mitigate it and sort of acknowledging our frailties as human beings.
0:48:41 That’s difficult.
0:48:48 It’s much easier and more comfortable just to blame the bad things that are happening on the people you don’t like anyway.
0:48:50 And so we saw an awful lot of that.
0:48:52 I’m going to leave it right there.
0:48:58 Once again, the book is called In COVID’s Wake, How Our Politics Failed Us.
0:49:01 Frances Lee, this was a pleasure.
0:49:02 Thank you.
0:49:02 Thank you, Sean.
0:49:10 All right.
0:49:12 I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:49:22 I certainly did in the sense that it was a reminder of how chaotic and complicated this time was
0:49:28 and how agonizing the decisions that had to be made really were.
0:49:33 But as always, we want to know what you think.
0:49:37 So drop us a line at the gray area at vox.com.
0:49:44 Or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749.
0:49:53 And if you have time after that, go ahead and rate and review and subscribe to the podcast that helps get the word to more people.
0:50:04 This episode was produced by the gray area.
0:50:12 And if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.
0:50:24 And if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.
There are lots of stories to tell about the Covid pandemic. Most of them, on some level, are about politics, about decisions that affected people’s lives in different — and very unequal — ways.
Covid hasn’t disappeared, but the crisis has subsided. So do we have enough distance from it to reflect on what we got right, what we got wrong, and what we can do differently when the next crisis strikes?
Professor Frances E. Lee — co-author of In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us — thinks we do. In this episode, she speaks with Sean about how our politics, our assumptions, and our biases affected decision-making and outcomes during the pandemic.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: Frances E. Lee, professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton and co-author of In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us
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