COVID Revisionism Has Gone Too Far
The Atlantic (archive.ph)
By Rogé Karma
2025-08-21 17:06:25GMT
Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic
Pandemic revisionism has gone mainstream. More than five years after COVID-19 began spreading in the United States, a new conventional wisdom has taken hold in some quarters: Public-health officials knew or should have known from the start that pandemic restrictions would do more harm than good, forced them on the public anyway, and then doubled down even as the evidence piled up against them. When challenged, these officials stifled dissent in order to create an illusion of consensus around obviously flawed policies. In the end, America’s 2020 pandemic response undermined years of learning in schools, destroyed countless businesses, and led to any number of other harms—all without actually saving any lives in the process.
These sorts of claims were once largely confined to the political right. No longer. Two recent books by respectable left-of-center authors—In Covid’s Wake, by the Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, and An Abundance of Caution, by the journalist David Zweig—take up versions of this skeptical narrative, each with their own twists. Both have received rave reviews in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and even the overtly progressive Guardian. The flagship New York Times podcast, The Daily, devoted an episode to an interview with Macedo and Lee. The pair and their work were also featured on PBS NewsHour and CNN.
The books make some valuable points. Some pandemic restrictions remained in place for far too long, especially after vaccines became available, and public-health experts did make several costly mistakes. Their mass support for the George Floyd protests, at a moment when they were otherwise warning against any public gatherings, was particularly damaging to their credibility. But the broader revisionist narrative—that the people in charge imposed sweeping restrictions that they knew were pointless—is a dangerous overcorrection. The political right already believes that America’s pandemic response was illegitimate and is using that as a pretext for waging war on the country’s public-health apparatus. If the center and left succumb to the nihilism that runs through both of these books, no one will remain to defend sensible public-health measures the next time a pandemic comes around.
For the revisionists, the tragedy of America’s pandemic response goes back to the very beginning. According to Macedo and Lee, the “dominant view” within public health prior to 2020 was that so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs)—such as school and office closures, stay-at-home orders, mass testing, and mask mandates—would be ineffective at containing a respiratory virus, but would cause widespread social and economic damage. “Mere months before Covid lockdowns, leading health agencies around the world recommended against the very policies that were widely embraced early in the Covid pandemic,” they write. Once the virus began spreading, however, public-health establishments around the world, enamored of China’s draconian efforts to suppress the outbreak, threw out decades of evidence and embraced society-wide lockdowns. (Right-wing COVID revisionists typically go even further, arguing that public-health officials endorsed lockdowns out of a cynical desire for power.)
As evidence that NPIs were pointless, Macedo and Lee point to Sweden, which refused to mandate masks or close schools, offices, and other public spaces. At first, the country was ridiculed and made into a global pariah for pursuing this strategy. But by the end of 2022, Sweden had one of the lowest rates of excess mortality in all of Europe. “Contrary to what was asserted by various experts in 2020, attempting to suppress and contain the Covid-19 virus was never the only option,” Macedo and Lee conclude.
Almost everything about this narrative is flawed, beginning with its characterization of the pre-pandemic consensus. Macedo and Lee’s account relies heavily on a September 2019 report from the World Health Organization. When I read the report for myself, I was surprised to find that, far from saying NPIs are useless, it actually recommends several, including face masks, school and workplace closures, and travel restrictions, depending on the severity of the outbreak. (The report does recommend against three specific policies—quarantines, border closures, and contact tracing—on the grounds that they are extremely onerous and lack concrete evidence of effectiveness.) Although the authors of the report acknowledge that NPIs can be “highly disruptive,” they arrive at the exact opposite conclusion as Macedo and Lee do. “The most effective strategy to mitigate the impact of a pandemic,” the report says, “is to reduce contacts between infected and uninfected persons, thereby reducing the spread of infection, the peak demand for hospital beds, and the total number of infections, hospitalizations and deaths.” The CDC’s 2017 pandemic-preparedness plan came to similar conclusions.
When I brought up these points to Macedo and Lee, Lee acknowledged that there “was definitely debate in the field at the time” but insisted that “strong proponents of NPIs were a minority perspective,” citing a 2019 report published by Johns Hopkins University and a 2006 study by four epidemiologists. Those documents are indeed more equivocal about NPIs, but even they are far from being opposed to the use of them. The 2019 report, for instance, states that “a multitude of factors will likely determine how effective NPIs will be, such as the size and geographical range of the outbreak, the specific pathogen, the timing of the outbreak, and the country of occurrence,” and includes several recommendations for how to implement certain measures most effectively.
Nor is Sweden the promising counterexample that Macedo and Lee (and many other COVID revisionists) make it out to be. Sweden finished 2020 with an excess mortality rate that was five times that of Finland and 12 times that of Norway. The Swedish government’s own postmortem report on its pandemic response concluded that “earlier and more extensive pandemic action should have been taken, particularly during the first wave.”
Sweden’s pandemic performance did eventually surpass those of most other European countries—but this was only after it embarked on one of Europe’s most successful vaccine rollouts in spring 2021. (By contrast, several of its neighbors, such as Finland, botched their vaccination efforts.) In other words, Sweden appears to have ended up with a relatively low death rate despite its lack of restrictions, not because of them. It probably could have saved even more lives by adopting NPIs earlier in the pandemic. “People love to cite Sweden as a success story of the hands-off approach,” Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. “But if anything, it shows the exact opposite.”
The COVID revisionists are on much stronger ground when they claim that the U.S. kept certain pandemic restrictions, above all school closures, in place for too long. Schools are the focus of Zweig’s An Abundance of Caution. As he documents at length—and argued persuasively at the time—the risk of severe illness among children was low, and schools themselves do not appear to have been a major source of transmission to the broader community. Yet 74 of the 100 largest school districts in the U.S. began the fall 2020 semester with remote-only instruction, and only 40 percent of schools nationwide offered the option of full-time in-person education. This was a genuine failure. Children who were kept out of school longer experienced much higher rates of learning loss and worse mental-health outcomes. Learning loss was especially severe for poor and minority children.
Where the revisionists go too far, however, is in their explanation of why schools remained closed for so long. In Zweig’s telling, public-health experts, the media, and teachers’ unions constituted a “laptop class” of liberal elites who indulged in pandemic groupthink. It was clear by summer 2020, he argues, that schools could safely be reopened, because several European countries had already done so. But the overwhelmingly liberal public-health establishment continued to sow fear about in-person learning—in part because Donald Trump was in favor of it—and their credulous allies in the media disseminated the message.
“Acting in concert—as a tribe, if you will—and aided by social media, these powerful factions exerted considerable control over school policy and the public narrative around it,” Zweig writes. This climate of fear led teachers’ unions to rebel against the prospect of reopening, at the expense of both children and parents, especially those from underprivileged backgrounds. “No other group of essential professionals en masse fought—and succeeded—to not have to show up for work,” he writes of teachers.
Zweig has a point, but he leaves out some important parts of the story. First, elite opinion on school reopenings was much more divided than he lets on. Throughout 2020, the question was the subject of extensive public debate. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine came out in favor of reopening in July of that year. Prominent public-health experts argued for reopenings in publications including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Second, perhaps even more important, a crucial reason that teachers’ unions were able to resist reopening is that they faced relatively little public backlash. Why? Because much of the opposition to school openings came from parents, who were terrified of COVID and didn’t want to put their children, or themselves, in harm’s way. When I put that to Zweig, he countered that parents supported remote learning only because they had been misled by the so-called experts. “Whether or not those people are fearful has to do with—and I know this is a loaded term but I’m using it purposefully—misinformation by the public-health establishment and the media,” he said.
No doubt media coverage influenced parental attitudes. But if that were the entire story, opposition to in-person schooling would presumably have been concentrated among wealthy, white, highly educated households—Zweig’s laptop class—who on average pay the most attention to the news and expert opinion. In fact, the opposite was true. Support for remote learning was most pronounced among Black, Hispanic, and low-income parents. One nationally representative survey by the University of Southern California found that a majority of low-income families believed schools should remain closed for the 2020–21 school year, compared with only 27 percent of the wealthiest families. Other polls found similar results. What Zweig attributes to media indoctrination is more adequately explained by real-world experience: Poor and minority families were far likelier than wealthy white households to have lost loved ones to the pandemic and to have health conditions putting them at higher risk. They had perfectly good reasons to be afraid, regardless of what The New York Times was saying.
Macedo and Lee extend the blame-the-elites style of argument beyond school closures, arguing that other pandemic restrictions remained in place for far too long because the public-health establishment elevated ideology over science. “One of our central issues is that debate became unwelcome beginning in April 2020,” Macedo told me. He and Lee dedicate a chapter to the debate over the Great Barrington Declaration: a one-page document written by three lockdown-skeptical scientists in October 2020 that called for most people to “resume life as normal” while governments deployed a strategy of “focused protection” concentrated on the most vulnerable individuals, namely the elderly.
This proposal, Macedo and Lee write, was an “earnest appeal by serious scholars” that “deserved a respectful hearing” but instead became the victim of a vicious, coordinated assault by the public-health establishment. They point to a private-email chain in which Dr. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, called for a “quick and devastating takedown of its premises,” and a counter-memorandum signed by 7,000 public-health experts that argued that the herd-immunity approach was based on “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.” Macedo and Lee write, “The reaction to the Great Barrington Declaration represented one of the key episodes in the moralization of dissent during the Covid crisis.”
Let’s start with the merits of the proposal itself. The idea of “focused protection” sounds great in theory, but would have been almost impossible to implement in practice. In 2020, about 90 million people in America were either older than 65 or had a preexisting condition that made them vulnerable to the coronavirus. The notion that we could have isolated close to a third of the country’s residents while allowing the virus to spread unimpeded through the rest of the population was a fantasy. “In basically every country that tried something like this, we saw infections spill over to the vulnerable,” Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told me. (When I put that critique to Macedo and Lee, Lee said, “The idea that focused protection would be more difficult than to protect everyone is hard to wrap my mind around.”)
On top of that, in October 2020, the world was a few months away from having highly effective vaccines. “Why needlessly risk the lives of so many people when vaccines were right around the corner?” Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, asked me. Osterholm had been an early lockdown skeptic—Macedo and Lee cite him approvingly at several points—but the imminent possibility of vaccination had made him change his tune. “This was the moment when it made the least sense to take away NPIs,” he said.
Although Collins regrets using the intemperate phrase quick and devastating takedown in that email exchange, he is adamant that public-health officials made the right call in coming out forcefully against the Great Barrington Declaration. “If this proposal had been implemented, it would have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people,” Collins told me. “There was no way we could just sit around silently and let that happen.”
They didn’t sit around; nor did they silence the Great Barrington Declaration or try to banish its authors to the scientific wilderness, as Macedo and Lee suggest. Yes, the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration came in for some personal abuse, usually by individual epidemiologists on social media. The official response, however, came in the form of a carefully argued article published in an academic journal that responded to the proposal’s central claims, offering loads of counterarguments backed by scientific studies. What Macedo and Lee characterize as a subversion of public debate looks more like an example of the marketplace of ideas in action.
At times, the revisionist narrative seems to exist in an alternate history in which the United States implemented a heavy-handed, centralized response to the pandemic. In reality, Donald Trump, who was president in 2020 (many COVID revisionists somehow overlook this), spent most of that year downplaying the severity of the pandemic, undermining public-health messaging, and refusing to implement or support the policies that public-health experts, doctors, and much of the country were begging for. The result was a shambolic and porous state-by-state patchwork rather than a unified national strategy to deploy the full resources of the federal government.
Macedo and Lee nonetheless look back at that time and conclude that the U.S. did too much, not too little. In their view, there is no evidence that any of the various measures employed to control the virus, other than vaccines, saved any lives. They cite multiple analyses, including their own, that find no difference in pre-vaccination COVID mortality rates between blue states, which had tighter and longer-lasting restrictions, and red states, which had looser restrictions and ended them earlier. Although Macedo and Lee are careful not to explicitly conclude from these analyses that “nothing worked,” it is hard to come away from their discussion of the evidence with any other view. “We have to be honest with ourselves,” Lee told me. “There are a lot of medical interventions that we think will be successful and then they don’t work. Sometimes the evidence doesn’t bear out what you expect to see.”
But the analyses that Macedo and Lee rely on fail to account for differences in the timing of when different states experienced their highest COVID death counts. Several blue states, including New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, were hit hard early, and the virus spread before they could implement much of an organized response. By one calculation, the Northeast experienced 56 percent of all U.S. COVID deaths from February through May 2020 despite containing just 17 percent of the country’s population; the South, meanwhile, experienced just 17 percent of deaths. In the subsequent months, that dynamic reversed: Northeastern states saw their death rates plummet, while southern states saw their death rates spike. Blue states got hit earlier and harder, but once the pandemic went national, they performed much better.
In our conversation, Macedo and Lee countered by pointing to examples of states that experienced the pandemic at similar times and had similar 2020 age-adjusted mortality rates, despite the fact that some (such as California) kept restrictions in place longer than others (such as Florida). But these cases run into a further complication: Although state-level analyses find no pre-vaccine difference in COVID deaths, they do estimate that the most restrictive states experienced about 30 percent fewer infections than the least restrictive ones, which is the precise outcome that NPIs are supposed to achieve. That is why Thomas Bollyky, the lead author of one of the state-level studies that Macedo and Lee cite, told me that he was shocked to hear his work being used to shed doubt on the effectiveness of NPIs. “I feel like I’m having an Annie Hall–type moment,” Bollyky told me. “These interventions were designed to reduce infections, and that’s exactly what they did.”
Why didn’t they show an obvious impact on mortality, then? One possibility, Bollyky said, is that a long list of intermediating factors—including age, preexisting conditions, and health-care access—determine whether an infected person will die from COVID. These might be impossible to fully control for in state-by-state comparisons. Another is that the elderly, who were most at risk of dying from infection, were likely to voluntarily adhere to social-distancing policies even when official mandates went away. For example, although Florida was one of the first states to entirely lift restrictions, Bollyky and colleagues found that Florida residents, who are disproportionately elderly, stayed home and wore masks at higher rates than people in most other states. Lockdown policies might have been so effective at changing behavior that people kept following restrictions even after they were lifted, creating the false impression that policy didn’t matter in the first place. (There were also plenty of Californians who disobeyed the orders that remained in place in their state, making those policies seem less effective.)
Whether restrictions prevented the spread of COVID is a different question from whether they were worth the cost. Macedo, Lee, and Zweig are right that America’s pandemic response was marked by a failure to properly weigh trade-offs. As they document at length, public-health officials often framed saving lives from the virus as the only legitimate objective of public policy, without considering the potential damage that would stem from the pursuit of that goal. Most public-health experts now seem to share that assessment. In July 2023, for instance, Collins expressed regret for what he called “a public-health mindset” in which officials “attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life” and “zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered.”
The COVID revisionists are right to criticize this tendency, but at times they fall victim to a mirror image of the same mindset: Lockdowns were all costs, no benefits, and thus should have been discarded. “There is just no evidence that any of these measures actually prevented death,” Lee told me. “So we have to ask ourselves: Should we really take the kinds of actions where the benefits are uncertain but we know the costs will be severe?” Zweig is even more direct. “In the end, there was no benefit to keeping schools closed for so-called safety reasons out of ‘an abundance of caution,’” he writes. “And there were no reasonable trade-offs in doing so. There were just harms.”
If ignoring the costs of lockdowns led in some cases to an overly restrictive response, ignoring the benefits could lead to an overly loose one. In many ways, we were lucky last time. The next virus—and there will be a next one—could be far deadlier. It could disproportionately target children or be much harder to vaccinate against. If all restrictions are off the table, the scale of the disaster could be unprecedented.
The revisionist narrative also has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people are convinced that public-health measures don’t work in the first place, they will be less likely to follow them, which, in turn, will render them even less effective. This dynamic could even undermine the one measure that the non-right-wing COVID revisionists generally support: vaccines. After all, if people are convinced that the public-health establishment is full of lying ideologues, why make an exception for vaccines? Unchecked COVID revisionism, in trying to correct the errors of the last pandemic, might leave us even less prepared for the next one.
The Atlantic (archive.ph)
By Rogé Karma
2025-08-21 17:06:25GMT
Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic
Pandemic revisionism has gone mainstream. More than five years after COVID-19 began spreading in the United States, a new conventional wisdom has taken hold in some quarters: Public-health officials knew or should have known from the start that pandemic restrictions would do more harm than good, forced them on the public anyway, and then doubled down even as the evidence piled up against them. When challenged, these officials stifled dissent in order to create an illusion of consensus around obviously flawed policies. In the end, America’s 2020 pandemic response undermined years of learning in schools, destroyed countless businesses, and led to any number of other harms—all without actually saving any lives in the process.
These sorts of claims were once largely confined to the political right. No longer. Two recent books by respectable left-of-center authors—In Covid’s Wake, by the Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, and An Abundance of Caution, by the journalist David Zweig—take up versions of this skeptical narrative, each with their own twists. Both have received rave reviews in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and even the overtly progressive Guardian. The flagship New York Times podcast, The Daily, devoted an episode to an interview with Macedo and Lee. The pair and their work were also featured on PBS NewsHour and CNN.
The books make some valuable points. Some pandemic restrictions remained in place for far too long, especially after vaccines became available, and public-health experts did make several costly mistakes. Their mass support for the George Floyd protests, at a moment when they were otherwise warning against any public gatherings, was particularly damaging to their credibility. But the broader revisionist narrative—that the people in charge imposed sweeping restrictions that they knew were pointless—is a dangerous overcorrection. The political right already believes that America’s pandemic response was illegitimate and is using that as a pretext for waging war on the country’s public-health apparatus. If the center and left succumb to the nihilism that runs through both of these books, no one will remain to defend sensible public-health measures the next time a pandemic comes around.
For the revisionists, the tragedy of America’s pandemic response goes back to the very beginning. According to Macedo and Lee, the “dominant view” within public health prior to 2020 was that so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs)—such as school and office closures, stay-at-home orders, mass testing, and mask mandates—would be ineffective at containing a respiratory virus, but would cause widespread social and economic damage. “Mere months before Covid lockdowns, leading health agencies around the world recommended against the very policies that were widely embraced early in the Covid pandemic,” they write. Once the virus began spreading, however, public-health establishments around the world, enamored of China’s draconian efforts to suppress the outbreak, threw out decades of evidence and embraced society-wide lockdowns. (Right-wing COVID revisionists typically go even further, arguing that public-health officials endorsed lockdowns out of a cynical desire for power.)
As evidence that NPIs were pointless, Macedo and Lee point to Sweden, which refused to mandate masks or close schools, offices, and other public spaces. At first, the country was ridiculed and made into a global pariah for pursuing this strategy. But by the end of 2022, Sweden had one of the lowest rates of excess mortality in all of Europe. “Contrary to what was asserted by various experts in 2020, attempting to suppress and contain the Covid-19 virus was never the only option,” Macedo and Lee conclude.
Almost everything about this narrative is flawed, beginning with its characterization of the pre-pandemic consensus. Macedo and Lee’s account relies heavily on a September 2019 report from the World Health Organization. When I read the report for myself, I was surprised to find that, far from saying NPIs are useless, it actually recommends several, including face masks, school and workplace closures, and travel restrictions, depending on the severity of the outbreak. (The report does recommend against three specific policies—quarantines, border closures, and contact tracing—on the grounds that they are extremely onerous and lack concrete evidence of effectiveness.) Although the authors of the report acknowledge that NPIs can be “highly disruptive,” they arrive at the exact opposite conclusion as Macedo and Lee do. “The most effective strategy to mitigate the impact of a pandemic,” the report says, “is to reduce contacts between infected and uninfected persons, thereby reducing the spread of infection, the peak demand for hospital beds, and the total number of infections, hospitalizations and deaths.” The CDC’s 2017 pandemic-preparedness plan came to similar conclusions.
When I brought up these points to Macedo and Lee, Lee acknowledged that there “was definitely debate in the field at the time” but insisted that “strong proponents of NPIs were a minority perspective,” citing a 2019 report published by Johns Hopkins University and a 2006 study by four epidemiologists. Those documents are indeed more equivocal about NPIs, but even they are far from being opposed to the use of them. The 2019 report, for instance, states that “a multitude of factors will likely determine how effective NPIs will be, such as the size and geographical range of the outbreak, the specific pathogen, the timing of the outbreak, and the country of occurrence,” and includes several recommendations for how to implement certain measures most effectively.
Nor is Sweden the promising counterexample that Macedo and Lee (and many other COVID revisionists) make it out to be. Sweden finished 2020 with an excess mortality rate that was five times that of Finland and 12 times that of Norway. The Swedish government’s own postmortem report on its pandemic response concluded that “earlier and more extensive pandemic action should have been taken, particularly during the first wave.”
Sweden’s pandemic performance did eventually surpass those of most other European countries—but this was only after it embarked on one of Europe’s most successful vaccine rollouts in spring 2021. (By contrast, several of its neighbors, such as Finland, botched their vaccination efforts.) In other words, Sweden appears to have ended up with a relatively low death rate despite its lack of restrictions, not because of them. It probably could have saved even more lives by adopting NPIs earlier in the pandemic. “People love to cite Sweden as a success story of the hands-off approach,” Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. “But if anything, it shows the exact opposite.”
The COVID revisionists are on much stronger ground when they claim that the U.S. kept certain pandemic restrictions, above all school closures, in place for too long. Schools are the focus of Zweig’s An Abundance of Caution. As he documents at length—and argued persuasively at the time—the risk of severe illness among children was low, and schools themselves do not appear to have been a major source of transmission to the broader community. Yet 74 of the 100 largest school districts in the U.S. began the fall 2020 semester with remote-only instruction, and only 40 percent of schools nationwide offered the option of full-time in-person education. This was a genuine failure. Children who were kept out of school longer experienced much higher rates of learning loss and worse mental-health outcomes. Learning loss was especially severe for poor and minority children.
Where the revisionists go too far, however, is in their explanation of why schools remained closed for so long. In Zweig’s telling, public-health experts, the media, and teachers’ unions constituted a “laptop class” of liberal elites who indulged in pandemic groupthink. It was clear by summer 2020, he argues, that schools could safely be reopened, because several European countries had already done so. But the overwhelmingly liberal public-health establishment continued to sow fear about in-person learning—in part because Donald Trump was in favor of it—and their credulous allies in the media disseminated the message.
“Acting in concert—as a tribe, if you will—and aided by social media, these powerful factions exerted considerable control over school policy and the public narrative around it,” Zweig writes. This climate of fear led teachers’ unions to rebel against the prospect of reopening, at the expense of both children and parents, especially those from underprivileged backgrounds. “No other group of essential professionals en masse fought—and succeeded—to not have to show up for work,” he writes of teachers.
Zweig has a point, but he leaves out some important parts of the story. First, elite opinion on school reopenings was much more divided than he lets on. Throughout 2020, the question was the subject of extensive public debate. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine came out in favor of reopening in July of that year. Prominent public-health experts argued for reopenings in publications including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Second, perhaps even more important, a crucial reason that teachers’ unions were able to resist reopening is that they faced relatively little public backlash. Why? Because much of the opposition to school openings came from parents, who were terrified of COVID and didn’t want to put their children, or themselves, in harm’s way. When I put that to Zweig, he countered that parents supported remote learning only because they had been misled by the so-called experts. “Whether or not those people are fearful has to do with—and I know this is a loaded term but I’m using it purposefully—misinformation by the public-health establishment and the media,” he said.
No doubt media coverage influenced parental attitudes. But if that were the entire story, opposition to in-person schooling would presumably have been concentrated among wealthy, white, highly educated households—Zweig’s laptop class—who on average pay the most attention to the news and expert opinion. In fact, the opposite was true. Support for remote learning was most pronounced among Black, Hispanic, and low-income parents. One nationally representative survey by the University of Southern California found that a majority of low-income families believed schools should remain closed for the 2020–21 school year, compared with only 27 percent of the wealthiest families. Other polls found similar results. What Zweig attributes to media indoctrination is more adequately explained by real-world experience: Poor and minority families were far likelier than wealthy white households to have lost loved ones to the pandemic and to have health conditions putting them at higher risk. They had perfectly good reasons to be afraid, regardless of what The New York Times was saying.
Macedo and Lee extend the blame-the-elites style of argument beyond school closures, arguing that other pandemic restrictions remained in place for far too long because the public-health establishment elevated ideology over science. “One of our central issues is that debate became unwelcome beginning in April 2020,” Macedo told me. He and Lee dedicate a chapter to the debate over the Great Barrington Declaration: a one-page document written by three lockdown-skeptical scientists in October 2020 that called for most people to “resume life as normal” while governments deployed a strategy of “focused protection” concentrated on the most vulnerable individuals, namely the elderly.
This proposal, Macedo and Lee write, was an “earnest appeal by serious scholars” that “deserved a respectful hearing” but instead became the victim of a vicious, coordinated assault by the public-health establishment. They point to a private-email chain in which Dr. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, called for a “quick and devastating takedown of its premises,” and a counter-memorandum signed by 7,000 public-health experts that argued that the herd-immunity approach was based on “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.” Macedo and Lee write, “The reaction to the Great Barrington Declaration represented one of the key episodes in the moralization of dissent during the Covid crisis.”
Let’s start with the merits of the proposal itself. The idea of “focused protection” sounds great in theory, but would have been almost impossible to implement in practice. In 2020, about 90 million people in America were either older than 65 or had a preexisting condition that made them vulnerable to the coronavirus. The notion that we could have isolated close to a third of the country’s residents while allowing the virus to spread unimpeded through the rest of the population was a fantasy. “In basically every country that tried something like this, we saw infections spill over to the vulnerable,” Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told me. (When I put that critique to Macedo and Lee, Lee said, “The idea that focused protection would be more difficult than to protect everyone is hard to wrap my mind around.”)
On top of that, in October 2020, the world was a few months away from having highly effective vaccines. “Why needlessly risk the lives of so many people when vaccines were right around the corner?” Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, asked me. Osterholm had been an early lockdown skeptic—Macedo and Lee cite him approvingly at several points—but the imminent possibility of vaccination had made him change his tune. “This was the moment when it made the least sense to take away NPIs,” he said.
Although Collins regrets using the intemperate phrase quick and devastating takedown in that email exchange, he is adamant that public-health officials made the right call in coming out forcefully against the Great Barrington Declaration. “If this proposal had been implemented, it would have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people,” Collins told me. “There was no way we could just sit around silently and let that happen.”
They didn’t sit around; nor did they silence the Great Barrington Declaration or try to banish its authors to the scientific wilderness, as Macedo and Lee suggest. Yes, the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration came in for some personal abuse, usually by individual epidemiologists on social media. The official response, however, came in the form of a carefully argued article published in an academic journal that responded to the proposal’s central claims, offering loads of counterarguments backed by scientific studies. What Macedo and Lee characterize as a subversion of public debate looks more like an example of the marketplace of ideas in action.
At times, the revisionist narrative seems to exist in an alternate history in which the United States implemented a heavy-handed, centralized response to the pandemic. In reality, Donald Trump, who was president in 2020 (many COVID revisionists somehow overlook this), spent most of that year downplaying the severity of the pandemic, undermining public-health messaging, and refusing to implement or support the policies that public-health experts, doctors, and much of the country were begging for. The result was a shambolic and porous state-by-state patchwork rather than a unified national strategy to deploy the full resources of the federal government.
Macedo and Lee nonetheless look back at that time and conclude that the U.S. did too much, not too little. In their view, there is no evidence that any of the various measures employed to control the virus, other than vaccines, saved any lives. They cite multiple analyses, including their own, that find no difference in pre-vaccination COVID mortality rates between blue states, which had tighter and longer-lasting restrictions, and red states, which had looser restrictions and ended them earlier. Although Macedo and Lee are careful not to explicitly conclude from these analyses that “nothing worked,” it is hard to come away from their discussion of the evidence with any other view. “We have to be honest with ourselves,” Lee told me. “There are a lot of medical interventions that we think will be successful and then they don’t work. Sometimes the evidence doesn’t bear out what you expect to see.”
But the analyses that Macedo and Lee rely on fail to account for differences in the timing of when different states experienced their highest COVID death counts. Several blue states, including New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, were hit hard early, and the virus spread before they could implement much of an organized response. By one calculation, the Northeast experienced 56 percent of all U.S. COVID deaths from February through May 2020 despite containing just 17 percent of the country’s population; the South, meanwhile, experienced just 17 percent of deaths. In the subsequent months, that dynamic reversed: Northeastern states saw their death rates plummet, while southern states saw their death rates spike. Blue states got hit earlier and harder, but once the pandemic went national, they performed much better.
In our conversation, Macedo and Lee countered by pointing to examples of states that experienced the pandemic at similar times and had similar 2020 age-adjusted mortality rates, despite the fact that some (such as California) kept restrictions in place longer than others (such as Florida). But these cases run into a further complication: Although state-level analyses find no pre-vaccine difference in COVID deaths, they do estimate that the most restrictive states experienced about 30 percent fewer infections than the least restrictive ones, which is the precise outcome that NPIs are supposed to achieve. That is why Thomas Bollyky, the lead author of one of the state-level studies that Macedo and Lee cite, told me that he was shocked to hear his work being used to shed doubt on the effectiveness of NPIs. “I feel like I’m having an Annie Hall–type moment,” Bollyky told me. “These interventions were designed to reduce infections, and that’s exactly what they did.”
Why didn’t they show an obvious impact on mortality, then? One possibility, Bollyky said, is that a long list of intermediating factors—including age, preexisting conditions, and health-care access—determine whether an infected person will die from COVID. These might be impossible to fully control for in state-by-state comparisons. Another is that the elderly, who were most at risk of dying from infection, were likely to voluntarily adhere to social-distancing policies even when official mandates went away. For example, although Florida was one of the first states to entirely lift restrictions, Bollyky and colleagues found that Florida residents, who are disproportionately elderly, stayed home and wore masks at higher rates than people in most other states. Lockdown policies might have been so effective at changing behavior that people kept following restrictions even after they were lifted, creating the false impression that policy didn’t matter in the first place. (There were also plenty of Californians who disobeyed the orders that remained in place in their state, making those policies seem less effective.)
Whether restrictions prevented the spread of COVID is a different question from whether they were worth the cost. Macedo, Lee, and Zweig are right that America’s pandemic response was marked by a failure to properly weigh trade-offs. As they document at length, public-health officials often framed saving lives from the virus as the only legitimate objective of public policy, without considering the potential damage that would stem from the pursuit of that goal. Most public-health experts now seem to share that assessment. In July 2023, for instance, Collins expressed regret for what he called “a public-health mindset” in which officials “attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life” and “zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered.”
The COVID revisionists are right to criticize this tendency, but at times they fall victim to a mirror image of the same mindset: Lockdowns were all costs, no benefits, and thus should have been discarded. “There is just no evidence that any of these measures actually prevented death,” Lee told me. “So we have to ask ourselves: Should we really take the kinds of actions where the benefits are uncertain but we know the costs will be severe?” Zweig is even more direct. “In the end, there was no benefit to keeping schools closed for so-called safety reasons out of ‘an abundance of caution,’” he writes. “And there were no reasonable trade-offs in doing so. There were just harms.”
If ignoring the costs of lockdowns led in some cases to an overly restrictive response, ignoring the benefits could lead to an overly loose one. In many ways, we were lucky last time. The next virus—and there will be a next one—could be far deadlier. It could disproportionately target children or be much harder to vaccinate against. If all restrictions are off the table, the scale of the disaster could be unprecedented.
The revisionist narrative also has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people are convinced that public-health measures don’t work in the first place, they will be less likely to follow them, which, in turn, will render them even less effective. This dynamic could even undermine the one measure that the non-right-wing COVID revisionists generally support: vaccines. After all, if people are convinced that the public-health establishment is full of lying ideologues, why make an exception for vaccines? Unchecked COVID revisionism, in trying to correct the errors of the last pandemic, might leave us even less prepared for the next one.
