How Our Politics Failed during the COVID Pandemic: An Interview with Stephen Macedo

March 11, 2020 has been widely described as “the day everything changed”—the day the dam broke on the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Five years later, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee—both professors of politics at Princeton University—have released a new book, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, examining the failures in institutional and political decision-making that led to the country’s being plunged into a long-term cycle of lockdowns, shutdowns, and unprecedented mandates, all in the name of public health. In this interview, Professor Macedo joins Public Discourse Deputy Editor Matthew X. Wilson to discuss the book, its findings, and his conclusions.

Matthew X. Wilson: To start, could you say a bit about how you came up with the idea for the book project? Were there any specific events that made you interested in looking back and reflecting on public policy during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Stephen Macedo: I was going on leave in 2022, and I knew that I wanted to write a book on the current political moment and the highly polarized politics that we are involved in now. Specifically, about how progressives were not paying sufficient attention to conservative concerns on certain issues in a way that was undermining the strength of progressive arguments and positions. I was planning to focus on abortion, immigration, and COVID. Of the three, COVID—and COVID policy—happened to be the subject I knew the least about.

Once I started working on it, I realized that was just a huge topic in itself and one that not many people were working on. So I decided to focus on COVID.  Professor Frances Lee—with whom I had been consulting from the start—and I did a workshop together on COVID policy and had various folks come in, including Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. After that she decided to sign onto the project, which I was delighted by. So we wrote the book together after that.

The book is partly about the failures of COVID policy and mistakes that were made—some understandable early on under the fog of war—but also the extent to which we ignored the pre-COVID pandemic plans and didn’t pay attention to the costs of restrictions. I also see the book as a window into the state of American democracy, and, in a way, a window into the health of our epistemic environment and our culture of public argument.

As a result, a large part of the book focuses on what we call the truth-seeking departments of liberal democracy: the places that we’re supposed to be able to find critical inquiry into important matters, such as science, science journalism, journalism more broadly, and the academy. So we treat the responses to and aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic as a window into the degraded state of our democracy and the failures of these elite institutions to pursue the truth in an objective, fair-minded, and nonpartisan way.

MXW: You are a prominent scholar of John Rawls and Rawlsian political philosophy. To what extent do you think that during the pandemic, the importance of political arguments’ public justifiability and the toleration of reasonable pluralism about COVID policy was suspended by public health authorities and governmental institutions? Do you think what occurred was improper—a violation, even, of what we should expect from political discourse, even in times of pandemic?

SM: That’s one of the ideas that motivated me. In a liberal democracy, one of the most essential practices is the giving, asking, and questioning of reasons in the public forum. We’re constantly making arguments for one thing or another. Public criticism, openness to public criticism, and the willingness to engage in self-criticism are essential to the fundamental liberal democratic values of truth-seeking. It was John Stuart Mill who said, “The only ground we have for confidence in our opinions is a standing invitation to all the world to disprove them.” That’s the spirit with which I went into the book.

To answer your question, I do think there were fundamental failures in that respect from the start. The most fundamental norms of liberal public discussion and democratic debate involve listening to the other side, and allowing both sides to make their arguments. That’s fundamental to due process in a courtroom—the accused party gets to have an attorney to make their case. Devil’s advocacy is a standard practice in almost any public forum for debate, deliberation, and decision.

Looking back on the pandemic, the timeline of dissent and the toleration of dissent are fascinating. In March 2020—when the lockdowns started to spread across the West, and when they were imposed in the United States by various states—there were dissenters who pushed back in op-eds in elite legacy institutions such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. Eminent scientists such as Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota, former CDC director Tom Frieden, David Katz of Yale, and quite a number of others said, “These severe lockdown measures are unlikely to work. They’re going to be costly. They’ll be especially costly for children and the poor, and they’re unlikely to be very effective.”

But this period of dissent, and the opportunity to question COVID lockdown policies, did not last—by April and May of 2020, elites in institutions, leading academic centers, policy think tanks (on both the left and the right, because Donald Trump was president then and he was being advised by people associated with conservative think tanks) seemed to lose patience with it. There was a lack of tolerance of dissent and that got worse over the summer. By the fall of 2020, the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration—who urged that we rethink our policies, that we question our assumptions, and that we consider the costs of these lockdown measures—were treated with great intolerance.

There was a fundamental failure of toleration for alternative points of view. I think some of it might be explained by the fact that, well, it was a pandemic. For public health guidance to be effective, people have to comply. To that I would say fair enough, but it’s also equally important, or more important, to have confidence that the policies are sound. People complying en masse with unsound policies won’t do us a whole lot of good. That’s what open debate is supposed to address.

MXW: Do you think the April–May pivot you identified as a turning point in the acceptance of dissent by elite institutions and the public health establishment was driven by partisan attitudes and progressive pushback toward the Trump administration?

SM: Yes. I think that’s part of what was going on. But Trump’s messaging was inconsistent. He held press conferences in which he’d say things that were silly, so he didn’t help matters. Part of what happened as well was that Trump became associated with the “Let’s reopen the economy position”—even though in actuality he never reversed the policies being advanced by Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, who were much more in the establishment lane of seeking to suppress the virus above all else. But despite the fact that he went along with their advice, Trump continued complaining about the restrictions and suggesting that the virus would soon go away.

So he wasn’t helpful. But I think there’s no question that as Republican states began to reopen their schools—as some of them did in April and May 2020—they eased lockdown restrictions. Democratic and Republican states started to diverge as early as April and May, and that divide became more pronounced in the summer. A more relaxed attitude toward school closures, business lockdowns, social distancing as a general matter, and mask wearing became associated more with the Republican side. And so I think there definitely was a partisan aspect to it. Elites associated those attitudes with irresponsibility, with threatening grandma’s life and so on.

But despite the partisanship associated with advocacy for maintaining lockdowns, restrictions, and mandates in the United States, we need to remember that European countries started reopening much sooner with less controversy. Most European schools—particularly in Western Europe—were open in the fall of 2020. So it’s one thing for lockdown-defenders to say that there was a lot of panic and unknowns early on in the pandemic that justified restrictions—the initial lockdown and so on—but it’s another thing to downplay the new information that was gleaned during summer 2020. There were schools that had reopened in the spring, and people could have looked and seen what the consequences were there. But there really was an unwillingness to re-examine positions. And the election was coming up in November, so I’m sure that was part of it. People didn’t want to concede anything to the Republican side going into what was going to be a close election with Donald Trump on the ballot.

MXW: By “people,” do you mean Democratic politicians, Democratic governors, or even certain ostensibly nonpolitical public health authorities?

SM: Well, I would say all of those people as well as academics. Let’s take for instance, the issue of the virus’s origins. Wuhan happens to be home of China’s leading bat coronavirus research institute. It’s well known that the safety standards there are not the same as in Western labs. Scientists know this. Every major Chinese city has a seafood market or a wet market. These wild animals are sold in many, many places in China, but only Wuhan is home to China’s leading bat coronavirus research institution. And there had been lab leaks of viruses before.

So it was entirely plausible that the virus might’ve emerged from a lab leak, and yet there was a concerted effort—a concerted campaign—to suppress that theory. And I have no doubt that there were scientists who knew that this was a plausible theory but who were not willing to say that for various reasons. Perhaps they thought it would distract efforts to fight the virus itself. The lab leak theory quickly became associated with Trump. And it’s also the case that the U.S. government—through the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergic and Infectious Diseases—had funded research in that lab. So there were self-interested motives on the part of leading public health officials to deflect attention from the entirely plausible lab-leak theory.

MXW: You identified at one point the progressive moralism associated with the pandemic response—rhetoric ranging from “Follow the science!” to “You’re a grandma killer!” and “You’re a conspiracy theorist!” (directed at everyone from those who refused the vaccine to those who simply questioned, for example, the effectiveness of disposable masks and social distancing policies). Can you say a little more about your view on how progressive moralistic arguments and slogans during the pandemic affected public discourse?

SM: The mantra became “Follow the science!” and the imperative was for everyone to pull together. The analogy that was constantly invoked was wartime. This was a war on COVID. Dr. Sanjay Gupta wrote a book called World War C, which was his memoir of the COVID years. Deborah Birx’s memoir of her year in the Trump administration was called Silent Invasion. The title of Philip Zelikow’s book on the pandemic response was Lessons from the Covid War.

So the wartime analogies, images, and imperatives were very strong. Places such as the Safra Center at Harvard put out national plans arguing that there was only one way forward. Major foundations—many which didn’t previously take policy positions—lined up in favor of that position. And even the centrist, libertarian-leaning Niskanen Institute endorsed those plans. And, as I said, the American Enterprise Institute put out a national plan as well that was very similar.

If you look at the debates in the Stanford Faculty Senate over the censuring of Scott Atlas, professors of public health endorsing the motion to censure him said very straightforwardly that this was the equivalent of wartime. And just as in wartime when we have to follow the generals, in this kind of public health crisis, you have to follow the public health leaders.

Complying was seen as a moral imperative. And I think exacerbating that is the fact of the extent of affective polarization in our politics—in which political partisan identities are now the deepest source of identity and meaning in people’s lives. There is a higher level than in the past—not all times in the past, but at least in the recent past—of a mutual loathing on both sides of the political spectrum, an unwillingness to take seriously arguments on the other side, and the assumption that if an argument is coming from the other side it must be bad.

So I think that partisanship definitely also played a role in this. To be sure, COVID was a crisis. It was the worst pandemic in a century. Fear was an understandable response. But COVID came into a polity, as one of our book’s endorsers said, “with severe pre-existing conditions”—severe pre-existing conditions in our political and moral culture. We became vulnerable to side-taking and not taking seriously the concerns coming from the other side.

MXW: You mentioned that fear was understandable. You also indicated earlier that some mistakes due to the fog-of-war atmosphere could perhaps be excusable. Could you say a little bit more about that? To what extent are phenomena such as groupthink, illiberalism, and conformity to be expected—and perhaps even excusable—during periods of pandemic, and to what extent are they not? Where do you draw the line?

SM: I think that’s a very good question. There’s a wonderful book by the Scottish epidemiologist Mark Woolhouse called The Year the World Went Mad. His perspective on it is, and I agree with this, that the first lockdowns, which were very widespread in March and April, in response to this threat that we didn’t know that much about at that point, were understandable and excusable. That’s despite the fact that those initial lockdowns probably didn’t do much good because viruses come in waves—they peak and then they go down at some point. That’s been known since the nineteenth century—viruses come in peaks and waves, and have a natural falling off at a certain point.

So, it’s not at all clear that the first lockdowns imposed in March 2020 were the things that led to the decline of that first wave of COVID. But Woolhouse argues that the cautious reaction was at least excusable. However, by the summertime, we were learning enough to know that these measures were not proving to be effective. And after that, there should have been more open discussion and debate.

Woolhouse also points out that it was very clear that the news media were exacerbating fears in order to encourage compliance and encourage governments to do more. In the UK, an expert government advisory group on policy sent messages to the BBC along the lines of “There are many parts of our population who are being lulled into complacency by the low mortality rates in their demographic. We need to ramp up the fear. We need to encourage people to be more afraid so that they will comply.” And that led to messaging from the media that was inaccurate about COVID’s risks to young people.

COVID was a bad virus. It was the worst pandemic since 1918. But the age gradient in people’s vulnerability was extreme. Basically, your chances of dying from COVID pre-vaccination were your chances of dying in the next year. The median age of death from COVID was the median age of death. So the risk to teenagers and people in their 20s and 30s was minuscule. It was much higher in elderly people—and people with serious comorbidities. That messaging, however, was apparently seen as antithetical to the demand for universal compliance.

MXW: Are you seeing leaders in the U.S. who championed the harshest lockdown measures starting to take account of the mistakes that they made in the pandemic? Are they starting to issue mea culpas—is there any inclination toward that? Leaders who presided over the most draconian measures during the pandemic—governors such as Tim Walz, Gretchen Whitmer, J. B. Pritzker, and Gavin Newsom—they all still hold elected office.

SM: Yes, they do indeed.

MXW: There have basically been no political consequences for any bad decisions. From whatever perspective you’re coming from—even if you’re coming from a progressive political perspective—shouldn’t you want accountability? Do you think there ever will be? And if there is not going to be any, how are progressives going to take account for the mistakes of their leaders and learn what went wrong?

SM: Well, that’s a very, very good question. We have a chapter in the book that my co-author Frances Lee took the lead on called “Laboratories of Democracy.” There were great policy variations across the fifty states, which tended to be associated with partisanship. The Democratic states locked down longer and harder. Republican states reopened faster—and schools in particular reopened much faster.

The idea behind individual states’ having the authority to pursue their own policy paths is that we’re supposed to learn from that experimentation. That’s the point. They’re laboratories to test out different policy approaches. And indeed, the results of those widely divergent patterns of stringency with respect to COVID lockdown measures, social distancing measures, and non-pharmaceutical interventions should furnish such an occasion.

We have essentially no evidence to show that the states which imposed the more stringent measures fared any better systematically. There’s no relationship between the length of lockdowns and COVID morbidity, no relationship between the length of school closures and COVID morbidity, and no relationship between the overall stringency of these measures and COVID morbidity. And so there’s no evidence of lockdowns’ systematic success. However, just as you said, governors were reelected across the fifty states irrespective of which policies they pursued and irrespective of these outcomes. So, from what we can see, there has been no learning.

Morbidity from COVID trended upward in Republican states as compared with Democratic states only after vaccines became widely available. The evidence is clear that slower vaccine uptake led to higher rates of death. But not school reopening or relaxed social distancing mandates.

Now, politics is politics, and maybe that’s an unfortunate failure of politics that we have learned so little. But what about journalism? What about the academy? We would hope that those who are not in the business of running for office and keeping themselves in office—although we should have higher expectations there too—but rather who are in the business of seeking the truth in our democracy would be held to higher standards. And yet there’s been very little accountability.

There have been very few academic conferences on this, although I suppose there has been a little bit of journalistic reflection. And there have been some people who have been good all along—David Leonhardt at The New York Times has been very good on this, for example. There are reporters who have written pieces for Vanity Fair. Katherine Eban wrote very good pieces from very early on on the lab-leak theory. And there have been others—especially on Substacks and new media publications. Nicholas Wade, who is a very famous science writer formerly from The New York Times, couldn’t get his work published anywhere. He did excellent work on the origins of the virus; he laid out what was known very clearly and very early on. But he had to publish his articles in the online platform Medium because he couldn’t get it published in mainstream media.

So overall, there has been a lack of reckoning. We hope there will be a reckoning. That’s what our book is about, and we hope that there will be a reckoning.

I’ll mention just one other troubling data point on this. On February 21, Nature, which is one of the leading scientific journals, published an article arguing that increasing evidence points to natural origins or an animal source for COVID. And it quotes six scientists in support of the proposition that evidence is mounting in support of a natural—not a lab leak—origin of COVID.

All six of those authors are among the most vehement deniers of the possibility of a lab leak. And yet several of them are known to have privately harbored and expressed the belief that it was very likely to have come from the lab. We have their Slack messages from February 2020, after conversations with Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins. We have a chapter on this in the book. They were sending each other Slack messages during the phone call and subsequent to the phone calls with Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, saying that while they will publish an article that seeks to disprove the lab origin, they believe, I quote, “It’s so fr***in’ likely.”

That’s a quote from Kristian Andersen, who was one of the people quoted in this Nature article from February 21, 2025, saying that there’s increasing evidence for a natural origin in an animal. There is little good evidence for a natural origin in an animal. There is increasing evidence for a lab origin. Many of those who have examined the evidence dispassionately and objectively think it’s overwhelmingly likely that it came from the lab. At a bare minimum, those who think it emerged from nature ought to at least acknowledge the existence of a debate and seriously address arguments on the other side.

MXW: There is growing recognition that the COVID-19 pandemic was a defining moment for many young people. Speaking personally, the events of 2020–2021 were crucial in my own political development. And now, there are representatives of elite institutions like The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson blaming the pandemic for pushing young people—and particularly young men—to the right.

To what extent do you think, in the future, we are going to look back and see the pandemic as a defining point for an entire generation’s political development? Do you think that the pandemic—because of the failures and the illiberal excesses—was a catalyst pushing young people toward the political right? If you would, please say more about the pandemic as a moment of political transformation.

SM: That’s an interesting question. Of course, the summer of 2020 coincided with the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent demonstrations that took place over the entire summer. So it became a time of heightened political activism and impatience with the pace of political change on the Left. As we have discussed, there were various factors that coincided with COVID that encouraged a deepening of partisanship. So I would say that yes, I think there’s every reason to believe that this will be an inflection point. There is evidence for that now.

It’s true that young people were among those who bore the brunt of the pandemic. If you look at these pre-COVID pandemic plans, there was a group of people who were sympathetic to the lockdowns and so on—these mathematical modelers whom we talk about in the book. They saw closing schools as the most important thing to do for younger children in particular, because they saw children as people that couldn’t possibly socially distance. You can’t socially distance a seven-year-old or eight-year-old. So you’re going to have to keep them isolated at home because they can’t play with their friends outside. They’re going to spread disease.

So in these mathematical models, children are treated entirely as vectors of disease. There’s no attention given to the cost of imposing these isolation measures on children. The interests of young people were systematically discounted. And the suggestion has been made, which we basically agree with in the book, that COVID policy was made by and for older members of the laptop class—people who could work from home on their computers and have food delivered to them while essential workers processed their food, made their food, delivered their food, and so on. About 30 or 35 percent of U.S. workers were never going to be able to stay home from work, so that the rest of us could quarantine ourselves. No special provisions were made for them.

Younger people were also lied to. Take, for example, the denial that natural infection and recovery contributed to herd immunity. The World Health Organization changed the definition of herd immunity on its website during the summer of 2020 from something that comes from vaccine or natural infection and recovery to a concept that comes only from a vaccine. They got a lot of pushback and they changed it back in December. But there’s no other reason to have done that other than to have wanted to encourage people to wait for the vaccine.

MXW: There was this messaging coming from elite institutions that the idea that natural immunity had any value at all was something only conspiracy theorists or anti-vaxxers believed.

SM: Exactly. People were lied to, and people were harmed because there were many people who got the virus, recovered, and had a measure of immunity—indeed, as we know now, as good or better than the immunity provided by vaccines. Vaccines only mimic the effects of infection and recovery. There’s no reason to think otherwise. So they were lied to, but they were also harmed because they were denied the knowledge that they had some level of immunity.

And other people were harmed too, because they were denied the possibility of being helped by those who had some level of immunity, including healthcare workers who would’ve been comforted by the fact that they had effectively the equivalent of a vaccine shot. Senator Rand Paul writes about this in his book, and he does so quite well. He had COVID early on and he then volunteered in hospital wards. No one authorized these people to lie to us in these ways—it was both harmful and deeply disrespectful to the public.

I do think young people have reasons for resentment. When I teach about these subjects in class, I touch on issues of generational injustice. I think there is an intergenerational debt, and I think there are good reasons for people to feel resentful and to demand a reckoning. As we discuss in the book—and as I’ve talked about to student groups as well as to others—I’ve often found the most receptive groups to be younger people, and yes, to some extent young men.

Of course, there’s also the issue of side effects of the vaccine, which still aren’t fully known. There is some incidence of myocarditis in young men, and other things. These things are still being figured out. We don’t understand “Long COVID” well either. We do need a more open discussion of these things. There’s a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, Paul Offit, who has written very eloquently on these matters. He served on the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, and he argues very powerfully—and to me very convincingly—that the best approach to vaccination and other matters of public health science should be to tell the truth with nuance.

If you want to recommend vaccines, fine, but be honest about the side effects. People are going to find out. Trying to cover them up is both deceptive and an ineffective strategy. In the long run lying to the public is bound to lead to distrust. I think that’s advice that needs to be taken, and we need to fully understand the ways in which the whole truth was not told, because there’s still many things about the vaccine and Long COVID that we don’t know.

MXW: Do you want to comment on the highly technocratic—and some would say anti-democratic—view of political decision-making that arose during the COVID pandemic: the idea that alleged experts and scientists, not legislators and policymakers, should be making decisions about public policy during a pandemic? Is it your view that this is a flawed way of handling public policy during pandemics? Please say a little bit more about the relation this has to political discourse and our democracy.

SM: Yes, I think that that was a very important factor and an important failure of political leadership during COVID. I think many political leaders did not want to take responsibility. They wanted to avoid responsibility. They wanted to say, “I’m just following the science,” so they could pass on the decision-making responsibility to others.

And of course, once people started adopting these lockdown measures, other leaders, adjacently, whether in countries or in states, felt the obligation too. And people would say, “Well, why aren’t you doing X? Why aren’t we locking down as hard as Ohio?” Ohio was the first state with a Republican governor to impose the school closures—again, understandable in March 2020, but not so later on.

There were many political leaders that did not want to assume the responsibility. Narrow experts in public health had out-sized power and authority. In retrospect, some of these leaders, including Francis Collins, acknowledged the narrowness of a public health mindset when it comes to these kinds of crises. He said,

The public health people . . . [had] this very narrow view of what the right decision is. And that is something that will save a life; it doesn’t matter what else happens. So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach 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 recover from. So, yeah, collateral damage. This is a public health mindset and I think a lot of us involved in trying to make those recommendations had that mindset and that was really unfortunate. It’s another mistake we made.

We quote him in the book. Deborah Birx has acknowledged the same kind of thing, but without apologizing for it.

So there is no question that there was an abdication of leadership by politicians. There was a significant abdication. Now, look, they were aided and abetted in that abdication by journalists who constantly asked, “Why aren’t we doing more?” There were many journalists who never asked questions about the costs of the pandemic restrictions, who were always urging governors to do more. Additionally, I would say that politicians were also aided and abetted by scientists and academics who didn’t speak up on these issues. As I said, many did in March 2020, but then after that, there was very little dissent. I don’t know what difference it would’ve made; nevertheless, academics, scientists, and serious journalists should have spoken out to raise the issue in the public realm about the cost of these measures and their likely ineffectiveness, but that didn’t happen either.

So I would say there was a multi-sided abdication of responsibility, including the professional responsibility of scientists and academics. I think part of it was political and professional partisanship. The idea of criticizing these policies—of questioning those who were seen as the representatives of the scientific establishment—was seen as anti-science and traitorous. And we’re still not seeing the truth pursued: it is still the case that there are very few academic conferences taking place on the COVID pandemic.

With respect to the censorship issue, which I know we don’t have time to get into, what the Biden administration did—to pressure social media companies to remove posts and restrict individuals who were criticizing government policy—there have been no law school conferences on the many concerns this raises from a First Amendment perspective. The American Civil Liberties Union—which in 2008 did put out a very good statement (that we quote in the book) about the dangers of a law enforcement approach to pandemics and the fact that minorities and the poor would bear the greatest burden from mandatory economic closures, lockdowns, and other severe measures—was totally silent during the COVID pandemic. So there was an abdication of responsibility.

What we needed were political leaders to consult public health experts, but to take into account the whole range of values relevant to the public good, and also the importance of basic civil liberties, such as freedom of speech and the freedom to attend religious services. Few politicians did have the independence and leadership to take an independent stand. Political leaders in Sweden did, but they had a public health establishment there that was skeptical of lockdowns.

And I’ll say this: Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida did call in experts. He called in Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Scott Atlas and consulted them, listened to their advice, and insisted that schools reopen. He might have paid a very heavy price for that if that had turned out to be the wrong strategy—after all, it’s a state with a lot of elderly people. He could have suffered politically quite considerably. But he made the judgment, he got himself informed, and I think he made a sound decision. I don’t know of others who did the same in such a high-profile way.

MXW: I vividly recall that during the pandemic, Governor DeSantis was assailed by the media as one of the country’s chief public health villains.

SM: Yes. And as it turns out, Florida did no worse than California, which kept their schools closed—many of them through the entire 2020–21 school year. All of the burdens that were imposed by California—restrictions, lockdowns, extended school closures—seem to have made no positive difference. There’s an old line that’s sometimes attributed to Churchill, “The expert should be on tap, but not on top.” Political actors need to be making these decisions.

There is a wonderful account of the 1976 swine flu outbreak, written by the Harvard political scientist Richard Neustadt. He wrote a book called The Swine Flu Affair, which the secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joe Califano, asked him to write to survey what happened—because while the government had announced a mass vaccination campaign to address a flu outbreak that never took hold, 140 or so people ended up dying or becoming seriously ill with Guillain-Barré syndrome.

So Neustadt wrote this report saying exactly the same thing: “Listen to the expert, be informed by the experts, but do not trust them to make the decisions because they operate with a very narrow perspective.” Frankly, experts have mixed motives, including things like wanting to increase the power and authority of their own agencies. They see the pandemic as an opportunity—to boost their budgets, to increase public profiles, etc. And of course as members of the elite, educated class, their interests, values, and perspectives may differ from people who are not so elite. So people will operate with mixed motives and limited perspectives, and political leaders need to be the ones to make those decisions, not expert advisors.

There’s quite a large literature on the worries about an offloading of political judgment onto technocrats. We do emphasize at the end of the book the importance of executive and legislative responsibility—for instance, the importance of the U.S. House of Representatives, which is supposed to represent the diversity of the American people and their concerns, in holding the agencies to account. Congress should have brought to bear the concerns of ordinary people.

But yes, overall, leaders certainly should have exercised more encompassing authority with reference to the whole public good—taking into consideration more than just public health imperatives—and legislatures should have been in session and should have been asking hard questions.

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