Princeton's Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee Are Dishonest Frauds
"In Covid's Wake" is Simply More Useless Fanfiction
“Science has rules and regulations, politics does not.” -Princeton professor Sheldon Wolin
Previously we joked that if you ran a Family Feud style poll of 100 Americans at random and asked them what professions would be the most useful in an infectious disease pandemic, that "economist" would appear very low on that list, if at all. Only "political scientist" might rank lower, as Princeton academics Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee have demonstrated in an unremarkable display of arrogant ignorance in a new book and media parade to promote it.
A Tsunami of Unscientific Falsehoods
"In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us" is about the COVID-19 pandemic making the rounds as the authors parade themselves in the media, exploiting a horrific tragedy to market themselves to the public as insightful pandemic policy experts. A portion of the book itself which discussed the Great Barrington Declaration was reviewed by Dr. Jonathan Howard for Science Based Medicine and his words are a must-read:
I feel nearly every paragraph should come with some sort of disclaimer that reads, “no one who worked on a COVID unit would ever say anything like that.”
This article is instead focused on how the authors Macedo and Lee have toured through the media, inadvertently discrediting their own book as woefully ignorant.
The central premise of the book argues that public health mitigations used to fight COVID-19 were entirely ineffective, and that the impact of the virus was inconsequential compared to the burden of non-pharmaceutical interventions. It's an obscene rewriting of history, as Katelyn Jetelina writes for Your Local Epidemiologist:
"In the first year of the pandemic, we faced a crisis with literally no vaccine, no treatment, terrible diagnostics, no surveillance system, and no federal plan. Outbreaks were widespread, hospitals were overwhelmed, and people were dying.”
In Covid's Wake is rather unimpressive in its ignorance, regurgitating numerous unscientific memes from the contrarian pestilence sycophant sphere of social media, completely uncritically. There is little original thought, if it all, and those who championed COVID-19 while disparaging PPE & vaccines are taking it as validation for their failed ideas, that harmed many. Macedo & Lee have demanded that their uninformed opinions be treated with the same weight and respect as mountains of scientific research. Yale's Gregg Gonsalves, who is personally condemned by Macedo and Lee in their book, fully demolished their hypothesis on Bluesky:
"I just listened to The Daily episode "On COVID's Wake" with Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo where they make a categorical statement that non-pharmaceutical interventions didn't work during the pandemic. The evidence does not support this categorical claim."
Comically enough, the authors are transparent about their ignorance, as two "political scientists" who never treated a COVID-19 patient, nor studied the virus and it's impacts in a laboratory setting. In a recent interview, author Stephen Macedo reveals his own foolish premise: "...progressives were not paying sufficient attention to conservative concerns...COVID - and COVID policy - happened to be the subject I knew the least about."
Frances Lee would add, "...our approach to doing the research was not to interview...in assessing what the body of evidence tells us, we looked to systematic reviews and metanalyses."
What this means is that these two "political scientists," with no background in science and public health, refused to talk to any actual experts - and did not do their own research - but instead read academic papers they weren’t qualified to evaluate, from cranks like Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, who wrote the thoroughly and overwhelmingly debunked "Cochrane Review of Masks." This was a hilariously pathetic attempt of "Evidence-Based Medicine" (now a common anti-vax meme, even employed by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) to discredit the science of PPE engineering - by lazily conflating airborne and droplet transmission of viruses, amongst numerous other intentional errors to mislead the public.
Carl Heneghan was advising the British government in 2020 to let the virus burn through millions of unvaccinated citizens - gee whiz, you don’t think that might just influence his views on the effectiveness of PPE? That he might have an unscientific bias against a tool for preventing infections with the virus he championed?
The final product is a sort of anti-intellectual Human Centipede, misinformed by long-debunked nonsense that authors clearly picked up from contrarian social media, instead of enlightening scholarship rooted in hard science. Lacking original thought and independent analysis, it's no surprise that the pestilence sycophants of social media who have championed the virus, and painted doctors and scientists as mustache twirling villains, are eating up this slop as it tells them nothing except what they want to hear.
A Flood of Journalistic Cowardice
Journalists at mainstream media outlets have unfortunately failed in their obligations to the public, allowing these two authors to speak, totally unchallenged, numerous woefully inept fictions without any serious inquiry into the "facts" behind their many claims - which have already been soundly debunked time and time again.
For example, Tyler Austin Harper, a podcaster over at The Atlantic, has endorsed In Covid’s Wake, saying on Twitter:
"Must read. Among other things, a frank discussion of how the Laptop Class championed policies - lockdowns and school closures - that primarily impacted the Have Nots, while the Haves enjoyed remote work, online shopping, booming stock portfolios, and groceries delivered by the poor."
Beatrice Adler Bolton, host of the Death Panel podcast, thoroughly eviscerated this garbage in extensive detail. At no point do the authors of In Covid's Wake, or Harper, show any concern for how SARS-CoV-2 has negatively impacted the health of millions of working Americans. She writes:
People who keep pushing this “laptop class” myth are engaged in a *profoundly anti-worker* ideological project. They want you to blame other workers instead of ruling class that forced people back into unsafe conditions. It’s a demand to look away from the real Covid class war.
PBS News was also happy to mislead the public, tweeting out:
"The pandemic launched widespread shutdowns, mandates for masks and vaccines and caused enormous social and economic harms. The new book, 'In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us," sharply criticizes how America responded to this crisis."
In the interview, PBS’ William Brangham cowardly fails to push back on the completely unscientific claims of Macedo and Lee, giving them an open platform to rewrite history. The fantasy that the COVID-19 pandemic could be navigated without mitigations, as Macedo and Lee have argued from the isolated comfort of their Princeton University offices, is completely ahistorical. The role of journalists is to be honest with the public about how fundamentally unserious these two "political scientists" are in their hastily constructed arguments.
Yet, on the podcast The Daily with Michael Barbaro of the New York Times, Macedo and Lee are granted the freedom to make utterly absurd proclamations. They soundly declare that non-pharmaceutical interventions simply do not work, contrary to mountains of scientific evidence proving otherwise, and insist that PPE such as N95 respirators are wholly ineffective in preventing transmission of SARS-CoV-2, another well documented fact. In fact, Macedo and Lee allege a ridiculous conspiracy theory that public health officials knew PPE didn't work and mandated it anyway.
Science writer Wendy Orent had something to say about this on Bluesky:
These two poli-sci people appear not to understand the nature of the virus and how it spread, the fact that Covid is anything but an ordinary respiratory pathogen, that letting it rip would have killed far more people-millions more-than those who died.
Much like economist Emily Oster muddied the waters on COVID-19 in children, deeming experienced medical professionals and scientific researchers to be inferior to her allegedly superior intellect, these two "poli-sci" academics arrogantly assume that they simply know better on the many complicated technical challenges surrounding the pandemic, even though they themselves admit they lacked meaningful experience regarding public health and pandemic-related sciences prior to 2020. Sadly, Michael Barbaro neglects his responsibility as a journalist to push back on this trash.
The authors write: "Mobilization against Covid included extraordinary restrictions on free speech," alleging that private social media companies had an obligation to defend "scientists, academics, and social media influencers accused of spreading misinformation and disinformation" from criticism. Ironically, the authors themselves are engaging in a form of censorship: spreading unscientific fictions to drown out legitimate scientific and medical information that the public is entitled to in order to protect the health of themselves and their loved ones. This is a shameful disservice and should be soundly condemned.
When Fareed Zakaria takes to his show on CNN and endorses In Covid's Wake, that's five minutes wasted spreading absurd fictions about how "the experts" got everything wrong. Yet, Fareed insists we can place our faith in these two Princeton academics, who with the luxury of hindsight, are able to comfortably condemn doctors and scientists (who have studied pandemics and infectious diseases long before 2020) tasked with making hard decisions at the height of a global crisis. This is five minutes Fareed could have dedicated to sharing some of the latest scientific research on COVID-19's negative impacts on the body and effective prevention measures instead, as is his responsibility as a journalist. You can find some of that here:
Riptides of Nihilism
The interview the authors Macedo and Lee give to the Niskanen Center as part of their little book-promoting parade is especially depraved and riddled with obscene fictions. Here are a few choice quotes which truly show the depths of moral nihilism in their pandemic commentary.
Frances Lee starts by suggesting that the financial burden of pandemic relief was not justified, arguing:
"...we're talking about the largest crisis response in US history as guaged by share of GDP...we're talking about massive investments, all of which were added to the public debt...we continue to bear the consequences in a fiscal sense that society bears the fiscal consequences well beyond what we can tally up in financial costs."
While some concern may be valid, what Lee leaves out is the alternative, of scenes from New York featuring overwhelmed hospitals, doctors committing suicide, and mass graves - playing out from coast to coast across America, would be completely unsustainable. The idea that we should condemn massive numbers of Americans to death because, well, they're just too expensive to keep alive, is especially perverse.
Stephen Macedo then proceeds to engage in a pretty unserious attack on non-pharmaceutical interventions, suggesting that pre-2020 research found these to be entirely ineffective measures, saying foolishly that:
"...it's remarkable to go back to the couple of decades of pre-COVID pandemic planning that was availiable. In fact, the World Health Organization updated it's pandemic plans in November 2019, just a few weeks before the onset of the COVID pandemic, and as you say, was very skeptical about the evidence supporting the efficacy of the whole range of non-pharmaceutical interventions, from masking, to various social distancing measures, school closures, business closures, and so on."
This is just a patently dishonest meme that regularly makes its rounds in anti-vax circles and makes a mockery of the scale of the crisis faced in early pandemic years. Macedo and Lee also fail to acknowledge a centuries-old fact of warfare and other crisis planning: no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Macedo & Lee could not be found volunteering to bury the mountain of corpses which emerged from the first waves of the pandemic, mind you. Instead, they were comfortably enjoying the protection of the very NPIs they would go on to profit from disparaging.
Macedo then engages in the tired old myth that Sweden had the best COVID-19 response, helmed by scam artist and state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, who rejected the medical research on SARS-CoV to embrace a social media conspiracy theorist by the name of "Fat Emperor." Do serious political scientists seriously believe that loudmouthed, abrasive cranks on social media should be dictating public health policy? Stephen says, "And even now people seem very reluctant to allow that the evidence shows that Sweden did very well." It's concerning that a credentialed academic such as Macedo does not seem to know what the word "evidence" actually means, as this is objectively, undeniably false.
In fact, Macedo also argued that getting COVID-19 was sufficient protection from COVID-19, saying "to deny, as people seem to do, that getting COVID and recovering from it wouldn't contribute to your immunity. That's a silly thing to have suggested." As people have been disabled after multiple COVID-19 infections, the only "silly" suggestions here are from Macedo and Lee. They simply do not care about the people harmed by the virus, or what SARS-CoV-2 actually does. Anyways, what just came out in The Lancet Infectious Diseases?
Our results suggest that a positive test for COVID-19 (vs a negative test) was associated with increased rates of diagnosis of various infections in the 12 months following an acute SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Oh, oops.
What Macedo and Lee care about is that there was negative pushback to quacks like Stanford radiologist Scott Atlas, who frequently got basic facts wrong and misled the public into embracing the virus - putting many six feet under whilst demonizing actual scientists and hardworking doctors who struggled to save lives. He's the real victim of a pandemic that killed and disabled millions of Americans.
Two academics, who never thought about pandemics before 2020, and enjoyed the benefits of taking public health for granted, decided that they would stumble into the COVID-19 policy debate & assumed that their abstract ignorance held equal worth to those with hands-on experience and technical knowledge. Sadly, the media has lacked the courage to push back on such tedious & revisionist nonsense, and if In Covid's Wake is used to influence future public health policy decisions, then a lot of people are going to die before the unsustainable ideas the book argues for are inevitably discarded for an alternative, more precautionary approach.
Hot Air Typhoons
Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee have been more than happy to go on a masturbatory parade in the public eye, in a truly repulsive display of their own willful, narcissistic ignorance that is utterly divorced from tangible science & medicine. The only place for "In Covid's Wake," as yet another of many absolutely worthless, scientifically illiterate collection of impotent rantings written about the COVID-19 pandemic, is in the creative fiction section. Tuition-paying students at Princeton University should be ashamed that arrogant frauds like this are what they have for faculty.
It's not surprising that the most obnoxious pestilence sycophants on social media are eating up "In Covid's Wake." Contrarian pundit Geoff Shullenberger of Compact Mag, who foolishly declared that Long COVID disability was actually caused by PPE, praised the authors as "impeccably credentialed liberals who systematically demolish the Covid public-health regime." Macedo and Lee are two "political scientists" with zero actual medical or scientific credentials, so here is yet another “journalist” lying to the public. Yet, it aligns with Geoff's personal opinions on COVID-19 that he spouts from behind the safety of his keyboard, so he eats up this slop uncritically. It's the opposite of intellectual rigor, completely immersed in fantasy, and deeply embarrassing for all involved.
America has tragically embraced a culture that celebrates ignorance and incompetence over science and intellectual rigor, and we are all starting to pay a serious price as a result. To turn back from this descent into self-destructive foolishness, the public must begin pushing back on this sort of uninformed, anti-intellectual drivel that makes a mockery of science and medicine. Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee should be deeply ashamed of themselves and apologize to the doctors and scientists who they mischaracterized in a woefully pathetic tome of ignorance.
Ironically enough, it is Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo whom have “failed us.”
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