October 8, 2025
In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us
Steve Macedo
Professor of Politics and the University Center for human Values
In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us
Steve Macedo
Professor of Politics and the University Center for human Values
George Bustin, introducer, and Steve Macedo
Minutes of the Fifth Meeting of the 85th Year
The fifth meeting of the Old Guard of Princeton’s 84th program year was called to order at 10:15 AM in the Maeder Auditorium of the Andlinger Center on the campus of Princeton University by President George Bustin. Eighty-three Old Guardians attended
.
Frances Slade led the invocation. Julie Denny read the minutes of the October first meeting, which had been prepared by Ann Seltzer.
Ruth Miller introduced her guest, James Bennett, who is a candidate for membership.
President George Bustin introduced the speaker, Professor Stephen Macedo, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and former Director of the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2014 and the American Academy of Sciences and Letters since October 2024, he is also immediate past-President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy.
He is author, with Princeton Professor Frances Lee, of the 2025 book: In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, an examination of Covid-19 policy and political dysfunction.
His current research concerns the pressures on social justice exerted by various forms of globalization, especially immigration, and the problems raised by social media companies and the dangers of government efforts to police “misinformation.”
Stephen Macedo writes and teaches political theory, ethics, public policy, and law, especially on topics related to liberalism, democracy and citizenship, diversity and civic education, religion and politics, and the family and sexuality.
His topic today was Liberal Democracy, the Covid Crisis, and Elite Failure.
The speaker’s fact-supported presentation included numerous charts based upon publicly available CDC data along with numerous direct quotes obtained from general and social media and by means of Freedom of Information requests made to various agencies of the United States Government.
The objective of the authors’ scholarship was to understand how the public response to the Covid-19 virus came about, how it “worked out,” at what cost, and what could be learned to aid in responses to future disease outbreaks.
While acknowledging the “Monday Morning Quarterback” nature of such work, the author stressed that his objective was to benefit social scientists and historians, and not to produce a partisan work.
As a preamble, the speaker offered the statistic that half the world’s population, 3.9 billion people, were under lockdown in the early stages of pandemic response.
Analyzing the behaviors of scientists, journalists, and academics was central to the book’s scholarship. The issue of “partisanship” and politics was introduced with what the author called a “background fact,” that from 1999 to 2021, the Democratic party changed from being 23% college educated to 48% college educated. Thus, the party become much more aligned with the well-educated scientist-journalist-academic portion of society, which he reminded the audience is “our tribe.”
He then organized his presentation into five sections of fact-finding and analysis:
According to the speaker, the bulk of pre-planning largely discounted benefits of NPI’s, such as closing workplaces and schools, masking, and social distancing. As late as 2019, the World Health Organization said such things “were not recommended in ANY circumstance.”
However, when the pandemic hit, the political class opted TO DO those things, in order to appear to be acting. He took us through a timeline of several weeks in early 2020 where lockdowns were initiated worldwide, public and private assemblies were prohibited, and harsh words were aimed at those who resisted.
He detailed skeptical, dissenting writings from several academic and scientific sources beyond the WHO, such as Johns Hopkins, Oxford University, Stanford, and the ACLU, which warned against the “welding together” of law enforcement and public health policy.
In his third section, he offered nine dual-axis charts illustrating relative outcomes among the 50 states, structured to plot an action taken on one axis and mortality rates on the other. The one and ONLY one variable that made any difference in mortality was how early a given state experienced “vaccine uptake.” Generally speaking, the earliest states to take up vaccine inoculation were also the first states to have experienced significant outbreaks, such as New York and New Jersey. Lesser per capita mortality reductions occurred in states like Wyoming and Montana where infection and vaccine uptake occurred weeks later and more slowly.
The speaker briefly returned to partisanship, revealing a stark divergence in confidence toward public health as an institution. He quoted a Pew Research Study from 2022, showing confidence in public health officials at only 50%, but with significant divergence: 70% positive among Democrats but only 30% positive among Republicans.
Besides loss of institutional confidence, other costs of the implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions were diminished personal prosperity, diminished learning by children, and diminished mental health. The greatest costs fell upon segments of society in lower income jobs where “showing up” was necessary and whose members had fewer resources to comfortably shelter in place. The speaker particularly noted the disparate impact on the education of minority students whose test scores went down and whose absenteeism went up. Downtown and inner-city businesses were devastated by lockdowns, and, for reasons not entirely clear, inner city homicide rates dramatically increased.
Mis- and dis-information were rampant, he reported. As examples he cited: natural immunity being discounted; gain of function research funding by U.S. agencies being denied; lab leak causality being aggressively denied; and ineffectiveness of masking being suppressed. Social media companies were called upon by government to censor anti-administration sentiments. Pro-government-policy scientific papers were prepared by recipients of significant pending, and ultimately awarded, grants from NIH and other agencies, suggesting to the speaker material conflicts of interest. He quoted Rutgers molecular biologist Richard Ebright’s critique of one article promoting wet market animal contact as the source of Covid while dismissing a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology by saying, “They are lying. They know they are lying. We know they are lying. And they know we know they are lying.” Audience laughter ensued.
Regarding what was learned and should have been learned, the speaker quoted Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the NIH, from July, 2023, who confessed, “We did not admit our ignorance, which was a profound mistake. We lost a lot of credibility.”
The question period was wide-ranging with numerous audience members preceding their questions by saying, “I learned a lot today.”
Respectfully submitted,
Owen G. Leach
.
Frances Slade led the invocation. Julie Denny read the minutes of the October first meeting, which had been prepared by Ann Seltzer.
Ruth Miller introduced her guest, James Bennett, who is a candidate for membership.
President George Bustin introduced the speaker, Professor Stephen Macedo, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and former Director of the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2014 and the American Academy of Sciences and Letters since October 2024, he is also immediate past-President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy.
He is author, with Princeton Professor Frances Lee, of the 2025 book: In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, an examination of Covid-19 policy and political dysfunction.
His current research concerns the pressures on social justice exerted by various forms of globalization, especially immigration, and the problems raised by social media companies and the dangers of government efforts to police “misinformation.”
Stephen Macedo writes and teaches political theory, ethics, public policy, and law, especially on topics related to liberalism, democracy and citizenship, diversity and civic education, religion and politics, and the family and sexuality.
His topic today was Liberal Democracy, the Covid Crisis, and Elite Failure.
The speaker’s fact-supported presentation included numerous charts based upon publicly available CDC data along with numerous direct quotes obtained from general and social media and by means of Freedom of Information requests made to various agencies of the United States Government.
The objective of the authors’ scholarship was to understand how the public response to the Covid-19 virus came about, how it “worked out,” at what cost, and what could be learned to aid in responses to future disease outbreaks.
While acknowledging the “Monday Morning Quarterback” nature of such work, the author stressed that his objective was to benefit social scientists and historians, and not to produce a partisan work.
As a preamble, the speaker offered the statistic that half the world’s population, 3.9 billion people, were under lockdown in the early stages of pandemic response.
Analyzing the behaviors of scientists, journalists, and academics was central to the book’s scholarship. The issue of “partisanship” and politics was introduced with what the author called a “background fact,” that from 1999 to 2021, the Democratic party changed from being 23% college educated to 48% college educated. Thus, the party become much more aligned with the well-educated scientist-journalist-academic portion of society, which he reminded the audience is “our tribe.”
He then organized his presentation into five sections of fact-finding and analysis:
- The planning and preparation that had already gone on between the year 2000 and the onset of the pandemic;
- The early emergence of dissent regarding lockdowns and other “non-pharmaceutical interventions,” abbreviated as NPI, and the concurrent rise of intolerance for dissent;
- A 50-state analysis and evaluation of NIP implementation and related effectiveness with regard to, specifically, reduced mortality;
- The conflation of “mis” and “dis” information with what the speaker termed “reasonable policy disagreements.”
- And, lastly, why did covid response take the shape it did, what DID we learn, and what SHOULD we have learned.
According to the speaker, the bulk of pre-planning largely discounted benefits of NPI’s, such as closing workplaces and schools, masking, and social distancing. As late as 2019, the World Health Organization said such things “were not recommended in ANY circumstance.”
However, when the pandemic hit, the political class opted TO DO those things, in order to appear to be acting. He took us through a timeline of several weeks in early 2020 where lockdowns were initiated worldwide, public and private assemblies were prohibited, and harsh words were aimed at those who resisted.
He detailed skeptical, dissenting writings from several academic and scientific sources beyond the WHO, such as Johns Hopkins, Oxford University, Stanford, and the ACLU, which warned against the “welding together” of law enforcement and public health policy.
In his third section, he offered nine dual-axis charts illustrating relative outcomes among the 50 states, structured to plot an action taken on one axis and mortality rates on the other. The one and ONLY one variable that made any difference in mortality was how early a given state experienced “vaccine uptake.” Generally speaking, the earliest states to take up vaccine inoculation were also the first states to have experienced significant outbreaks, such as New York and New Jersey. Lesser per capita mortality reductions occurred in states like Wyoming and Montana where infection and vaccine uptake occurred weeks later and more slowly.
The speaker briefly returned to partisanship, revealing a stark divergence in confidence toward public health as an institution. He quoted a Pew Research Study from 2022, showing confidence in public health officials at only 50%, but with significant divergence: 70% positive among Democrats but only 30% positive among Republicans.
Besides loss of institutional confidence, other costs of the implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions were diminished personal prosperity, diminished learning by children, and diminished mental health. The greatest costs fell upon segments of society in lower income jobs where “showing up” was necessary and whose members had fewer resources to comfortably shelter in place. The speaker particularly noted the disparate impact on the education of minority students whose test scores went down and whose absenteeism went up. Downtown and inner-city businesses were devastated by lockdowns, and, for reasons not entirely clear, inner city homicide rates dramatically increased.
Mis- and dis-information were rampant, he reported. As examples he cited: natural immunity being discounted; gain of function research funding by U.S. agencies being denied; lab leak causality being aggressively denied; and ineffectiveness of masking being suppressed. Social media companies were called upon by government to censor anti-administration sentiments. Pro-government-policy scientific papers were prepared by recipients of significant pending, and ultimately awarded, grants from NIH and other agencies, suggesting to the speaker material conflicts of interest. He quoted Rutgers molecular biologist Richard Ebright’s critique of one article promoting wet market animal contact as the source of Covid while dismissing a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology by saying, “They are lying. They know they are lying. We know they are lying. And they know we know they are lying.” Audience laughter ensued.
Regarding what was learned and should have been learned, the speaker quoted Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the NIH, from July, 2023, who confessed, “We did not admit our ignorance, which was a profound mistake. We lost a lot of credibility.”
The question period was wide-ranging with numerous audience members preceding their questions by saying, “I learned a lot today.”
Respectfully submitted,
Owen G. Leach