The governmental violation of the basic rights of citizens, especially the right of free speech, is the most painful and lasting legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic. To flourish in the future, it is worth our time to remember what happened and defend those who protected free speech and the pursuit of true science, which is a method of continual inquiry, not a body of fixed beliefs.
(p. C7) “Science,” the great theoretical physicist Richard Feynman wrote, “is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” The incorrigibly curious Feynman knew that skepticism and a willingness to assimilate new evidence propel the scientific endeavor. Yet by 2020, in response to a global pandemic, the dominant part of America’s political and media class had turned the imperative to “follow the science” into an expression of almost religious reverence for the judgment of experts. Many educated and otherwise intelligent Americans, meanwhile, made a single, bespectacled government scientist their idol: “In Fauci We Trust” read their lawn signs and bumper stickers.
Their faith was misplaced. Credentialed experts, especially those in the fields of epidemiology and public health, had tied themselves to badly flawed theories, closed their minds to new evidence and thrown the mantle of “science” over value judgments for which they had no special competence.
“An Abundance of Caution,” by the journalist David Zweig, documents the poor evidentiary basis for the prolonged school closures and attendant follies such as masking requirements and social distancing. Mr. Zweig distinguished himself throughout the pandemic by his willingness to question the assumptions of self-identified “Covid hawks.” When he dug into the epidemiological modeling papers whose projections seemed decisively to rule out the safety of opening schools, he found “a never-ending matryoshka doll” of citations, resting ultimately on an assumption conceded to be “arbitrary” by its initial author.
Mr. Zweig shows how evidence emerged early on—in March 2020—that the virus did not pose a serious threat to children. American public-health professionals remained largely impervious to this fact.
. . .
“In Covid’s Wake,” by the Princeton political scientists Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo, mostly remains within the idiom of polite academic prose, but they state with disarming plainness that “elite institutions failed us” by giving in to panic. Ms. Lee and Mr. Macedo marvel at how consensus plans—none of which would have required extended lockdowns—were thrown out before Americans ever began dying, in part because public-health experts were entranced by China’s harsh restrictions. American policymakers had sound advice ready at hand, but most of them took the view that safety outweighed individual liberties, economic activity and quality of life.
Where Mr. Zweig emphasizes incuriosity, Ms. Lee and Mr. Macedo stress the willful suppression of reasonable debate, including the unfortunate tendency to paint critics of lockdowns and mask mandates as racists, quacks and conspiracy theorists. Such conduct was especially evident on the question of Covid-19’s origins, as top scientists vilified anyone suggesting the virus may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. Credulous journalists, academics and other cultural arbiters, the authors remind us, embraced the effective censorship of those who questioned the official line.
. . .
Ms. Lee and Mr. Macedo catalog reams of data to show that, before the availability of vaccines, areas imposing the severest restrictions earned no discernible health benefits.
. . .
(p. C8) In 2024 the U.S. House’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic issued a genuinely impressive 500-page report, covering Covid-19’s origins, the fraud in pandemic-response programs and the effectiveness or otherwise of various interventions.
For the full review see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 18, 2025, and has the title “‘An Abundance of Caution’ and ‘In Covid’s Wake’: Failing the Pandemic Test.”)
The books under review are:
Macedo, Stephen, and Frances Lee. In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025.
Zweig, David. An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2025.
The over-500-page 2024 report issued by the House’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, and praised above, is: