Two New Books Bash Covid Failures
I find failure fascinating. My first scholarly articles explored well-meaning Army General William Westmoreland’s Vietnam War disaster. I never thought I’d see that happen again. Then came Covid.
Winter 2019-20 brought trouble. A deadly virus hit China, then Italy, then all over. After initially counseling against large-scale lockdowns, masks, and other non-pharmaceutical interventions which had underperformed in past pandemics, public health bureaucracies imposed them with gusto, copying the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and denouncing dissidents as “anti-science.” In my experience, when powerful people censor critics, failure follows.
As a European coauthor and I wrote in mid-2020, the first 15,596 COVID deaths in California included just three school aged children, fewer than some flu seasons. Just 1.5% of fatalities were under 35 compared to over half over 70. Those facts enabled schools across Europe and in many U.S. states to quickly reopen without spiking Covid deaths, minimizing adolescent depression and long-term student learning loss.
Unlike General Westmoreland, our health establishment was not guessing about guerrillas hiding in jungles. They had daily reports from hospitals and morgues. They must have known that many schools reopened without spiking fatalities but ignored those facts. By mid-2020 few knew anyone in good health and under 65 who died of Covid---yet such cases dominated mainstream media and social media, stoking panic among some, distrust among others. And policymakers flouted the lockdown rules they imposed on regular folks. In contrast, for all his mistakes, General Westmoreland faced danger in Vietnam and lost kin in combat.
Two prominent scholarly presses recently published readable books explaining what went wrong: journalist David Zweig’s An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, and In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, by Princeton Professors Stepen Macedo and Frances Lee.
As Zweig writes, members of the public health establishment failed to accurately interpret the evidence, choosing to trust questionable statistical models rather than real world experience. (The most accurate models came from amateurs outside the public health community.) Public health authorities also neglected to convey the uncertainty around and enormous costs of school closings. Authorities chose to believe CCP propaganda that China’s authoritarian interventions massively reduced deaths from the virus. Our authorities endorsed the CCP narrative that Covid came from a wet market, but as Macedo and Lee detail, more likely is an accidental leak from a Chinese lab funded by U.S. taxpayers. That U.S. experts had so much trust in a Communist government suggests a level of wishful thinking comparable to pundit Tucker Carlson’s praising Russia’s economy and “democracy.”
Zweig reports that the 6-foot social distancing between school students (mostly ignored in Europe) was based on a questionable interpretation of an 1897 German study of bacteria, not viruses. Anthony Fauci, who promoted the 6-foot social distancing that delayed school openings, admitted in later congressional testimony that it lacked empirical support. So did National Institute of Health (NIH) leader Francis Collins. Yet they accused their critics of ignoring “science.” (Collins later apologized.) Dissenting researchers like Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya barely escaped cancellation attempts with their jobs. While writing Abundance of Caution, Zweig received numerous messages from researchers supporting his interpretations and regretting they could not go public for fear of losing their livelihoods.
Just as sanity was reappearing, Trump derangement syndrome, and Trump himself, derailed it. By June 2020, a quiet consensus emerged that schools should reopen. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a formal statement saying so. Days later, after months of tweeting thousands of times on everything but Covid, President Trump ignored advisers who urged him to stay silent, tweeting “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” The AAP immediately did an about face on reopening schools. Virtually the entire establishment followed.
My own interpretation is that President Trump lacked the discipline to keep mum, and during an election campaign, elites decided they hated Trump more than they cared about kids, not to mention truth. Few noted that Swedish schools, which stayed open, suffered no Covid deaths among a million-plus students and little transmission to others.
Zweig, Macedo, and Lee rightly eviscerate the judgement and integrity of the media and public health establishments. Yet they might have said more about President Trump. The whole point of electing an outsider is to (sensibly) question the establishment, but Trump often seemed asleep at the switch.
More productively, as Macedo and Lee argue, failure can inform improvement if we use free speech to debate dissenters rather than intimidate them into silence. Let America be America, not Russia or China.
The American military offers a model. In the decade after their Vietnam debacle, officers openly debated what went wrong, eventually implementing reforms. If the Pentagon could do it, why not NIH? And if the public health establishment balks, upstarts like my state’s Alice Walton School of Medicine can show them the way because one thing is certain, neither the establishment nor the country can afford another failure like Covid.
Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and has produced numerous books including COVID-19 and Schools (Routledge, 2024). These thoughts may not reflect those of his employer.
