Germ Crazy

An Update from Planet Covid

Planet Covid

At CMC, the college where I taught, the doors in the corridor leading to the underground parking garage were always open, but when Covid hit, and the structure was largely deserted, signs went up saying that doors must be locked at all times. Microscopic invaders, it seems, were sneaking in. Five years later, those doors were still locked. In some unaccountable way, the college had become more vulnerable, more vigilant, though locking those doors did nothing to enhance its immunity. This seems like a parable for the short and longterm effects of the pandemic.

I thought of it when reading In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us by Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo. Here’s the story they tell: a lab in Wuhan China accidentally releases a virus with features experimentally enhanced for invading our human immune system. It is a lab that collaborates with prominent American medical institutions, whose leaders value it partly because Chinese safety standards are more permissive than in the US, giving investigators more freedom to experiment with rejiggered germs. As the virus spreads around the world and deaths multiply, defensive American officials insist that the virus must have emerged naturally from human-animal contact in Chinese live-markets. They do their best to downplay their relations with Wuhan and the “gain of function” type of research performed there.¹ The president of the United States recklessly denounces the Chinese flu, or “kung flu,” and public health officials are eager to defuse his xenophobic rants.

At the beginning of the outbreak, the scientific community begins a fairly robust public debate about how to combat the disease, including vocal defenders of the long-held consensus that stopping the spread of a virus by non-pharmacological means is a losing proposition. According to that consensus, lockdowns, travel bans, quarantines, and masks cannot contain a highly contagious virus, and such measures exact enormous costs. They keep children out of school, prevent other medical procedures, isolate people, and focus the danger on “essential workers” who deliver basic services and tend to be disproportionately poor.

Orthodox immunology holds that, in the face of such a threat, daily routines should continue while people in the most vulnerable categories—in this case the elderly and those with immune-weakening conditions—isolate themselves as the virus circulates through the rest of the community, leading to the development of “herd immunity”—an unfortunate term suggesting mindless conformity. The hope is that the herd will be further protected when a vaccine finally arrives. This approach is taken by the Swedes, who suffer no worse effects from the virus than people elsewhere but incur fewer of the side-effects of radical public health measures.

But most of world’s leadership does not follow the previously established science, starting with the Chinese authorities, who pioneer heroic measures of containment imposed on a population unable to protest. To enforce their stay-at-home orders, they go so far as to weld some people into their houses. Next, improbably, officials from the World Health Organization, visiting the center of the outbreak in Wuhan, are won over by the remarkable Chinese claim that they have controlled the spread of the disease.² Even more improbably, the entire world follows suit with lockdowns and masks, except for the lonely Swedes. Before long, about half the world’s population is in hiding and the world’s economy is on life-support. In the US, members of the “laptop class” do their jobs comfortably at home while the risks are borne by others.

With remarkable speed a vaccine is developed; gradually the pandemic winds down and becomes endemic. It has killed millions of people, but lockdowns have done much real harm to many who needn’t have suffered, especially children who experienced very little danger from the disease itself. There was every reason for the immunologically vulnerable to be alarmed, but 98 to 99 percent of Covid infections were mild.

Lee and Macedo’s point, tirelessly restated in their book, is that once the new, corral-the-virus orthodoxy was established, even well-qualified experts who contradicted it were branded as cranks and sometimes even censured by their institutions, leading to a harmful stifling of debate about the costs of fighting the disease. Articles in major medical journals were used for crassly partisan takedowns. Major health officials like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx laid claim to excessive certainty about matters that were very much in doubt. The imperative to “follow the science” regarding masks, for example, led to claims that were anything but scientific. And the denial of the laboratory origins of the virus when that was the most likely cause was conveniently self-protective.

For the authors of In Covid’s Wake, it was the excessive reliance on medical experts that prevented the huge non-medical costs of fighting the virus from being taken into account or led them to be dismissed as merely “economic”—as if that were a type of cost everyone can shrug off. A political process that should have involved all kinds of expertise and perspectives was left to health experts who do not face the voters and who tend to focus narrowly on the type of medical threats they study. The results weren’t good. Red states who resisted scientific advice did no worse on that account than blue states who followed it, though the red states did suffer later on from their resistance to vaccines. In general, the lockdown was a massive, self-inflicted wound. Instead of following the science, the system followed the scientists, the scientists followed the lead of an authoritarian regime, and democracy was not served.

What to make of this dismal story? Lee and Macedo focus on the US context, and they are no doubt correct that the polarization of the American scene and the liberal mistrust of the public led to excessively simple and confident recommendations by experts who feared to put their authority at risk in open-minded discussion. Doctors dismissed their colleagues as cranks when they themselves were afraid to expose the complexities of the issues in front of the unstable herd. None of this is an advertisement for American liberal democracy or the healthcare establishment. Still, the fact that half of the world’s population wound up being locked down in such short order suggests that the dynamics of the crisis didn’t depend primarily upon political conditions in the United States.

Instead of focusing on what went wrong, as Lee and Macedo do, it would also be interesting to ask what went right. What allowed Sweden, for example, to take such a different path, resisting the international press coverage which denounced its approach as a disaster? Appeals to the Swedish belief in common sense are not very illuminating, though the Swedish authorities considered the population level-headed enough to take reasonable measures to live with the disease rather than trying to conquer it.

Dr. Anders Tegnell, the architect of Sweden’s Covid response, became something of a popular hero during the crisis, and this may be one of those cases where an individual’s contribution is crucial. But it is also interesting, and counts against Lee and Macedo’s thesis about the importance of democratic input to health policy, that Sweden’s public health administration is more insulated from politics than most. Reliance on experts led Sweden in a different direction from the rest of the world, and public trust in the experts seems to have been due in part to experts’ trust in the public.

Lee and Macedo cannot be faulted for seeing the US response to Covid as having been infected by the polarization of the American political system and the enormous pressure it has put on all kinds of institutions. But another of the symptoms of that polarization is the eclipse of what the US government did right in the Covid crisis—Operation Warp Speed, which mobilized a public/private-sector collaboration that developed and distributed a revolutionary type of vaccine in an unprecedentedly brief time-frame, saving millions of lives all over the world. That accomplishment might have boosted confidence in government but, as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson point out in Abundance,³ the program in retrospect has become a political orphan, unloved by Democrats because it was launched by Donald Trump, unloved by Republicans because of the right-wing mistrust of vaccines. What might have become a model for national problem-solving has become yet another casualty of dissension.

In the modern world, both politics and science are based upon a balance of suspicion and trust depending upon mental habits, practices, and institutions started in seventeenth-century England. In the political realm, divinely appointed monarchs were marginalized and public servants empowered to do the public good, while the public was given the means to check them if they went wrong. In science, new, institutional forms of civility were developed that allowed gentlemen to resolve intellectual disagreements by public testing rather than personal conflict.⁴ The results in both realms, however imperfect, have been momentous.

I mention the local origins of the Enlightenment not to lionize its founders but to recall how peculiar and fragile is the balance of suspicion and trust that enables these institutions to work. That balance might never have been achieved in the first place, and there is no guarantee it can’t be lost. As the public health response to Covid shows, following the science does not come naturally to scientists any more than abiding by the law comes naturally to politicians. How can the balance of suspicion and trust at the level of society be preserved? That is one of the great questions of our time.

1. The anodyne phrase “gain of function” refers to the experimental development of variant viruses more capable of penetrating the human immune system than current naturally occurring strains.

2. In dealing with Covid, the Chinese authorities welcomed the opportunity to tighten their surveillance and control over their own people, including and especially the Uyghurs and the citizens of Hong Kong. The favorable WHO response to Chinese Covid policy was politically compromised by Chinese influcence. See the interesting discussion in Michael Sheridan, The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and the New China (Headline, 2025), chapter twenty.

3. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance (Simon and Schuster, 2025).

4. See Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (U of Chicago Press, 1994).