In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us
The Spin
Establishment-critical narrative
“In Covid’s Wake” perfectly encapsulates the myriad errors in the scientific-political establishment’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. In creating a manufactured consensus, leading figures in the scientific community drove the authorities to embrace sweeping mandates that inflicted deep social harm without any firm evidence, all while silencing dissent and masking trade-offs. These are failures that the book confronts head-on, providing strong recommendations to prevent their recurrence.
Pro-establishment narrative
While Macedo and Lee raise valid points about school closures, their book traffics in dangerous COVID revisionism. By cherry-picking data and minimizing real harms, they fundamentally distort how public health actually operated during an unprecedented crisis. This narrative risks crippling our capacity to respond effectively when the next pandemic strikes — turning legitimate debate over specific policies into a wholesale rejection of the institutions we'll desperately need.
Cynical narrative
“In Covid’s Wake” is a deeply flawed account of the pandemic. The authors, so-called political scientists, dismiss overwhelming clinical and epidemiological evidence showing that public health measures saved lives and mitigated spread, and instead recycle fringe narratives and caricatures of pandemic science. By misrepresenting key facts about NPIs and the risks of COVID-19, and unfairly lionizing contrarian figures, Macedo and Lee actively undermine trust in medical expertise to elevate the status of the laptop professor class to which they belong.