"In Covid's Wake" Part 2: Wrong About The Right

Summary

Podcast Summary: "If Books Could Kill"
Episode: "In Covid's Wake" Part 2: Wrong About The Right
Release Date: June 19, 2025

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Introduction

In the second part of their deep dive into the book "How Our Politics Failed Us" by Steven Macedo and Francis Lee, hosts Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri engage in a passionate discussion dissecting the authors' analysis of political and public health responses during the COVID-19 pandemic from June 2020 to January 2024.

Recap of Part One

Francis Lee initiates the conversation by summarizing the first episode, where the hosts critiqued Macedo and Lee's initial evaluation of early pandemic mitigation efforts. They argued that the authors mistakenly believed that measures such as masks and social distancing lacked scientific backing, a stance the hosts firmly reject.

Shift from Epidemiology to Political Science

Peter Shamshiri explains that while the first part focused on the epidemiological missteps, the second part shifts to political science failures. He emphasizes that state and local governments gained more autonomy post-lockdowns, allowing for varied approaches to managing the pandemic.

Notable Quote:
"Last episode was how they're bad at epidemiology, but this episode is how they're also bad at political science." [02:55]

Analysis of Reopening Policies

The hosts critique Macedo and Lee's assertion that diverse reopening strategies across states did not significantly impact COVID-19 mortality rates before vaccines became widely available. They argue that such comparisons are flawed due to differing initial outbreak severities.

Notable Quote:
"The reason why deaths were so high in the northeastern corridor in the first two months of the pandemic was because they waited too long to lock down. That's not the failure of lockdowns, that's the fact that they didn't do lockdowns until the virus was already everywhere." [17:32]

Political Polarization and Its Impact

A significant portion of the discussion centers on how political polarization exacerbated the pandemic response. The hosts highlight how Republican leaders, influenced by political motives, undermined public health measures, leading to increased mortality rates in red states compared to blue states.

Notable Quote:
"They have been a blow off major. You can't fuck around with me and act like this is a real science." [03:09]

Effectiveness of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions

Francis challenges the book's claim of scientific uncertainty regarding the effectiveness of measures like lockdowns and masks. The hosts present evidence from various meta-analyses indicating that early interventions significantly reduced COVID-19 cases and deaths.

Notable Quote:
"The academic consensus is that lockdown orders were like one of the most effective interventions." [34:21]

School Closures Debate

The hosts delve into the contentious issue of school closures, arguing that the book inaccurately portrays the impact of such measures. They provide data showing that school closures were among the most effective interventions in reducing virus transmission, contrary to the book's suggestions.

Notable Quote:
"There's one in the US that says each additional day from a county's first case until the state ordered school closure is related to a 1.5 to 2.4% higher cumulative death per capita." [35:12]

Vaccination and Partisan Divide

Peter and Francis critique the authors' handling of vaccination rates and mortality disparities between red and blue states. They argue that the book downplays the role of policy and instead attributes differences primarily to personal beliefs, ignoring the significant impact of political leadership and misinformation.

Notable Quote:
"The preferences and voluntary actions of state residents, which themselves strongly correlate with partisanship, largely explain the differences in vaccination rates across red and blue states." [59:50]

Misinformation and Policy Failures

The discussion highlights how misinformation, particularly from political leaders like former President Trump, fueled vaccine hesitancy and undermined public health efforts. The hosts emphasize that this was a deliberate strategy rather than a mere reflection of personal beliefs.

Notable Quote:
"Trump was spreading these conspiracy theories." [62:16]

Concluding Critique of the Book

Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri conclude by asserting that Macedo and Lee's analysis is fundamentally flawed. They argue that the book misrepresents scientific consensus, overlooks critical data, and fails to account for the profound political factors that influenced pandemic outcomes. The hosts stress the importance of relying on credible scientific evidence over politicized narratives.

Notable Quote:
"The entire premise of this book is wrong. None of the producers of the Daily Nobody, like, thought to check, hey, can we maybe talk to an epidemiologist." [68:11]

Final Thoughts

The hosts reiterate their stance that political interference, misinformation, and ineffective leadership significantly contributed to the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. They advocate for a more evidence-based approach to public health policy and caution against the dangers of politicizing scientific crises.

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This summary encapsulates the heated and thorough discussion between Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri as they critically evaluate the arguments presented in "How Our Politics Failed Us", offering their perspective on the interplay between politics and public health during one of the most challenging periods in recent history.

Transcript

[Peter]

Do you have a zinger?

[Francis]

How could I possibly have a zinger for this?

[Peter]

What do you know about June of 2020 to January 2024? What do you know about that period?

[Francis]

Peter, look, you can't keep trying to pull zingers out of me for the same book. It's outrageous. Oh, what's your zinger for Nudge Part two? I don't fucking know, man. I don't. I'm not just an endless font of zingers.

[Peter]

I mean, you kind of are, though, Peter, to be fair, it's like one of my favorite things about you.

[Francis]

Unfortunately, though, the inherent corniness of our zingers.

[Peter]

I know.

[Francis]

It makes it so that coming up with two of them is humiliate. Like, if you come up with one corny joke, it's like, okay, that's a corny joke about the book or whatever. Coming up with two back to back, it's just like, ugh, it's degrading.

[Peter]

So are we giving up on them again? I might just have the music kick in randomly at some point.

[Francis]

What do you mean? You keep putting me in a situation where we have to give up on them.

[Peter]

Okay, so this is episode two of our dissection of in Covid's how our Politics Failed Us by Steven Macedo and Francis Lee, two academics at Princeton.

[Francis]

What kind of academics?

[Peter]

Why don't you lead us through a little recap, Peter? What did we learn last episode?

[Francis]

A couple of political scientists have decided to wade in to the COVID retrospective. Industry, shall we say, industrial complex. We spent part one essentially discussing their take on the first few months of the pandemic, which revolved in large part around their belief that a lot of the mitigation efforts that we took, masks, distancing, et cetera, were not actually grounded in any sort of scientific revolution reality. Now, they were wrong about that, and they're very stupid.

[Peter]

Yes.

[Francis]

And now we're moving on to part two, where we're, I believe, going to discuss basically what you might call the rest of the pandemic. There's like, the pandemic uppercase, and that's like, March, April, little bit of May 2020. And then there's the pandemic lowercase, which is the rest of human civilization.

[Peter]

What's kind of amazing is that the pandemic does, at this point, become kind of more of a political science question.

[Francis]

Okay.

[Peter]

The early outbreaks were mostly a function of how early the virus arrived. So a lot of the cases and deaths of the first two months of the pandemic were Kind of locked in by how much community spread there had been. Once we come out of those initial lockdowns, however, we have a much lower background rate of COVID infection and cities and states have much more ability to balance how severe is the pandemic versus how much do we want to reopen our economies?

[Francis]

Right.

[Peter]

And so if you want to think about it, thematically, it's like last episode was how they're bad at epidemiology, but this episode is how they're also bad at political science.

[Francis]

Well, to be clear, this is slightly deeper lure than we need, but I have a political science degree, so I can say this stuff.

[Peter]

Yeah, this is why you're. This is why you're very phobic.

[Francis]

These are my words. These are our words.

[Peter]

I have to like cut this and put it into the previous episode because it seems like you're like against political science as a field, which you kind of are.

[Francis]

People don't understand that. I know that this is a blow off Major. You can't fucking dick around with me and act like this is a real science. Like, this is. This is like, you're like, well, it would be embarrassing to just get a psychology degree, so I'll get a political science degree.

[Peter]

So to get us back into the timeline, we talked about the initial lockdowns. We are now in sort of April, May of the lockdowns. Everyone has like been at home for a while. People are starting to get a little antsy. And so pretty soon, April or May of 2020, you start getting these think tank reports coming out of like, okay, here's a plan for reopening. Different think tanks have different ideological orientations, different steps that they're proposing. But there is actually like a fairly broad consensus at this point that, yeah, there needs to be a path toward reopening. And so in their chapter on this kind of reopening period, they quote people on various points of the political spectrum basically saying, we can't do nothing and we can't stay locked down forever. So we need to come up with some sort of medium plan that meets everybody's goals without completely destroying society. And I had like almost completely forgotten about this. But at this time, the sort of consensus view was that we needed some sort of regimen of test, trace, isolate, that we can start to reopen the economy. But we need a testing apparatus. Everybody's getting tested all the time. We have contact tracers so that when you test positive, you then stay home and people will get in touch with people you've been in contact with and say, hey, so somebody tested positive. You need to test, or you need to stay home, et cetera. Something that kind of allows people to begin going about their daily business, but also, like, manages the pandemic. Like, this is kind of the medium way that people were talking about.

[Francis]

Yeah.

[Peter]

So after quoting a bunch of other people talking about this test, trace, isolate, system, they then quote a post from Ezra Klein in April of 2020. So they say the most remarkable point in Klein's analysis is that despite the almost unimaginable intrusiveness and sever of the measures, he saw no alternative. And then they quote Ezra Klein at length. So here's their excerpt from the Ezra Klein piece.

[Francis]

All these plans say the same thing. There is no normal for the foreseeable future until there's a vaccine. The United States either needs economically ruinous levels of social distancing, a digital surveillance state of shocking size and scope, or a mass testing apparatus of even more shocking size and intrusiveness.

[Peter]

This surveillance state thing he's referring to, there were plans at the time to launch an app, like a contact tracing app that would monitor your location and would let you know things like, oh, hey, you were in a cafe yesterday where somebody tested positive. So there's a lot of privacy concerns about the use of this kind of digital surveillance technology to do contact tracing.

[Francis]

You have visited the village homosexual, who is a known transmitter. In fact, that was the worst place you could have gone.

[Peter]

I want you to keep doing this, Peter, because that was a bonus episode. And so most people have no idea. Like, that was a shockingly homophobic thing of Peter to say.

[Francis]

There's an extended bit about the village homosexual in our bonus content explaining it. Pay up. Pay up. If you want to hear it.

[Peter]

Peter's best homophobia, the real artisanal homophobia.

[Francis]

You want to hear about a guy fucking horses? You want to hear about the village homosexual? $4 a month.

[Peter]

Folks, anytime you hear Peter say something problematic, assume that it's an inside joke. That's actually fine. If you pay $4. You have to pay $4 for Peter not to be problematic.

[Francis]

All right, continuing, this is Ezra Klein. Yeah, I don't want anyone to mistake my questions as an argument for surrendering. As unlikely as these futures may be, I think the do nothing argument is even less plausible. It imagines that we simply let a highly lethal virus kill perhaps millions of Americans, hospitalize tens of millions more, and crush the health system, while the rest of us go about our daily economic and social business. That is, in my view, Far less likely than the construction of a huge digital surveillance state. I care about my privacy, but not nearly so much as I care about my mother. So this was.

[Peter]

I mean, there were lots of columns similar to this coming out at the time that were sort of like, yeah, this, this is going to suck. But also, like, lockdowns suck. Yeah, reopening would cause mass death. It's sort of like there's no good option available to us.

[Francis]

Pretty reasonable way to look at the tradeoffs. Right? Like, either you have this, like, highly managed, sort of intrusive way of monitoring the spread, or we let it rip and a lot of people die.

[Peter]

Right. This is basically somebody being an adult.

[Francis]

You know, there. There are, like little middle grounds you can find. But, like, that's the basic dilemma that we faced. And that's why I fucking hate this debate. Because a lot of the people that want to retcon our mitigation efforts act, again, like there wasn't mass death on the other side of it.

[Peter]

What's so weird about this chapter is that if you ignore their conclusions, what it actually is is a chronicle of like, all of the debate that was going on in the country about this. Like, again, there's think tank reports coming out. Different governors have different plans. The country was talking about the best way to do this. But then after they quote Ezra Klein, they say it's surprising that so few raised questions about the feasibility of the massive regimes of nationwide testing and contact tracing that were being contemplated, let alone their effectiveness in a free, diverse, and individualistic country such as the United States.

[Francis]

The fuck?

[Peter]

So this is literally a prominent commentator talking about the feasibility and the cost and the trade offs of these plants. Yeah, like you're literally quoting someone doing something. And then you're like, no one was doing.

[Francis]

Right. No one was talking about this. This is a weird, like, reactionary centrist tendency we've talked about a lot recently, which is the tendency to act as though debate that they disagree with is actually shutting down debate, shutting out their side of the story.

[Peter]

And then they then specifically criticize Ezra Klein.

[Francis]

Klein, like most other commentators discussing the issues at the time, was prepared to contemplate constructing and living in a dystopia if it would extend the life of his mother. And your. Oh, shit.

[Peter]

They're like, this worm values the life of his mother.

[Francis]

All this to protect human life. Disgusting. What's next? Are you going to cap the speed at which I can drive? In the frenzied panic of March and April 2020, anything less smacked of surrender. Klein recognized the plans would be mind bogglingly difficult to implement and indeed might not be workable at all. But he accepted that the policies themselves were necessary and did not dwell on their costs or likelihood of failure.

[Peter]

Again, they literally quoted him dwelling on the costs.

[Francis]

Holy shit. Again, it's just like he didn't. Because he didn't land in the place that I wanted him to land.

[Peter]

Exactly.

[Francis]

What he's doing is just like insufficient consideration. Right, Right. If he had thought about it harder, he would have realized that I'm correct.

[Peter]

The other thing I really want to stress here is that they're saying he's fine with living in a dystopia if it would mean saving the life of his mother. Which, like most of us, it depends on the dystopia.

[Francis]

Right.

[Peter]

But also the dystopia that they're constructing here.

[Francis]

It's like an app.

[Peter]

Yeah. Is like a test trace isolate system, which, like, honestly would not have been that onerous. Like, I get that there are privacy concerns. Those are real. But it's like, yeah, go about your business. Test yourself a couple times a week. If you test positive, stay home. That's not. That's not a dystopia.

[Francis]

The idea that the costs of like a tracing app, for example, that would give the government a lot of data about our location were sort of insufficiently considered feels a little bit ridiculous considering that never happened.

[Peter]

Yeah, we didn't do them.

[Francis]

Obviously the powers that be decided that those costs were more significant than the benefits. Yeah. And so they didn't do it. So, like, you won this argument.

[Peter]

Yeah, exactly. So why.

[Francis]

Yeah, and here's your book complaining about how people weren't giving your side enough consideration while the argument happened. What are you fucking talking about?

[Peter]

Also, we know the reason for this. We, Donald Trump put Jared Kushner in charge of building a testing apparatus in the United States. And, like, that never happened. They were supposed to have, like, thousands of locations where you could like, kind of drive through and get tested because there weren't like, home tests available yet, and only 78 of those ever opened. Again, there are real failures in the pandemic, but this book is not interested.

[Francis]

In actual failures with the exception of the masking and social distancing stuff, which I guess was too Orwellian for them.

[Peter]

Or dystopia, where you wear a mask at the grocery store.

[Francis]

Right. Just like, okay, whatever. From like summer 2020 onward, the anti mitigation people won almost every debate.

[Peter]

Well, it depends on the state. So this is actually what we're Getting to, I mean, America kind of did have a national experiment on like, which measures work right. Because different states had very different approaches. And so the next kind of phase of the pandemic that we're going to talk about is this period from kind of June 2020 until roughly until the rol of the vaccines, this kind of post lockdown pre vaccine period where states had really different approaches. And I remember this cycle where it was like we would lock down for a while and then cases would go down and they'd be like, it's safe to reopen. And then we'd reopen and then cases would go up and then we'd lock down again. There was this kind of like zigzag approach throughout the rest of 2020.

[Francis]

As I moved my hand away from the stove, it's gotten a lot cooler. I will now, I will now begin to bring it back. Yes, that was objectively one of the funniest parts of the pandemic that we just were like, before there were vaccines, we were like, what if we tried it again?

[Peter]

So we are going to listen to a clip of the authors on the Daily, which is a podcast by the New York Times.

[Steven Macedo]

Where we began to see policy divergence is in the reopening process. Democratic leaning states maintained these stay at home orders two and a half times longer than Republican leaning states. Democratic leaning states were slower to reopen schools, dramatically slower to reopen schools. They maintained more stringent restrictions in terms of business closures and which businesses could reopen and when and on what timeline, and whether you'd have to have outdoor dining or whether restaurants would be closed again in the winter of 2020. So there were substantial policy differences between red states and blue states over the course of the pandemic. And at the time that the vaccine rollout began, there was no difference between red states and blue states in their cumulative Covid mortality over the of the crisis.

[Francis]

Can I ask you to linger on.

[Peter]

This period before the vaccines?

[Francis]

Because from what you're saying, Frances, before.

[Peter]

The vaccines were introduced, states that had more and longer restrictive measures had the same more or less number of deaths as states that had less and shorter restrictive measures.

[Steven Macedo]

That's correct. This is what we can see as we look back. We can see that there was a great deal of variation in how states responded, but that variation doesn't correlate with variation in Covid outcomes as measured by mortality from the disease.

[Francis]

She's saying that the lockdown efforts, the additional extended lockdown efforts in blue states did not affect Covid mortality. And in fact, the gap between red states and blue states is entirely, it seems, she's implying, due to vaccine uptake.

[Peter]

This is the core of their argument that non pharmaceutical interventions for Covid didn't work. You basically have all of these blue states that did a ton of public health measures, things like closing schools, closing businesses, stay at home orders, mask mandates. And you have these red states that didn't do any of that stuff, or did it much more seldom than the blue states. And yet at the end of the first year of the pandemic, states that did a lot of these things and states that did none of these things had the same number of deaths. So what was the point of all that? That's their argument. Does that sound right to you, Peter, what do you think?

[Francis]

I think that they're right and that you're just trying to give them credit where it's due. And that this is finally the episode where you admit to our audience that you are a Republican who's been faking it.

[Peter]

The episode's actually over now. It is true that if you look at broad overall cumulative death rates roughly at the end of 2020, early 2021, when vaccines start rolling out, there isn't a difference between red states and blue states. That is roughly correct. However, what they do not get into is the specifics of the deaths and especially the timing of the deaths. So, Peter, I am going to send you a graphic of your home state, New Jersey. We're gonna look at New Jersey's performance on mortality rates in the pandemic.

[Francis]

Uh huh. Okay, what are you saying?

[Peter]

These are deaths in New Jersey.

[Francis]

Number of daily deaths in New Jersey with a giant Spike in early 2020 and smaller spike in January 2021, smaller spike in January 2022.

[Peter]

So what is really remarkable, if you look at most of these blue states that they're comparing to red states, especially in the Northeast America, had an early wave of COVID in March, April of 2020.

[Francis]

Yeah.

[Peter]

Where around 50% of the deaths were in and around New York City.

[Francis]

Right.

[Peter]

So if you look at New Jersey, New Jersey as of 2024 has 26,000 deaths from COVID total 13,000 of those, half were in the first two months of the pandemic. So if you're looking at cumulative death rates when vaccines start to roll out in 2021, you are ignoring the fact that the virus arrived earlier in the Northeast corridor. So places like Boston, New York got hit really hard in the first two months of the pandemic and then managed the pandemic. Significantly better than red states.

[Francis]

What they're saying is basically like the pre vaccine death rates were even. But what they should be doing is at least in part looking at maybe just the latter portion of 2020 before the vaccines across the states. Right.

[Peter]

They're essentially using this as an argument against lockdown measures. However, we know that the reason why deaths were so high in the northeastern corridor in the first two months of the pandemic was because they waited too long to lock down.

[Francis]

Right.

[Peter]

That's not the failure of lockdowns, that's the fact that they didn't do lockdowns until the virus was already everywhere.

[Francis]

You know, the fundamental problem here is that you can't compare death rates across places where there wasn't the same amount of spread. Right.

[Peter]

Exactly.

[Francis]

It was spreading in New York City. The death rate was highest in New York City. It wasn't the result of pre existing policy in New York City.

[Peter]

Right.

[Francis]

That's just where it spread. Maybe it was density or whatever, but you then can't compare that to middle of nowhere in Nebraska.

[Peter]

Also, the policies in Nebraska were effective and that's why Nebraska didn't have a big outbreak in early 2020. Like they, they at one point they compare Idaho and Connecticut and say like, well, at the start of the rollout of vaccines, they have roughly the same amount of COVID But Idaho did not have a meaningfully large number of people with COVID in March and April of 2020. The virus just arrived later there and they had already locked down.

[Francis]

Right.

[Peter]

Their lockdown policies were effective in Idaho and once they stopped their lockdowns, they then had big waves of cases. The conclusion that they're drawing is exactly the opposite of what the data indicates. You really can't compare the first two months of the pandemic to the rest of the pandemic.

[Francis]

And you can't just do this broad red state, blue state shit. Yeah, similar to the excess death data from Sweden. It's just a very inaccurate, sloppy data point to be like, oh, red states and blue states. Right. What about the same state before and after lockdowns?

[Peter]

Right.

[Francis]

What about isolating different parts of the year? Right. Where there was different levels of spread? You need to look at more data points to be confident that lockdowns don't work. Especially again, when, like scientists who understand the spread of disease say that mechanistically lockdowns should work.

[Peter]

It's also again, a political science failure because we also know what happened during this period. So as I mentioned, most states locked down in March. These were like, pretty strict. There wasn't a lot of partisan split. However, as early as March 24, this is five days after the first lockdown in California, Trump already starts saying, oh, we need to be open by easter. Easter was April 12th of that year.

[Francis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Peter]

On April 17th, he starts publicly criticizing Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, for having lockdown orders. And, like, there were already starting to be protests against the lockdown orders. So on April 17, he tweets, all caps, liberate Michigan.

[Francis]

Yeah.

[Peter]

And this is an excerpt from Lawrence Wright's book, the Plague Year.

[Francis]

The whole political reality on the ground changed when Trump singled me out, Whitmer said. Up until that point, I had pretty good support out of my legislature, which is totally Republican controlled. And when that happened, they stopped extending the state of emergency. They started suing me. They threatened to impeach me. Protesters not only continued to besiege the Capitol, they showed up at the Governor's mansion with assault weapons, wearing tactical gear. I called the leader of the Michigan Senate, Whitmer said. She left a message on his cell phone. We need to bring the heat down. She said. I need your help. She told him that there had been death threats against her and her family. He didn't even return my phone call.

[Peter]

She said researchers have looked into this. There's a huge spike in kind of medical freedom protests and anti lockdown movements almost immediately after Trump's tweet on April 17. Like, this is when the kind of on ramp to politicization begins. So here is another excerpt from Lawrence wright's book.

[Francis]

On April 30, thousands of protesters, spurred on by Trump's tweets and Fox News commentators, participated in Operation Gridlock surrounding the state Capitol in Lansing and demanding that restrictions be lifted. They carried Trump 2020 campaign signs and chanted lock her up. Meaning Whitmer, not Hillary Clinton.

[Peter]

It's like, lock her up. I'm afraid you'll have to be more specific. We're a country that chants lock her up about female politicians.

[Francis]

Frequently they had a Trump float and they were waving the Confederate flag, which in the state of Michigan is not something you see very often. Whitmer said she was called Hitler and hanged in effigy. A number of the protesters, armed with assault weapons, stormed into the Capitol building, menacing state police, who barred them from entering legislative chambers. This went on week after week.

[Peter]

These movements, to be fair, were relatively fringe at the time. Yeah, not very many people were on board with this. But as often happens in American politics, things that start on the far right Sort of start to trickle into more polite discourse. And so by June, June of 2020, super early in the pandemic, you have 40% of Republicans saying that they're concerned about getting coronavirus compared to 80% of Democrats.

[Francis]

I remember seeing footage of protests where there are people being like, cough on me. I want you to.

[Peter]

Yeah, yeah, Covid parties. That was like a real thing.

[Francis]

Yeah.

[Peter]

There's a super interesting article called Partisan How Partisanship and Public Health Concerns Affect Individual social mobility during COVID 19 that tracks these surveys where they ask people, how many social events did you attend last week? And as early as June of 2020, Republicans are attending three social events a week and Democrats are attending 1.7. So very early, Republicans become less likely to wear masks. They become less likely to restrict their mobility. There's also studies of like, cell phones where they look in red counties versus blue counties. Republicans are just like, doing more stuff even when there's lockdowns. And this article notes that pretty early, as early as the summer, the best predictor of the amount of activity that somebody's carrying out isn't how many cases are there in their county. It's their partisan affiliation. So basically, Republicans are moving around regardless of how many cases there are, and Democrats are mostly locked down regardless of how many cases there are.

[Francis]

If you do not let me go to Chili's, I am going to suicide bomb the governor. I mean, like, literally, that was basically the median position of American Republicans.

[Peter]

And I found this fascinating article in New York Times from. I believe it was July of 2020 where all these Republican states start, like, reopening their economies essentially because they're like, sick of being indoors. But, like, there's. They don't have control of the virus. So there's one where Arizona reopens. And like in this article, they have graphs of cases. And Arizona is like a vertical line. It's just like an explosion. As soon as bars and restaurants are open, people go to bars and restaurants.

[Francis]

Would you rather die or not be able to get the triple dipper for two months?

[Peter]

So here is an excerpt from that New York Times article.

[Francis]

When the government of Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston, the country's fourth largest city, mandated that residents wear masks in public or risk a thousand dollar fine. The state government blocked the rule. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick called a face mask mandate the ultimate government overreach. Sure. And Representative Dan Crenshaw said it would lead to unjust tyranny. Eventually, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas and Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona went even further. Blocking cities and counties from implementing any pandemic related restriction more stringent than that required by the state. This meant that when a video emerged of packed nightclubs in Phoenix full of people who are not wearing masks, the mayor was unable to close or sanction the clubs or even require them to force patrons to wear masks.

[Peter]

Basically, very quickly, red state governors start calling all of these basic public health measures a form of government tyranny. They're banning cities from taking their own measures. Again, political science, this, like, was the political dynamic pretty quickly. And so in an article called COVID 19 Mortality in the United States, it's been two Americas from the start. They note that before May 30th of 2020, 56% of deaths were in the Northeast.

[Francis]

Yeah.

[Peter]

After that, 48% of deaths are in the South. And it says since May 31, 2020, the south experienced COVID 19 mortality, 26% higher than the national rate, whereas the northeast rate was 42% lower. So almost immediately, basically, June 1, northeastern states, blue states, start managing the pandemic much more effectively than red states. And red states take a more lax approach, and they have death rates to match. It says 63% of avoidable deaths occurred between June 2020 and February 2021, and 60% were in the South. I feel like this is like, an underappreciated aspect of the pandemic. Red states did a much worse job.

[Francis]

The incredible part of this is that, like, New York City got its rates way, way, way, way down to the point where it was below many rural areas, despite the fact that it's incredibly densely populated. I mean, like, it just speaks to how obviously effective some of these basic mitigation efforts are. And, like, not only having a local and state government that is interested in mitigation, but having people who are interested in mitigation completely changes the game.

[Peter]

Also, even looking at states can make you think that the divide is less big than it is. So I looked up, like, by population, different states and different cities. So San Francisco has roughly the same population as North Dakota, 800,000 people. San Francisco. Throughout the entire pandemic, San Francisco had 1300 COVID deaths. North Dakota has 2,400. So not quite double, but pretty close. And the population of San Francisco is slightly older than North Dakota.

[Francis]

Okay.

[Peter]

I also looked at King county, where I live, which is basically the greater Seattle area. We have like, 2.2 million people. We have roughly the same number of people as Mississippi. So Seattle area versus Mississippi, we had 3,900 deaths. They had 13,400 deaths. So they're 30% bigger than us as far as population, and they have 300% more deaths.

[Francis]

That's wild.

[Peter]

This divide is really stark.

[Francis]

And we're not allowed. And we're not allowed to make fun of them because it comes across as cosmopolitan elite. I know half of American politics is just making fun of coastal cities as like, out of touch, but if we do the same, we're immediately clocked as elitist pieces of shit.

[Peter]

Right wingers understand punching up when they're talking shit about New York City. When they say New York City is like depraved values, they get it.

[Francis]

Oh, you're punching down.

[Peter]

We have to talk about why the death rates diverge so much. Here is in Covid's wake.

[Francis]

Despite a proliferation of studies, there remains a dearth of settled science about whether and how the restrictions employed by governments in the United States and around the world affected pandemic outcomes.

[Peter]

So here's their review of the evidence.

[Francis]

Much of the existing scholarship was produced while the pandemic was still ongoing before it was possible to ascertain how well the measures worked over the full course of the pandemic. But there is simply no sign at present that scholarship is tending toward a consensus assessment. A systematic review of the accumulated literature available through March 2023 conducted by the UK's Health Security Agency concludes. Unsatisfyingly, despite the high number of primary studies, reviews and opinion pieces published on this topic, there are still many uncertainties and unknowns about the effectiveness of non pharmaceutical interventions. And it remains critical to develop a robust evidence base to inform pandemic preparedness and future response.

[Peter]

Many uncertainties and unknowns.

[Francis]

Yeah, that doesn't really.

[Peter]

Okay, yeah, the quote doesn't actually make the argument.

[Francis]

Yeah, not at all. Not at all. This reminds me of their interpretation of the WHO data, the WHO stuff, where it's just sort of like, yeah, this is like basic uncertainty in science stuff. And you're taking it as like, nothing's been proven, no one could know either way.

[Peter]

Yeah, like, oh, you admit it.

[Francis]

They're just not used to the language that you frequently see in scientific papers.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Francis]

The July 2023 report produced by Scotland's official Covid inquiry concluded similarly, quote, there is insufficient evidence in 2020, or alternatively, no evidence to support most pandemic measures, including face mask mandates outside of healthcare settings, lockdowns, social distancing and test, trace and isolate measures, and quote, the evidence base has not yet changed materially in the intervening three years. In other words, we did not know in 2020, what policies would work to manage the pandemic. And years later, we still do not know what benefits these policies achieved.

[Peter]

So there's no consensus about whether all this masking lockdown garbage had any effect on the pandemic. That's the argument, yeah.

[Francis]

Again, this just, at, just at a glance feels like they are taking some like pretty basic scientific caveats and trying to drive a truck through them.

[Peter]

My first reaction to this was like, this is a book by American scholars. They almost exclusively have talked about the American context. Why are they citing a UK government report and a random inquiry from Scotland?

[Francis]

Do the fat bastard voice, but make.

[Peter]

Him talk about COVID So first of all, this document in the UK is not relevant to the point that they're making here because it is a rapid mapping review. This is in the title. It is simply a list of every study that has been carried out on the effectiveness of non pharmaceutical interventions in the uk.

[Francis]

Nice.

[Peter]

And the reason it says there is much uncertainty is because not that many studies have been done on the uk. The second reason why it's irrelevant is because it's a rapid mapping. It's literally just a list of sources. It's like a step in the process. They're like, first we're going to identify all of the studies that have been done. Later we will look at all of their conclusions and synthesize them. That never happened. This is literally just the part of the process where they identify all of the studies and do like a little typology. So this is literally just a list of sources that does not include anything international and does not include the United States. It's so fucking weird to cite this in your book. And this just like boilerplate thing of like, there's many uncertainties on this topic. You can read about like nuclear physics and they'll say the same fucking thing. They'd be like, there's much we don't know. This is just how academics talk, right?

[Francis]

Well, depends on your field. If you're in political science, perhaps not every political science. Every.

[Peter]

I love giving you more opportunities to dunk on political scientists.

[Francis]

Look, I read a shitload of political science literature and it's hard to make comparisons across fields that I don't read a lot of. But there is a decent chunk of the literature in political science where they just draw these really, really overwrought conclusions, where you're just, they are clearly interested in telling a story with their research. Whereas, like in a lot of the harder sciences you'll see the caveats. Like all over the place to the point where you're like, what is even the point of this research? They're not even willing to say anything about it.

[Peter]

So the second thing they cite here is this document from the Scottish Covid inquiry. And I was like, okay, I should probably look this up. Like why are they citing this? What was the deal with like the Scottish Covid inquiry? I type in the name of this author and then Scotland Covid something, something in Google. The first thing I get back is a BBC article called Scottish Covid Families condemn shameful first day. So this document is produced by a guy named Ashley Croft who is kind of an infamous like anti vax adjacent person.

[Francis]

Hell yeah.

[Peter]

He wrote an article in 2019 saying that it wasn't proven that MMR vaccines don't cause autism. And then in this document he says it remains unclear as to whether or not COVID 19 vaccination has resulted in fewer deaths from COVID 19. And so then I like ended up doing a couple weeks of research on the most effective interventions for Covid. This is actually something that I've been interested in, what matters for handling the pandemic. And it was, they're right that it was quite murky in 2020 and 2021. It's still somewhat murky now simply because countries did so many non pharmaceutical interventions at once. And you know, countries have different kind of political structures and different like age and comorbidity structures. It's relatively difficult. But on the other hand there's a vast literature on what worked to handle the pandemic. Like they construct this weird uncertainty in the book as if like they are the only ones who are interested. Like, hey, what explains different outcomes for a global once in a century pandemic? We finally asked the question. It's like, dude, there's so many studies on this, you can really only scratch the surface. I also think there's some challenges in establishing beyond a reasonable doubt precisely what worked for the pandemic. There's a really interesting article by Ed Yong at the end of 2020 where he's talking about this scientific uncertainty of like, do we know what works? And he says the countries that fared better against COVID 19 didn't follow a universal playbook. Many used masks widely. New Zealand didn't. Many tested extensively. Japan didn't. Many had science minded leaders who acted early. Hong Kong didn't. Many were small islands, some were large and continental like Germany. Each nation succeeded because it did enough things right. And this is something you find in the reviews too that like all of these non pharmaceutical interventions weren't perfect. Right? Masks don't prevent 100% of infections, lockdowns don't prevent it. Vaccines don't even prevent 100% of infections or deaths. Right. All of these things have holes in them and different countries use different mixes. I really liked this metaphor of Swiss cheese where every slice of Swiss cheese has a hole in it, but if you stack four or five or six Swiss cheese slices up against each other, it will provide an impenetrable barrier.

[Francis]

Thank you for a sandwich based metaphor.

[Peter]

Now you're going to be distracted. So I tried to look at as many meta analyses as I could, including meta analyses of the US experience. And the academic consensus is that lockdown orders were like one of the most effective interventions. So one of the meta analyses said social distancing measures play an important role in COVID 19 prevention. A study of 340 cities in China predicted that a three week earlier intervention of travel restrictions and isolations could have reduced COVID 19 cases by 99% while the cases would have been 67 times higher without interventions. Similar results have been estimated in the US. One study found that imposing stay at home orders one week earlier could have prevented 61% of infections and 55% of deaths by 3rd of May 2020. It's just not true that there's all this scientific debate and uncertainty about whether stay at home orders.

[Francis]

Right.

[Peter]

The thing that is interesting about stay at home orders and kind of most of the measures writ large is that it is true that they became much less effective over time. And some studies I found this really interesting meta analyses where it's like three studies found that lockdowns were the most effective measure and three studies found that lockdowns were the least effective measure. And the reason for that is basically compliance that over time, like In March of 2020, a lot of us were scared. We didn't know what was going on. People really did stay home in March of 2020. But as partisanship took over, there was pandemic fatigue. Some version of this took place in every country. And you know, right wing agitators were able to ride this to a lot of pandemic skepticism. But like people got really sick of lockdowns and so over time lockdowns became less effective. It is true that lockdowns were not universally effective every single place that they were tried. But that's not necessarily evidence about the effectiveness of lockdowns. It's evidence about compliance with lockdowns.

[Francis]

Right.

[Peter]

Mechanically reducing the contacts between people prevents the Spread of wood disease. It's like, yes.

[Francis]

This is what drives me nuts about this, is like, you do believe in germ theory, right?

[Peter]

Right.

[Francis]

Cause staying away from other people, it's basically foolproof. I understand that there's a little more nuance than this, where it's sort of like there must be some contact with other people, and it reaches a threshold where maybe lockdowns start losing efficacy. But there's something running through this analysis when it comes to, like, do masks work? Does social distancing work? Oh, do lockdowns work? There's just no evidence either way. It's just like, we understand how disease spreads and have for well over a century. So are you advocating for the rejection of germ theory, or are you just fucking jerking yourself off with this contrarian bullshit?

[Peter]

And this is also the. The failure of the actual political science analysis in the book, because at numerous points in the book, when they're talking about how lockdowns don't work, they're like, people don't want to be stuck inside. It's like, oh, so we're talking about compliance, Then we agree that we're talking about compliance. And there are factors which reduce compliance, which are political.

[Francis]

Right. Like being a Republican.

[Peter]

Yeah. There's not, like, biological reasons why lockdown stopped working.

[Francis]

Right. And part of the reason, maybe not a big part in this particular case, but, like, part of the reason that compliance is such an issue is because you have people in the political center hemming and hawing, talking out of their ass about topics they don't really understand. Like this. And like, that lends credence to the people who are like, well, maybe we should just reopen. Right. Don't really know whether this stuff works.

[Peter]

I think the clearest example of this is masks, where we know that at the individual level, masks work to prevent viruses from coming into and out of your mouth and nose. That's not really, really up for debate. This is why healthcare workers, like, some healthcare workers got Covid and died during that period, but far fewer than you'd think. Right. And if masks didn't work, we would have had, like, half the healthcare workers in America would have fucking died. Right. But, like, on an individual level, masks work. Right. N95s work better than the surgical masks, which work better than cloths. Basically, any covering that prevents, like, things from coming out of your mouth and nose does work. The question was not whether masks worked. The question was whether masks mandates work. And the effectiveness of mask mandates is almost entirely about compliance.

[Francis]

This is the thing where I Can't get past this. Like, part of the reason that compliance starts to erode is people like this who publicly undermine the case for the efficacy of masks.

[Peter]

Right. Part of it is like, yeah, they're uncomfortable or whatever, but part of it is like people are saying masks don't fucking work. People believe what they are told.

[Francis]

And I don't, like, I don't want to overstate it because I don't think that like reactionary centrists were a big part of the anti lockdown blowback in 2020.

[Peter]

Yeah, I think it was mostly the far right. Yeah, for sure.

[Francis]

But it's interesting the conversations that we have and the conversations that we don't have.

[Peter]

Right, yeah, yeah.

[Francis]

The idea that masks were like a step too far is something that gets widespread play throughout the government, despite the fact that it's fucking ridiculous.

[Peter]

Right. And also Fauci downplaying masks in March of 2020, which I think is a genuine blunder. But also like within two weeks, the CDC and Fauci had corrected that and recommended masks and continued to recommend masks for the rest of the pandemic. Whereas Trump openly questioned masks, constantly, didn't wear a mask in public, told people he at one point told a reporter to take off a mask before asking a question in a press conference. Like, Trump denigrated the effectiveness of mask throughout the pandemic. I get why, like Fauci deserves criticism for that two week period. But like, okay, where, where were the forces of mask questioning coming from? Those horses were overwhelmingly on the right.

[Francis]

And from people who don't. Who aren't fucking scientists.

[Peter]

Yeah. Who don't know what they're talking about.

[Francis]

This is the thing is like, I am not interested in a debate between Anthony Fauci and a guy who eats dead animals that he finds on the street.

[Peter]

The other measure that we need to talk about is school closures. We're going to spend a little bit more time on this just because it's become like such a big political thing now. And I want to sort of put some basic facts on the table. So this is not an excerpt from the book, but this is an excerpt from an interview with Steven Macedo in a magazine called Public Discourse. And he's talking about public health experts, the kind of people that were advising lockdowns in 2020.

[Francis]

They saw closing schools as the most important thing to do for younger children in particular, because they saw children as people that could, couldn't possibly socially distance. You can't socially distance a 7 year old or 8 year old. So you're going to have to keep them isolated at home because they can't play with their friends outside. They're going to spread disease. So in these mathematical models, children are treated entirely as vectors of disease. There's no attention given to the cost of imposing these isolation measures on children. The interests of young people were systematically discounted. And the suggestion has been made, which we basically agree with in the book, that COVID policy was made by and for older members of the laptop class. People who could work from home on their computers and have food delivered to them while essential workers processed their food, made their food, delivered their food, and so on.

[Peter]

I'm skipping it, but they have a whole thing about how, like, Democrats approach was unfair to essential workers because, like, essential workers had to work and they were given no protections. It's like, oh, so you do want mass mandates.

[Francis]

Exactly.

[Peter]

Wait, I'm like, I'm not covering because it's like, unfair to even talk about. It's like you don't even know your own fucking arguments.

[Francis]

There's an element of that I agree with in the general sense that like, a, the definition of essential worker was too broad. Right.

[Peter]

It was a third of the population.

[Francis]

Yeah. And then B, we were knowingly putting that population at risk.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Francis]

I agree that, like, our exploitation as a society of the working classes was laid bare during COVID But this argument is like, one, no one knows if masks work.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Francis]

And two, these poor essential workers were put at risk because they had to work. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You just told me that lockdowns don't matter.

[Peter]

Yeah, exactly. You were the one saying that we should have just had way more infection and death among essential workers. What are we doing here?

[Francis]

These people were living free.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Francis]

They're living the dream.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Francis]

They didn't have to do lockdowns. They're blessed. It was us. It was actually the laptop class who was so oppressed, we weren't allowed to go anywhere, according to your analysis. This is nonsense and, like, we're about to talk about this, so I don't want to get too far into it, but the idea that no one thought about the cost of lockdowns on children is, dude, insane.

[Peter]

There were reports from, like, UNICEF and shit. It was like, so there was so much societal concern about this.

[Francis]

As someone who didn't have kids at the time and doesn't have kids, I thought it was exhausting. I was like, who cares about these guys? I'm not a kid anymore. Let's talk about me. What about the impact on 30 something yuppies who live in New York City. That's the. Those are the people we should be focusing on.

[Peter]

Older members of the laptop class. You're an older member of the laptop class. You're like, no one is managing me. Yeah, no, I mean, you kind of are an older member of the laptop class.

[Francis]

Shut the fuck.

[Peter]

I will also cop to this.

[Francis]

No, I'm not. We're like the youngest members of the laptop class. Anyone younger than us doesn't use a.

[Peter]

Laptop at all on their phones.

[Francis]

It keeps happening. People talk about these things and instead of just being like, I think that X side should have won this debate. And they didn't. They're like, discussion was shut down.

[Peter]

There's also this, I mean there's this sort of metastasizing argument now that like Democrats fucked up. Schools were closed for too long in blue states and blue cities. And as a result we have this like egregious learning loss. And this is because our entire media apparatus is governed by like, like the right and far right interests. This is now seen as like one of the signal failures of the pandemic. Response was like, we kept schools closed too long.

[Francis]

Yeah.

[Peter]

So just to get the sort of timeline and sequence of events on the record, basically school closures started in mid March. We then have this massive wave of death in March, April and May of 2020. Schools then go on summer break in June of 2020. Even people who are pushing this like, school should have reopened earlier argument, even they don't really argue that schools should have reopened in spring of 2020. I think everyone kind of accepts that, like, yeah, they were going to have to close for that period over the course of the summer. This is when a lot of the debate took place, like, should schools reopen in the fall? Should they not? Some states did reopen in 2020. So Florida famously, like reopened all of ITS schools in 2020. As of November of 2020, 36% of schools were in person. Those were overwhelmingly in red states. 45% of schools were using hybrid models and 19% of schools were using schools were remote. It isn't the case that like no schools reopened. Like it was only one in five schools were fully remote at that time. Despite what he says here about like, essential workers, like, weren't taken care of. The people who were pushing against school reopening, a lot of it was teachers and teachers unions. Like, of course, the great villain of conservatives, like, ah, teachers unions. But like a lot of teachers did not want to get infected with COVID at work. I don't know. I don't know that. I think that's, like, that unreasonable as far as.

[Francis]

That's part of the job. All right?

[Peter]

I don't want to get. I don't want to get sick. There was no vaccine available. There was, like, nothing.

[Francis]

You like teaching kids? Get ready to risk your fucking life.

[Peter]

So a lot of these school reopenings were actually, even at the time, considered fairly experimental. We didn't really know how much Covid could spread through schools. We knew that children were at low risk of severe outcomes, but we didn't know how much kids going back to school would end up spreading it through the community. So there were, you know, schools did different mitigation measures. Most schools at that time had masking when they were in person. Many of them only had, like, half the class attending. A lot of parents actually voluntarily kept their kids home even when schools were open because, like, they had an older relative, right? Or they had an essential worker. People were sort of figuring it out in the fall of 2020. And another thing to know about fall of 2020 is that very quickly, cases started to rise again. So I don't think that's because of the school openings necessarily. It's mostly because people traveled for Thanksgiving. People thought, like, the pandemic is over. We survived the first wave. But then that winter, we had the worst wave of death of the entire pandemic. Deaths peaked at 26,000 a week in December, January of 2020, 2021. That huge wave of death is also when the biggest disparity between red and blue states was happening. So in blue states, 21% of schools were open states, 66% of schools were open in January of 2021. After that wave, it's then sort of March 2021. By the time that subsides, by May of 2021, 53% of schools are open and 46% are hybrid, and only 1% are fully remote. So by May of 2021, most schools are in some way in person. But then we start getting the delta wave. The delta wave comes in July of 2021, and it lasts into the school year. So deaths were still really elevated in September of 2021, when kids were going back. So a lot of people were really nervous about sending kids back to school because we knew caseloads were extremely high. Health care systems were swamped. It was like, I don't know that this is, like, all that responsible.

[Francis]

I remember this. I remember that there was a really big debate about going back in the fall of 2021. Yeah.

[Peter]

In September of 2021, we were still having 15,000 deaths a week.

[Francis]

But we were also post vaccine. Right.

[Peter]

That's another thing to know is that kids could not get vaccinated until November of 2021. Kind of like all kids, but most of the teachers were vaccinated by that point. And then as soon as kids went back to school, we never really got a lull between the delta and omicron waves. Deaths went down to 8,000 a week. That's as low as they went between those two waves. And then they spiked to 21,000 a week that January. By the time the omicron wave is done is when deaths for the first time go below 3,000 per week. And they've stayed lower since, and they've kind of been trending downward ever since. I think there's a real debate here, and we'll get more into the data, but like, I think if you think schools should have reopened, I do think that you should specify exactly when.

[Francis]

Yeah.

[Peter]

Because schools were reopening in the context of huge waves of cases and deaths.

[Francis]

Yeah. And that's the thing about the schools should have reopened argument. The deadliest wave was in the winter of 2020. It wasn't long after that that the vast majority of schools in this country were open.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Francis]

So if you're arguing for earlier school openings, what you're arguing for is essentially for schools to have ignored the pandemic entirely. Right, Right. It seems to me, like what happened, largely speaking, across the country, if you could like map it. Map. A really broad trend, was red state schools were opening in the fall of 2020. As the vaccine rollout hit teachers, blue states gave way, and by the end of that school year, almost every school in the country was open to some degree. Yeah.

[Peter]

I do think it's important to sort of talk about the cost of keeping schools closed. That like all this stuff about learning loss is like totally true. Like, kids really got fucked over in the pandemic. And as I've mentioned before, like one of my closest friends in Seattle, the guy who named our show Peter, my little pun machine friend, is a high school teacher at a public district in Seattle. So I got like an up close view of what it was like to be a teacher at that time. And like, it sucked. Shit, it was really hard. They were not given any support. The way that he puts it is always, I pretended to teach and they pretended to learn. Yeah, right. Especially for younger kids. Like, distance learning was a total joke.

[Francis]

And that's a shame because. Because you go into teaching because it's an easy job, because.

[Peter]

The pay is great, hours are great, everybody loves you.

[Francis]

Let's lean into just getting canceled for.

[Peter]

This, for this one.

[Francis]

Just being extremely dismissive about teachers and parents.

[Peter]

People who are highlighting the costs of keeping school closed are totally correct. Right? The learning losses were really profound. There's also been a doubling of chronic absenteeism which appears to be to still be getting worse. It used to be around 15% of kids were missing more than 1 in 10 school days and now it's about 30%. It's not totally clear what's driving that, but it's really bad.

[Francis]

Maybe that's because everyone who is powerful and rich now is the dumbest motherfucker I've ever seen. And so kids are like, what am I doing? Why am I if I'm 8 years old, if I'm 8 years old right now I'm like, I'm not doing this. Are you kidding me? This is a waste of my time.

[Peter]

It would be ridiculous to deny that there are costs of, of keeping schools closed for two years. Like obviously you need to acknowledge the fact there are real costs of this. On the other hand, as you said, there are huge costs of reopening schools. So one thing I was not expecting when I started looking into this was if you read a lot of the national and international meta analyses of the most effective non pharmaceutical interventions, a lot of them find that school closing was the most effective. There's one in the US that says each additional day from a county's first case until the state ordered school closure is related to a 1.5 to 2.4% higher cumulative death per capita. Another one says school closure is the most significant intervention in reducing the reproduction number, closely followed by stay at home orders. You know, I could keep going. Like a lot of reviews have found this and it has become an article of faith among people who talk about school closures all the time that like we don't even know if it was preventing cases. But like the evidence appears to indicate that school closures do matter for spreading coronavirus.

[Francis]

It seems pretty obvious that this is just the conflation of two things. One is that kids very rarely die from COVID which is true. And two, kids don't spread Covid, which is false. Right.

[Peter]

Totally.

[Francis]

It's just wildly false. Kids spread Covid more because they are disgusting.

[Peter]

Yeah, because they're little petri dishes.

[Francis]

Have you ever just looked at a five year old, just snot all over their face and it's just like yeah, that's what five year olds look like, dude.

[Peter]

When I lived in Copenhagen, I got fucked up head lice from a colleague whose kid got it at daycare. And then we shared a chair and there was like a blanket over the chair and then I leaned my head back on it and I had fucking head lice.

[Francis]

Yeah. Well, I'll tell you this. When I was in Copenhagen a few years ago, I stayed in an Airbnb that was directly across from an elementary school. And at 7:30am, the sound of 1000 screaming 6 year olds woke me up. And so what I'm saying to you is, fuck kids in Copenhagen, all right?

[Peter]

Are you literally railing? It's like the sound of the delight of children. You're like, shut up.

[Francis]

I would rather see one 34 year old sleep an hour than a thousand children enjoy themselves.

[Peter]

But then if we're also, if we're talking about the cost of reopening, it's not just that it spreads Covid like through schools. There's also, I mean, kids do die there. More than 100,000 kids were also hospitalized with COVID during the pandemic. Getting hospitalized with COVID fucking sucks.

[Francis]

It's awful.

[Peter]

And also, like, we also know that like, long Covid exists for kids. It's hard to get the prevalence rates because they seem to differ quite a bit with different symptoms. But like, many children have long Covid from getting infected numerous times. And then we also have 1300 teachers that died of COVID during the pandemic. It's also like, it's not like, not in the interest of teachers to be like, hey, I don't want to get this illness. It's just weird that like, teachers unions are like now cast as this big villain when. And like, yeah, I also did not want to get Covid during fucking Covid.

[Francis]

No, we've joked about it. But it's so funny that teachers were basically treated as if they had taken a job where they implicitly offered up their lives.

[Peter]

Yeah, what the fuck?

[Francis]

Oh, you wanted to teach? Well, then get ready to die so that my kid doesn't lose six months of in person learning. It's just ridiculous. And that was one of the most frustrating parts of the pandemic is like all of these contexts where people are like, well, we should reopen this, we should reopen that. And built into that is someone who gets thrown into the wood chipper. Someone whose risk is way higher than everyone else's. If I say, hey, I want to go to Target, that's an hour of my Time where maybe I wear a mask and keep my distance and don't do anything too risky. But there's 50 people working there all day and then the next day and the next day, right? And those people are put in extremely high risk situations. And that's the trade off, right? So when I'm just like, I want things to reopen so that I can go fucking shopping or whatever, what I'm actually saying is like, I want thousands and thousands and thousands of people put at high risk so that I can do a little bit of low risk shopping.

[Peter]

The other like kind of chilling thing about this and disqualifying thing about this bizarre argument is that if you look now, right, the entire discourse is based around like, well, red states reopened schools and blue states didn't. And that was a mistake. But if you look now, red state schools do not have less learning loss than blue states. Blue states and red states both experienced huge learning loss. There's I've seen some like attempts from these kind of center right blogs to be like, well if you look at the NAEP results, the scores are higher in red states than blue states because they didn't close. But for fourth grade math, red states have an average score of 236 and blue states have an average score of 234. Eighth grade math, red states it's 271. Blue states it's 270. These are minuscule differences.

[Francis]

Was there a notable change though that blue states go down further than red states?

[Peter]

Blue states are typically at a higher baseline, so they experienced slightly more learning loss.

[Francis]

So the learning loss in blue states was so severe that their kids are now as dumb as the median red state child.

[Peter]

It just, I mean if we're supposed to see this as like this obvious blunder by blue state Democrats. Right, this obvious huge fuck up.

[Francis]

Yeah, sorry.

[Peter]

Shouldn't there just be results that clearly show that red states are doing better? We don't actually have any evidence of this. There was an interesting article comparing Florida and California. And you know, Florida famously reopened schools, California famously didn't. Yeah, it says neither Florida nor California saw a statistically significant change in fourth grade reading performance on the National Assessment of of educational progress between 2019 and 2022. Florida's 8th graders performed worse on the reading exam in 2022 than in 2019. While California's 8th graders performance was unchanged. Both states performed worse on the 4th and 8th grade math assessments. So it's sort of like, it's kind of a wash. Like it just isn't obvious looking at places that closed schools and places that didn't. That one policy approach was better. Right, right. And also keep in mind there are far more deaths in red states.

[Francis]

Right.

[Peter]

They had 60% of their schools open during the worst wave of mass deaths death of the entire pandemic. So they paid for those one or two extra points on their NAEP scores. Right. Even if you think that was the correct decision for these tiny results. Yeah. They paid for it in teacher deaths, in long Covid for kids, in outbreaks. Like they made that trade off. And it's weird to act like that isn't a trade off.

[Francis]

I will say this about this argument, the school closure argument. At least the sacrifice on the closure side is real. So that you can have a debate like is this very real learning loss worth X number of deaths? Or whatever. Right. Whatever you think about that debate, at least you can have it. Whereas the mask stuff is like, I don't wanna wear it.

[Peter]

Yeah, I don't wanna wear it. Okay, so final chapter of this story is we now have to talk about vaccination.

[Francis]

Okay?

[Peter]

So I mean, as you heard in that clip from the daily, like they do admit that death rates are significantly higher in red states than blue states post vaccine. Right. That's when you see this like much more noticeable divergence. Right, right, right.

[Francis]

So they believe in the efficacy of vaccines, these reactionary centrists.

[Peter]

Although, you know, this is a 400 page book. This entire issue of like the divergence of death rates is handled in six.

[Francis]

Paragraphs at the end of the book, which we know for a fact, fact that nobody reads. No one reads the ends of books. And please authors, anyone listening to this, you don't understand how crazy the ends of books are. The ends of a non fiction book could contain anything in the world and no one will notice. Like, yeah, this is where Malcolm Gladwell is. Just like, by the way, I don't think Koreans are good at flying.

[Peter]

That was gonna be my example. That's like, that's the Koreans can't fly plane section of the book.

[Francis]

For all, for all anyone knows, the end, end of every single nonfiction book is a chapter about Koreans not being able to fly planes.

[Peter]

So in this six paragraph treatment of post vaccination death rates, they say states varied widely in Covid mortality over the course of the pandemic. From a low of 124 COVID deaths per 100,000 population in Hawaii to a high of 450 per 100,000 in Arizona. Figure 5.8 displays the relationship between Covid mortality and vaccination rate rates, revealing just what one would expect. The least vaccinated State experienced fully 1.6 times as much Covid mortality as the most vaccinated state. Basic facts, right? They then get to their interpretation of these basic facts.

[Francis]

Peter, this is where political science makes sense.

[Peter]

This is where it's all in the politics part. I'm explaining the politics.

[Francis]

Given the market differences between Republicans and Democrats level of vaccine hesitancy evident in public opinion polls, the state level differences between red and blue states in their vaccine uptake stem in large part from their residents personal beliefs and attitudes.

[Peter]

Their personal beliefs and attitudes. And then they go into that in like slightly more detail. And then a bit later they say this.

[Francis]

The bottom line is that variation in COVID vaccine uptake probably accounts for much of the difference in Covid mortality between Republican and Democratic states. However, state policy played only a modest role in driving that variation. The preferences and voluntary actions of state residents, which themselves strongly correlate with partisanship, largely explain the differences in vaccination rates across red and blue states.

[Peter]

So Republicans are just anti vaxxers. What are you gonna do? Policy had nothing to do with it.

[Francis]

I understand what they're saying. They're saying that like, even if these red states had made vaccines widely available, and I'm sure some did, that is.

[Peter]

True that their vaccine rollouts were roughly as effective as the vaccine rollouts in PC, right?

[Francis]

But here's the thing is publicly stating that everything should reopen or that VACC might be the product of an evil international conspiracy. That is policy. It's not legislation, it's not regulation, but it's policy.

[Peter]

And also like to just have two paragraphs here where you're like, republicans hate vaccines and then you move on. It's like, sorry, did politicians play any role in that? Like, what are the factors?

[Francis]

It's the output of a massive propaganda campaign that the entire Republican party participated in. You can't just be like, yeah, they made their choices. Why? Why did they make those choices? Why did everyone in the Republican party do a fucking 180 on vaccines in the span of a couple years? Can you explain that? Like, wouldn't that be maybe helpful to.

[Peter]

Dive into whatever, you know, plandemic, that insane documentary that me and Aubrey watch for maintenance phase came out in like May of 2020. Misinformation was spreading extremely early in the pandemic. And if you read actual accounts of the drivers of anti vax beliefs, a really foundational belief was this idea that like the fatality rates are really low, and it's basically just a flu. And all this stuff about, you know, you died with COVID versus you died of COVID and the deaths are inflated. This belief that essentially Covid is. Is a nothing burger that we don't need to worry about, and public health is essentially a conspiracy against conservatives. All of this was an excuse to shut down debate, an excuse to do lockdown. This was fundamentally illegitimate. All these things started floating around very early in the pandemic, and again, they sort of slowly gained steam. And, you know, Donald Trump was retweeting like, QAnon influencers. He repeated that deranged shit about doctors getting more money for saying it's a COVID death and inflating COVID deaths. Like, Trump was spreading these conspiracy theories.

[Francis]

My favorite part about Trump then and now is that he tweets like, he's not the president.

[Peter]

Yeah, I know. Yeah.

[Francis]

He's like, there's a conspiracy to do X, Y and Z. It's like, you are in charge of the federal government, dude. What are you talking about?

[Peter]

And so, I mean, as early as December of 2020, 25% of Republicans said that they were definitely not getting the vaccine versus 5% of Democrats. Republicans were five times more likely to be anti vaxxers even before we really had the meaningful rollout of the vaccine. By the kind of the end of the vaccine rollout, October 2021, 90% of Democrats had gotten vaccinated versus 61% of Republicans. This was really, like, decisive in death rates, like it really matters. The other really decisive thing was the inauguration of Joe Biden. It's kind of easy to forget now, but, like, 2020 was also an election year. And we have January 6, 2021. We have all that psychosis, and then Biden takes over. And there's a really interesting New York Times article about how the sort of stop the steal organizers, all this, like, election fraud, these psychos.

[Francis]

Yeah, they pivoted.

[Peter]

They all pivoted to doing, quote, unquote, medical freedom anti vax stuff. So you start getting anti vax protests as early as March of 2021, and then it's just like galloping under its own initiative. So by the time it's available to the general public in most states, these people have been awash in anti vax propaganda for, like, months to years.

[Francis]

Right?

[Peter]

You can quibble about whether that counts as policy, but, like, there's an article in May of 2021 that reports that only 45% of House Republicans were vaccinated versus 100% of House Democrats like this was coming from the top.

[Francis]

There were internal meetings within the Republican Party where they decided that they were going to message a certain way about this. And the propaganda that you saw emanating from them during the early pandemic was the result of those discussions. If you don't want to consider that policy, if you're doing this, like, fine line where policies are either legislation or regulations, right, fine, But. But you're still not confronting the fundamental problem, the fundamental issue here. And in fact, you're getting it backwards because the whole point of a book like this is that, like, the left, generally speaking, should have taken the arguments coming from the right more seriously. And in fact, those arguments had some credence to them. But the opposite is true. The actual reality is that the arguments coming from the right were conspiratorial nonsense and, and should have been not just ignored, but shamed even more aggressively than they were. And anyone associated with them should be considered unserious. Right. And we should be thinking in the future not about how to take the right more seriously on this stuff, but how to box them out of public policy making because they are unhinged, because they are all unwell, because they reject science out of hand. That is like, what we should be taking into, like, the next public crisis or whatever. Not some sort of, like, wishy washy, we should be partnering with them a little more sort of bullshit. That's the fucking opposite of what you should be taking away from this era.

[Peter]

We had a hyper incompetent Republican president who didn't really do anything to manage the virus. We then have all this political propaganda starting this rolling snowball throughout 2020, and then it peaks when they become an opposition party. They have to be against whatever the president is doing. And so they seize on vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, all this stuff is like government tyranny. I know that's a boring explanation, but it's also really fucking obvious. If you, like, remember what was going.

[Francis]

On, that basic pitch. The American right lost their minds. Yeah. That is the definitive story of American politics over the span of the last 20 years. And it was vastly accelerated by Covid. Right. And when you're. And if you're gonna write a book about COVID along these lines, that's probably what should be your central focus. But for whatever reason, these folks understand, I guess, that they're pitching to a liberal audience. Right. Like, right wingers aren't really reading this book, they're reading books about how Anthony Fauci did all of this by hand. From a secret lair somewhere. Right? So you're pitching your book to libs that edge toward the center maybe are a little bit right leaning. Even that feels more transgressive among the audience that it's being pitched to. But it's not just that you're missing the forest for the trees. It's that you have no fucking idea what you're talking about.

[Peter]

You're taking the wrong lesson, like, the exact wrong lesson. And from the pandemic, right? And also in a way that fucking harms people. Like, if you look at the pandemic as a whole, counties that voted for Trump have three times the death rate of counties that voted for Biden in 2020. Brookings estimates the number of preventable deaths as 800,000. Some of that's also like, blue states also fucked up too. Like, that isn't just red states, but those deaths are overwhelmingly concentrated in red states. And also this is only going to get worse. One of the most chilling things I found doing the research for this was a Kaiser Family foundation survey from January 2025 that found that 40% of Republicans now say it's probably or definitely true that more people have died from the COVID vaccine than the COVID virus. That's 40% of Republicans. That's up from 25% two years ago.

[Francis]

The idea that now is the time to start thinking about, like, the ways in which we should concede to the right on this shit, it's nuts from a policy perspective, incorrect from a political perspective. Just batshit fucking insane. Yeah. And again, like, look, congrats, okay? The head of HHS eats roadkill and has a fucking worm in his brain. It's like, congrats, Congrats on all your success, guys.

[Peter]

Great. Yeah, you guys won.

[Francis]

If a pandemic hits now, they're not gonna do fucking anything. They're gonna let it rip. So I imagine you think that's fine and in fact, maybe even better in ways that liberals won't concede. There won't be school closures next time. So don't fucking worry about it. You know what I mean?

[Peter]

And also, I mean, keep in mind, this was published by University of Princeton Press. These people are academics at an elite institution. They were featured on the Daily and pbs. There is an elite consensus that the need to question, quote, unquote, liberal groupthink is so powerful that it outweighs any consideration of the actual reality. Right. The entire premise of this book is wrong. None of the producers of the Daily Nobody, like, thought to check, hey, can we maybe talk to an epidemiologist. Is it true that everyone in the field doesn't know if lockdowns and masks work? Is that true? Nobody thought to fucking check. Because all you have to do is say the magic words. Oh, both sides have extremists. Both sides made mistakes.

[Francis]

Yeah.

[Peter]

You then get invited onto prestigious just shows. You then get credibility. It's really important to have a conversation about this right now. But that conversation, as usual, is being led by dipshits who don't know what they're talking about and who are just fundamentally fucking wrong.

[Francis]

It's exhausting. I'll say it again. You have political scientists writing books about what's basically virology and telling us that we took the recommendations of public health officials, who are, in fact, experts in this stuff, a little too seriously.

[Peter]

I like how you say political scientists as a slur. No, these political scientists.

[Francis]

Unless someone calls you one.

[Peter]

Then I can reflect it back.

[Francis]

That's what you told me about the f slur. At which point I happily told you that I've been called.

[Peter]

Should we call it the P.S. slurp it?