Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?

Summary

Summary of "The Daily" Episode: "Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?"

Release Date: March 20, 2025
Host: Michael Barbaro
Guests: Steven Macedo and Francis Lee, Professors at Princeton University

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1. Introduction

In this episode of The Daily, host Michael Barbaro engages in a profound discussion with Princeton University professors Steven Macedo and Francis Lee. They delve into their new book, Covid's Wake, which critically examines the United States' response to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly focusing on the efficacy and repercussions of nationwide lockdowns.

2. Motivation for the Study

Barbaro initiates the conversation by highlighting the professors' decision to rigorously assess the US COVID response.

Michael Barbaro [02:16]:
"You have produced a body of work here that feels important and it feels unique. You're both tenured professors at Princeton University...Why you undertook this project of examining the US Response to Covid in a really rigorous way."

Steven Macedo [02:59]:
"This is meant to be, in part, a book about policy choices, policy deliberation, and in many ways, policy mistakes, perhaps, that were made during COVID."

3. Pre-Pandemic Views on Lockdowns

Before the pandemic erupted, there was significant skepticism within public health circles regarding the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) like lockdowns and mask mandates.

Francis Lee [05:26]:
"There was a lack of good evidence and absence of certainty around the effectiveness of these measures."

4. Shift to Lockdowns

Despite pre-existing skepticism, the US swiftly adopted lockdown measures influenced by reports from organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) and Imperial College London.

Steven Macedo [13:07]:
"One factor was the fact that China locked down and the World Health Organization sent a team to China and they issued a report...They endorse the strategy without qualification around the world."

Michael Barbaro [14:02]:
"How did China's response become so persuasive, especially given that's a very unique system of government?"

5. Comparing State Responses

The US exhibited a fragmented approach to pandemic management, with states adopting varying levels of restrictions based on political leanings.

Francis Lee [32:38]:
"Initially, there was great unity with 43 states implementing stay-at-home orders. Policy divergence began in the reopening process, with Democratic-leaning states maintaining restrictions longer than Republican-leaning states."

Francis Lee [34:00]:
"By the end of our study, Republican states had 30% more Covid mortality than Democratic states."

6. The Great Barrington Declaration

Seven months into the pandemic, the Great Barrington Declaration emerged as a controversial proposal advocating for focused protection of the vulnerable instead of broad lockdowns.

Steven Macedo [27:11]:
"They were three scientists...who argued that rather than keeping society closed, we should focus protection on the vulnerable parts of the population."

Michael Barbaro [30:05]:
"Francis Collins...called the Great Barrington Declaration...an awful, awful idea."

7. Assessment of Lockdown Effectiveness

The professors argue that lockdowns did not significantly reduce COVID-19 mortality rates and that variations in state policies did not correlate with differences in death rates before the vaccine rollout.

Francis Lee [35:18]:
"Before the vaccines were introduced, states with more restrictions had similar mortality rates to those with fewer restrictions."

Steven Macedo [35:25]:
"Even the optimistic reports...do not show evidence of significantly reduced death."

8. Costs of Lockdowns

The economic and social costs of lockdowns are substantial, encompassing education disruptions, economic hardships, and increased societal inequalities.

Francis Lee [39:30]:
"There was an unprecedented drop in student learning...Chronic absenteeism from school roughly doubled nationwide."

Steven Macedo [40:45]:
"The initial COVID expenditures were equivalent to the New Deal and the 2009 stimulus package combined."

9. Future Recommendations

Macedo and Lee advocate for a more balanced and inclusive approach to pandemic response, emphasizing the need to consider both costs and benefits and to involve a broader range of expertise and public input in decision-making.

Steven Macedo [45:01]:
"We need to consider the costs as well as the hoped-for benefits of policies...and have wider and more tolerant deliberation about these matters."

Francis Lee [44:16]:
"Conspiracy theories are fueled by not asking these questions...a franker conversation...can raise trust in our institutions."

10. Conclusion

The episode underscores the necessity for a comprehensive national reckoning of the COVID-19 response. Macedo and Lee emphasize that understanding both the successes and failures of lockdowns is crucial for preparing more effective and equitable responses to future pandemics.

Francis Lee [42:02]:
"It's extremely painful, but I think we owe it to ourselves to do so."

Michael Barbaro [47:14]:
"It's an invitation to have a reckoning, right?"

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Steven Macedo [02:59]:
  "This is meant to be, in part, a book about policy choices, policy deliberation, and in many ways, policy mistakes, perhaps, that were made during COVID."

• Francis Lee [05:26]:
  "There was a lack of good evidence and absence of certainty around the effectiveness of these measures."

• Steven Macedo [13:07]:
  "They endorse the strategy without qualification around the world."

• Francis Lee [34:00]:
  "By the end of our study, Republican states had 30% more Covid mortality than Democratic states."

• Michael Barbaro [30:05]:
  "Francis Collins...called the Great Barrington Declaration...an awful, awful idea."

• Francis Lee [35:18]:
  "Before the vaccines were introduced, states with more restrictions had similar mortality rates to those with fewer restrictions."

• Francis Lee [39:30]:
  "There was an unprecedented drop in student learning...Chronic absenteeism from school roughly doubled nationwide."

• Steven Macedo [45:01]:
  "We need to consider the costs as well as the hoped-for benefits of policies...and have wider and more tolerant deliberation about these matters."

• Francis Lee [44:16]:
  "Conspiracy theories are fueled by not asking these questions...a franker conversation...can raise trust in our institutions."

• Francis Lee [42:02]:
  "It's extremely painful, but I think we owe it to ourselves to do so."

---

Final Thoughts

Macedo and Lee's analysis challenges the mainstream narrative surrounding COVID-19 lockdowns, urging a nuanced evaluation of their effectiveness and the profound costs they imposed. Their call for transparency, inclusive deliberation, and balanced policymaking seeks to foster a more resilient and equitable public health strategy for the future.

Transcript

[Michael Barbaro]

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[Michael Barbaro]

The new York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is the Daily Five years ago, at the urging of federal officials, much of the United States locked down to stop the spread of COVID a decision that over time, polarized the country and changed the relationship between many Americans and their government. Now, two prominent political scientists are making the case that there's no clear evidence that those lockdowns saved lives and that it's time for a national reckoning about the decision making that led to those lockdowns in the first place. Today, my conversation with Steven Macedo and Francis Lee about their new book in Covid's wake and what they say will be required for a better outcome when the next pandemic strikes. It's Thursday, March 20th. Just to start, can I call you by your first names? Should I call you by your professional type? Is it okay to call you Steve and Francis?

[Francis Lee]

Yes, absolutely, Please.

[Michael Barbaro]

Of course, now that I've called you by those names, I've pressured you into the informality.

[Steven Macedo]

Not at all.

[Michael Barbaro]

We're actually not a show that often speaks to academics. If you listen to the Daily, and that's nothing against academics, we usually talk to our colleagues. But you have produced a body of work here that feels important and it feels unique. You're both tenured professors at Princeton University. Steve, you spent a lot of your career researching democracy. Frances, your work is focused on policymaking, your big deals in your fields. And so to start, I want to talk about why you undertook this project of examining the US Response to Covid in a really rigorous way.

[Steven Macedo]

So maybe I'll just say a couple of words about that. To start with, I actually had started to work on a larger project on several topics on which I thought progressives were not paying enough attention to arguments coming from the other side, and that included immigration, abortion, and then Covid as well. And as soon as I got deeply into it, it was clear that the COVID policy issues themselves The COVID crisis itself was large enough and moreover, that people were not engaging in critical reflection and the sort of reckoning we've tried to do. So this is meant to be, in part, a book about policy choices, policy deliberation, and in many ways, policy mistakes, perhaps, that were made during COVID But there's also a larger kind of institutional question in the background and principled question in the background, which is how did the institutions function? Which is supposed to be helping us to catch mistakes and correct our mistakes, to seek the truth on difficult matters. How did they function under Covid? And I mean, of course, journalism, science, and the academy more broadly. And so the biggest theme that runs through the book, I think, is that these, as we call them, truth seeking institutions did not function as well as they should have during COVID that there was a premature policy consensus, there was an unwillingness to reexamine assumptions, and there was an intolerance of criticism and divergent points of view that emerged fairly quickly in the pandemic. And that hurt us, that hurt our policy responses, that hurt our ability to. To course correct over the course of the pandemic, as we learned more and had greater reason to course correct.

[Francis Lee]

I mean, this was, as was frequently said at the time, a whole of government, whole of society response. And it was undertaken without the normal deliberation that accompanies decision making of that degree of consequence. And I mean, I remember when the pandemic began that I had some doubts as to whether these measures were going to succeed. I mean, it was just a normal kind of skepticism about whether government policy would work, which is, you know, sort of bedrock to political science. I mean, that is one of our main topics of inquiry, whether government policy works or whether it has unanticipated consequences. And I was so struck at the lack of skepticism over the course of the pandemic about these measures. I mean, it was obvious that a large share of the workforce.

[Michael Barbaro]

Lack of skepticism from some.

[Francis Lee]

Yes, right. In the quarters, you know, that I travel in among academics or in mainstream media, that's where there seemed to be little questioning. It was almost seen as sort of wrong or immoral to raise questions about whether this was feasible for most of the population.

[Michael Barbaro]

And Stephen, what was your experience of this pandemic like, and how did that in any way contribute to your desire to. To excavate the entire thing?

[Steven Macedo]

Well, my experience was not unusual. I was in New Jersey, a blue state, and I went along with the messaging. I was busy with doing other things. Of course, we kept teaching online and Doing our research online, but I didn't really investigate skeptically during the height of COVID itself in 2020, 2021. I started working on this book in 2022 and frankly have been kind of shocked on almost a daily basis in researching the book at the things I'm coming across and discussing with Frances. So for me, it's been a kind of voyage of discovery. And I've been very surprised at what we've uncovered in your reconstruction of it.

[Michael Barbaro]

I found myself thinking, wow, I thought I knew the pandemic really well because I lived through it, but I didn't know it as well as I thought I did. And I think the biggest way many people experienced the pandemic was through the mandates. Right. The restrictions. One of the things that surprised me in your research, in your book was that heading into the pandemic, you found that there was not a consensus that these restrictions, these mandates around things like school closures, lockdowns, stay at home orders, quarantining, masking, that they were the right way to try to fight a respiratory viral pandemic. That instead there was some real uncertainty about whether that made sense or that it could work at a large scale as public policy. And actually that there were a lot of doubts that it ever could.

[Steven Macedo]

Well, there were a number of pre COVID pandemic planning documents anticipating a respiratory pandemic such as Covid turned out to be. One of them was published just in the fall of 2019, shortly before the COVID pandemic broke out. That was by the World Health Organization. It surveyed the range of non pharmaceutical interventions, social distancing measures, school closures.

[Michael Barbaro]

Let's just zero in on that word. Cause we're using it a lot. I think. Non pharmaceutical interventions.

[Steven Macedo]

Yes.

[Michael Barbaro]

Just define that.

[Steven Macedo]

Yeah. So it's everything other than vaccines and drugs. The whole suite of measures, from hand Washington mask wearing, personal hygiene, staying apart, closing schools, restricting businesses, restricting public gatherings, not letting people go to church, and so on.

[Michael Barbaro]

The big things we associate with the government's response to the pandemic.

[Steven Macedo]

Absolutely. Things that are often lumped under the word lockdown. And so those measures had been contemplated before they were investigated. That was the major subject of these pre COVID pandemic plans. Obviously getting a vaccine as soon as possible and administering it was something on which there was a consensus. But the controversial part of the policy was the non pharmaceutical measures.

[Michael Barbaro]

And what made them controversial and just how controversial were they?

[Steven Macedo]

Well, they were quite controversial because one of the things that the plans emphasize is that they would be costly that keeping children out of school would lead to learning losses and other detriments to health and well being, including mental well being from children being isolated. Business closures likewise could have consequences in terms of human well being for those who own businesses, who depend on that businesses for a livelihood. Economic loss can lead also to psychological loss and family conflicts and so on. Isolating human beings who are social creatures will have a whole series of knock on effects that the pre pandemic planning documents discuss. And these matters had been studied and they found that there was a lack of good evidence and absence of certainty around the effectiveness of these measures.

[Michael Barbaro]

Effectiveness in terms of actually stopping, containing the spread of the virus?

[Steven Macedo]

Yes, especially reducing morbidity and mortality, that is to say, serious illness and death.

[Francis Lee]

I'd just like to add on this 2019 World Health Organization study. The study was to examine intervention by intervention. Which of them have evidence of effectiveness against a respiratory pandemic. And all of the measures were rated as having very poor evidence. So in other words, we don't know if these measures work. Four of them they recommended not to use under any circumstances. Those four measures were quarantine of exposed persons, border closure, entry and exit screening and contact tracing. So there were no assurances that these measures would work, but we were assured that they would have costs.

[Michael Barbaro]

Right. And prompted by you two and what you wrote, I went in and looked at this study. What it says is that while there is, like you just said, low evidence that it was plausible that these kinds of interventions could help mitigate the spread of the virus. What do you make of that word, plausible?

[Francis Lee]

Well, they had been suggested. That's the reason why they are being studied. And of course we know at some level that viruses transmit from person to person. So one can infer that separating people from one another, putting barriers between them, ought to make a difference, or that there's a logic there. But the question is whether that could be scaled up to society or whether it would be sustainable over the course of a pandemic. There was no body of evidence around that. And so when it became the mantra of the pandemic that we should follow the science, there just wasn't a body of scientific work that undergirded the response that directed us to conclude that these measures were likely to be effective.

[Michael Barbaro]

You're citing this WHO study, but how widespread, how dominant would you say this skepticism of these kinds of interventions as effective, as worth the cost, as practical and scalable? How widely would you say that view was held before the pandemic?

[Steven Macedo]

Well, yeah, the world Health Organization was one study, but there was Another one in 2019 by Johns Hopkins which came to similarly skeptical conclusions about these various non pharmaceutical interventions. School closures, mask wearing and so on and so forth. Earlier 2011, the UK government did a pre pandemic planning document and similarly argued that in times of modern transportation around the world, these non pharmaceutical interventions could not be counted on to significantly slow the spread of a virus. And so I would say that that was the dominant view. There were of course mathematical modelers who were prominent in the George W. Bush administration. They were more optimistic, not based on huge amounts of data, but based on scientific modeling projections. They believed that these measures could work.

[Michael Barbaro]

So given this skepticism in the world of public health toward these non pharmaceutical interventions or Steve, as you said basically writ large, the lockdown approach before the pandemic, how and why did the US shift gears and end up recommending pretty much all the things that you're saying everybody previously thought wasn't such a good idea?

[Steven Macedo]

Well, one factor was the fact that China locked down and the World Health Organization sent a team to China and they issued a report after just spending a week there. And it was a fulsome endorsement of the Chinese approach. They said that China has shown the world the way to suppress a virus. Never been done before, but it's been done by China. And they endorse the strategy without qualification around the world.

[Michael Barbaro]

Can I just pause? Because China's response, as I recall, was pretty heavily criticized at the very beginning as harsh. So how does China's response to Covid that lockdown approach that was so total, at least according to these recommendations, how did it become so persuasive, especially given that's a very unique system of government, totally authoritarian, with a big surveillance apparatus and a much more compliant citizenry than most of the world.

[Steven Macedo]

Well, you're expressing some skepticism about the extent to which we should regard the Chinese approach as a model, given the features of its system and their inconsistency with Western civil liberties, freedom of dissent and so on. And that's a perfectly good question. None of that is evident in the World Health Organization report. They don't emphasize those sorts of things at all. They pay no attention to the fact that Chinese had authoritarian powers to require people to be bolted into their apartments. In some cases literally.

[Michael Barbaro]

Right?

[Steven Macedo]

Yeah. And then Italy had the first national lockdown in the world.

[Michael Barbaro]

A democracy, we should say, not a democracy.

[Steven Macedo]

Right. So they showed it was possible. I mean, Italy showed that a Western population was willing to go along with a national lockdown and That I think had a demonstration effect. Another factor was the report that came out of Imperial College London. The optimistic modeling projections about non pharmaceutical interventions. That's Neil M. Ferguson. His report projected something like 2 million deaths in the United States by August 2020.

[Michael Barbaro]

Right. Kind of. The report heard around the world.

[Steven Macedo]

The report heard around the world, one of the most influential, it looks like, reports that was ever issued. And it was that that Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx carried into Donald Trump's office, leading to a news conference on March 16 that recommended school closures and other measures.

[Michael Barbaro]

So I'm glad to see that you're practicing social distancing. That looks very nice. That's very good. I want to thank everybody for being here today. This afternoon we're announcing new guidelines for every American to follow over the next 15 days as we combat the virus. Each and every one of us has a critical role to play. My administration is recommending that all Americans, including the young and healthy, work to engage in schooling from home when possible. Avoid gathering in groups of more than 10 people. Avoid discretionary travel, and avoid eating and drinking at bars, restaurants and public food courts. This what we're mentioning now, the guidelines, when you look at them carefully, I believe if the people in the United States take them seriously because they were based on some rather serious consideration back and forth, some may look at them and say they're going to be really inconvenient for people. Some will look and say, well, maybe we've gone a little bit too far. They were well thought out. So take a look at the guidelines, read them carefully. And we hope that the people of the United States will take them very seriously because they, they will fail if people don't adhere to them. Thank you.

[Steven Macedo]

Good afternoon. This morning I signed an executive order directing nearly all of our 9 million residents to quite simply stay at home.

[Michael Barbaro]

That we direct a statewide order for people to stay at home. The breaking news.

[Steven Macedo]

Stay at home.

[Michael Barbaro]

That is the order tonight from four state governors.

[Steven Macedo]

As the coronavirus pandemic spreads.

[Michael Barbaro]

I fully recognize that in some cases I am choosing between saving people's lives.

[Steven Macedo]

And saving people's livelihoods.

[Michael Barbaro]

In California, the notoriously busy highways are nearly empty. The hustle and bustle of New York is at a standstill. More than half of the country's students have been sent home. Businesses across the country forced to shut their doors. About a quarter of all restaurants to.

[Steven Macedo]

Close as a result of this pandemic.

[Michael Barbaro]

The coronavirus now has one in four.

[Steven Macedo]

Four Americans living in lockdown.

[Michael Barbaro]

We are looking At a new war that no one has seen before. Frances, do you think that the reality is that in the face of what felt terrifyingly like an existential threat to so much of our population, US government officials, as aware as they must have been of all this skepticism, you two have found that they just didn't trust Americans enough to kind of really level with them from the start and say something like, look, these interventions, they are our best guess about what's gonna slow this down and save as many lives as possible and get us through this pandemic in the best shape that we possibly can. And to say essentially this is a large scale experiment and we have to be honest, it's gonna involve all these trade offs, Economic, social, academic, psychological. It may hurt a lot of people in the name of saving an unknown number of people, but we think it's gonna be worth it. So join us. I mean, that is admittedly a hard message to ask people to join you.

[Francis Lee]

I think under the pressure of the crisis, with the public demanding action, with the sense of catastrophe unfolding, I think they indulged in a great deal of w. And so when advocates of non pharmaceutical interventions recommended these measures and were optimistic about it, they heard what they wanted to hear. I mean, there was a sense that with the two weeks to slow the spread, that we get control of this thing, it'll go up, there'll be a peak, and then it'll come down, we'll defeat it. This will be done in a few months. So there was optimism that this could be over with in short order, but there just wasn't a lot of long term thinking of any sort around this, and a great deal of hope that long term these measures wouldn't be in place.

[Steven Macedo]

I think there was a general social fixation on the number of deaths, the spread of cases. We developed a kind of tunnel vision of the one indice that public health officials were focusing on was sickness and death from COVID And these other matters were not highlighted by political leaders or by public health officials.

[Michael Barbaro]

Is there any case to be made that with a new and deadly virus that everyone was learning about in real time, that if government leaders thought that any of these measures had any chance of working or even just buying time until a vaccine was available, that as a result it was worth a try? I mean, I guess to distill my question is a deep, singular focus on saving lives.

[Steven Macedo]

Okay, I don't see how it is if there are significant costs involved, including in the currency of life. These policy choices always involve a variety of values and we have to not simply focus on the one indice of saving lives. I think insofar as why not just explain that?

[Michael Barbaro]

Because I think there'll be some people listening who say that that's the only indices that matters in a pandemic.

[Steven Macedo]

You know, look, early on I think that the initial lockdown orders and those conditions of uncertainty and so on may have made some sense. But we learned things over the summer that should have helped inform the strategy and that should have at least been more vigorously debated. The success of the public health measures always depended upon public buy in, public willingness to comply, a public willingness to trust and to go along. And there wasn't enough public deliberation about these matters. Too much power was accorded to narrow experts in public health and epidemiology in particular. There should have been a wider conversation simply involving many more people with broader expertise. But it also should have involved ordinary people in the public who after all being the ones asked to make sacrifices in their own lives to adopt policies which always involve trade offs across values, risks. How much are we willing to give up to not visit an elderly relative in the hospital, to not have a funeral, to not be allowed to attend church on Sunday? These sorts of public questions don't have scientific answers. They're value judgments about which ordinary people have a certain expertise about their own lives and what matters to them. And they should have been involved as well in the deliberation about these measures.

[Francis Lee]

I would also add on this point that it's not just that there were costs, it's that the costs were inequitably distributed so that some would suffer to protect the lives of others. I mean, the pandemic restrictions did not protect essential workers from exposure to Covid. And so they were being asked to bear the societal burden of disease. So I think we have to confront the nature of these restrictions, that it's not a matter of saving everyone's life, it was saving some. I mean that was all they could have achieved, is to save some. There's question as to whether they saved any in that as we look back, you know, the places that imposed tougher restrictions did not do better.

[Michael Barbaro]

We'll be right back. I'm Julian Barnes, I'm an intelligence reporter at the New York Times. I try to find out what the US government is keeping secret. Governments keep secrets for all kinds of reasons. They might be embarrassed by the information. They might think the public can't understand it. But we at the New York Times think that democracy works best when the public is informed.

[Steven Macedo]

It Takes a lot of time to.

[Michael Barbaro]

Find people willing to talk about those secrets. Many people with information have a certain agenda or have a certain angle. And that's why it requires talking to.

[Steven Macedo]

A lot of people to make sure.

[Michael Barbaro]

That we're not misled and that we.

[Steven Macedo]

Give a complete story to our readers.

[Michael Barbaro]

If the New York Times was not reporting these stories, some of them might never come to light. If you want to support this kind.

[Steven Macedo]

Of work, you can do that by.

[Michael Barbaro]

Subscribing to the New York Times.

[Steven Macedo]

The coronavirus pandemic has left a trail.

[Francis Lee]

Of destruction in the US and around the world.

[Michael Barbaro]

I've never seen so much death.

[Steven Macedo]

So many of the patients are dying despite our best efforts.

[Michael Barbaro]

I am fighting two wars. I'm fighting a war against coronavirus and I'm fighting a war against stupidity. People are not listening to what we're saying.

[Steven Macedo]

Protesters say the shutdown has lasted too long and inflicted too much pain, especially on small businesses. The cure cannot be worse than the disease.

[Francis Lee]

There are 30 million people that are.

[Michael Barbaro]

Out of work in this country.

[Steven Macedo]

We have to go back to work.

[Michael Barbaro]

Open our country.

[Francis Lee]

Open us up. We need to work.

[Michael Barbaro]

We are ordering you. Open up. End the shutdown now.

[Francis Lee]

Open up. Open up.

[Steven Macedo]

Open up now. 36 states are seeing increases in new weekly infections this morning.

[Michael Barbaro]

The US Just suffered the deadliest day of the summer so far. We want to reopen the schools. Everybody wants it. The moms want it, the dads want it, the kids want it. It's time to do it.

[Steven Macedo]

Tonight, with the virus raging and hospitals.

[Michael Barbaro]

On the brink, the president putting pressure on schools today, threatening to cut off.

[Steven Macedo]

Funding for districts that don't reopen in person. Many teachers across the country are pushing.

[Francis Lee]

Back on plans to bring students back into the classroom.

[Michael Barbaro]

This COVID 19 world we've been living in has lasted a full six months. The official COVID 19 death toll in the US has now surpassed 200,000, the most of any nation. It's a little shocking to see so many people not wearing protective masks, not.

[Steven Macedo]

Staying six feet apart. That's it's a hoax.

[Francis Lee]

It's a hoax.

[Michael Barbaro]

How can we coexist with anti science people? What can we do to survive the ignorant. I just think we need to hunker down and get through this fall and winter because it's not going to be easy. Let's talk about what happens as the pandemic progresses and the impacts and the cost of these shutdowns, these quarantines, these stay at home orders that the government told us we needed. They begin to Grow. You two posit that even as those costs are rising, the country's public health officials show very little tolerance for an open debate about whether this approach should change. And for you, this is encapsulated by what happens to three well known scientists who decide to write what becomes known as the Great Barrington Declaration, which arrives in the fall of 2020. So about seven months into the pandemic. Can you lay out what that declaration was and how the conversation in response to it unfolded?

[Steven Macedo]

Well, they were three scientists from Stanford University, Harvard University and Oxford, well known, well established scientists with excellent publication records. They were concerned about the costs of the closures. They were concerned about the disproportionate burdens being borne by essential workers and school children. And they attempted to start a conversation. They were arguing that rather than keeping the whole of society closed, rather than keeping schools closed for children at very little risk from COVID we should be focusing protection on the vulnerable parts of the population. And by October 4th, when that document was published, we had good evidence to suggest, to know that there was highly uneven vulnerability across the population, age being the principal factor, right?

[Michael Barbaro]

Death rates among the elderly were orders of magnitude larger than the general population, much, much higher.

[Steven Macedo]

And what they suggested was focusing protection on the vulnerable.

[Michael Barbaro]

And how did they suggest doing that?

[Francis Lee]

The Great Barrington Declaration is a strategic plan. I mean, it's one page long and it just lays out a different approach and then invites people to think carefully about how it might be implemented, how one might engage in the effort of protecting the vulnerable. Like more COVID testing of people who interact with the elderly, more help, organized society, wide help of, you know, getting groceries and taking them to the elderly, like, you know, looking for ways to reduce the risk of those who were at most risk of severe outcomes. That was what they hoped to initiate with the Great Barrington Declaration, was then a discussion that might develop more fully paths to implementing this strategic plan. But instead they were denounced. They were presented as if they wanted people to die. You know, their motives were profoundly questioned. And that happened also at the highest levels of the US scientific establishment.

[Michael Barbaro]

Just explain that.

[Steven Macedo]

Well, when the declaration came out a few days later, the Great Barrier people were charged with adopting a herd immunity strategy to let the virus rip through the population and that it would cost hundreds of thousands of lives. We have now the email by Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of health, in effect, Dr. Anthony Fauci's boss. He said in his email to Dr. Fauci and others, the document from the three fringe epidemiologists is Getting a lot of attention, even a co signature from a Nobel Prize winner. People were signing this declaration online and he said there needs to be a quick and devastating takedown. For those of you who don't know, the Great Barrington Declaration is a awful, awful idea. It's the fantasy of petulant children who just want this pandemic to be over.

[Michael Barbaro]

And it is appalling really, that experts.

[Steven Macedo]

Would even suggest something like this as a real plan.

[Michael Barbaro]

Critics, including the Director General of the World Health Organization, call this plan a.

[Francis Lee]

Dangerous approach and not an option.

[Steven Macedo]

You're essentially asking people to go to concentration camps. I mean, that's overstatement, I'm sorry, but separating the families, it's, you know, it's just not workable.

[Michael Barbaro]

NIH Director Francis Collins said this quote, what I worry about with this is, is it's being presented as if it's a major alternative view that's held by large numbers of experts in the scientific community.

[Francis Lee]

That is not true.

[Michael Barbaro]

This is a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It is dangerous. If you let infections rip, as it were, and say, let everybody get infected, that's going to be able to be getting infected and then we'll have herd immunity. Quite frankly, that is nonsense. Frances, was there something to the backlash kind of on principle? Because I recall that there was a response from the scientific and public health community that basically amounted to this alternative vision, the great parenting declaration. It's just not practical. You know, how do you separate vulnerable people from the rest of society? Think about your immunocompromised grandmother. She lives on the third floor of a multi generational household. How is she supposed to be protected when everybody else is suddenly liberated from their stay at home orders and bringing that virus home to then infect her? Who is very, very vulnerable?

[Francis Lee]

Well, the question presupposes that the measures that we were taking were working. They were not protecting the essential workers. And if we're not gonna be able to contain the virus, if it's going to continue to spread through society, if it's going to become, then aiming at protecting those at most risk makes more sense. It's a matter of what you see as the future trajectory here.

[Michael Barbaro]

So the question of what the approach should be to Covid, of course, ends up in the hands of states and governors. And as all our listeners will remember, states take very divergent approaches. So talk to us about what you find in your research about that breakdown across the 50 states, especially on the metric of saving lives.

[Francis Lee]

So at the outset, states across the board implemented stay at home orders, right? 43 states put them in place. Of the seven states that did, not all but one had broad business closures. So there was great unity of response across the country. And these measures were hugely popular. Like something like 87% of Americans supported the measures at the time of their implementation. 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 course of the crisis.

[Michael Barbaro]

No difference.

[Francis Lee]

No difference. The difference begins to emerge in the post vaccine period. And that's where you begin to see blue states faring better than red states. So that by the end of the time series we examine in our book, which stops in January 23, Republican states had 30% more Covid mortality than Democratic states.

[Michael Barbaro]

Can I ask you to linger on this period before the vaccines, because from what you're saying, Frances, before 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.

[Francis Lee]

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 as reported to the cdc. And we control for factors like the age structure of the state population, the percent with obesity, the percent who live in urban areas, and, you know, other demographic factors likely to affect a state's vulnerability to the virus.

[Michael Barbaro]

Is there any evidence, Steve, that these restrictions slowed the spread of COVID across the states?

[Steven Macedo]

Well, there's some evidence that the non pharmaceutical interventions of various sorts, lockdown measures, school closures, et cetera, reduce somewhat the spread of the virus. But even the optimistic reports that emphasize that and call that success do not show evidence of significantly reduced death. So the virus evidently spread efficiently enough so that even if the spread of infection could be reduced, say 15% that did not yield significant benefits in terms of death and disease.

[Michael Barbaro]

Frances, how is it possible? I just want to make sure we can wrap our heads around how it might be the case that longer, deeper restrictions didn't end up meaningfully changing outcomes. I'm just imagining someone hearing that and thinking, I stayed home, I didn't get sick. And so why, in your estimation, by your analysis, didn't this save more lives?

[Francis Lee]

Well, individuals of sufficient means to stay home can protect themselves individually, but what works for individuals may not work for society as a whole.

[Steven Macedo]

Yes, you know, the lockdowns had lots of holes in them. The social distancing measures were very porous. A third of workers had to keep working as essential workers to keep the rest of us well fed, the electricity on. So it really was not possible to lock down the entire economy or the workforce.

[Francis Lee]

That's right. Another explanation is, of course, that it matters greatly who is being infected. It was only highly lethal in certain populations. And so if you were not protecting those in nursing homes, but you were keeping the teenagers and the college students locked down, you're not going to achieve anything in terms of reducing Covid mortality. We also didn't know when the virus reached the United States. There's evidence from antibodies in blood banks that the virus was already here in December of 2019. So it had already been spreading for months before the first lockdowns occurred. And data from cell phone mobility shows that lockdowns begin to break down after just a few weeks. So they're not sustainable for human beings either. Human beings could not comply over the long ha. You know, there's evidence that these measures made a difference for transmission, but there's not evidence that these measures were effective at reducing Covid mortality. And so that's just where we are. We need to do more study to understand what happened during the pandemic. And so I think we need to confront our failures and our successes and learn from it.

[Michael Barbaro]

And ultimately, it's really the vaccine that starts to make the difference when it comes to death rates.

[Francis Lee]

Our data are consistent with that interpretation in that we begin to see a divergence after the vaccine rollout between states with high vaccine uptake and states with low vaccine uptake in their Covid mortality. At the aggregate level, states that had higher vaccine uptake do have better Covid outcomes in the period after vaccines were available.

[Michael Barbaro]

And so if we go back to where we started this conversation about trade offs before the pandemic, you thoroughly described this scientific view that these kinds of interventions we've been talking about the whole time. The lockdown approach was difficult to implement and would come with heavy costs and uncertain benefits. And yet the United States and dozens of other countries plowed ahead with the shutdown and lockdown approaches anyway, focusing on their theoretical life saving benefits. Five years later. What your findings show is that the state by state data within the US hasn't definitively established those life saving benefits. But what we do know is a lot about the costs. So talk about what you found when it comes to those costs.

[Francis Lee]

I mean, they're extraordinarily wide ranging. I mean, this was a whole of society intervention and so the whole of society was affected. I mean, we can start by thinking about the cost to education. We saw unprecedented drops in student learning as gauged by long standing indicators of student progress. Chronic absenteeism from school roughly doubled nationwide. Still elevated the gaps that emerged in learning outcomes between the better off and the less well off students. They widened and they haven't begun to close since the pandemic ended. And since schools reopened, those gaps are still wider than they were. Those who are academically lagging before the pandemic were much worse off after the pandemic. I mean, we can go through the long. It's a long list of costs.

[Steven Macedo]

I was just going to add one, which is the tremendous expenditures on Covid relief. Now some of that was going to be necessary, but Francis has pointed out that the initial expenditures were equivalent to the New Deal and the.

[Francis Lee]

So the 2020 Covid response was equivalent as a share of GDP to both the New Deal and the 2009 stimulus package combined.

[Michael Barbaro]

Right. Trillions, trillions of dollars in the United States.

[Francis Lee]

And then in 2021, we had another New Deal all over again. It's roughly equivalent in terms of the demand on the US treasury to war mobilization. In 1943, about 10% of the total cost went to health care. Most of it is going to sustaining businesses and individuals through the closures. That's the lion's share of COVID aid.

[Michael Barbaro]

So if we're putting this all together and summarizing what you found here about the lack of evidence of a life saving benefit and the real clear evidence of extraordinary cost from what you're saying, Frances, we're not able to say at this point that these extraordinary historic interventions, that they were ultimately worth it.

[Francis Lee]

I mean, that's where things stand. I think that's one of the reasons why there's a great deal of hesitance to look back at what was done and to take stock of it.

[Michael Barbaro]

I'm curious about Something in the end, you're clearly saying that there needs to be a different kind of conversation about the measures that were taken. But are you saying that we shouldn't have done the things we did during COVID Because those are two very distinctions ways of thinking about this.

[Francis Lee]

That's a larger question than I think we are capable of settling. What we can point to is the shortcomings in deliberation, in considering the costs, and in the equivocal and skeptical nature of the evidence when these measures were undertaken and the doubts about what difference they made based on the data that we have now. That's why we think a larger conversation is necessary. It's not for us to say, I mean, this is scale of the decisions we are talking about are society wide. They are global. You know, as I have reflected on the work that Steve and I were doing, as you know, as we were writing, I'm just struck by the tragedy if these measures didn't work, like what the costs were, what else we could have done had we been able to make those kinds of public investments in something that was effective for other needs that we have as a society. It is excruciating to think about, but I think we owe it to ourselves to do so.

[Michael Barbaro]

I mean, the risk of any kind of reckoning like this is that it results in people having even less faith in the government and taking bits and pieces of what you find and weaponizing them. Do you worry that conspiracy theories will be fueled by what you're asking people to do here?

[Francis Lee]

I think conspiracy theories are fueled by not asking these questions. I mean, this is obviously this. There are many conspiracy theories around Covid. You know, the plandemic, you know, governments took these actions in order to assert more control over us. I mean, that kind of discourse which exists, if government acknowledged these questions and tried to hash them out, yes, some faiths might be lost, but also some faith would be gained.

[Steven Macedo]

Right. It's very hard to say for sure what will succeed in raising trust in the institutions in our society that are in the business of pursuing the truth. Science, science, journalism, the academy and so on. But we should try to behave in a more trustworthy fashion and hope that greater trust follows from that. We need a franker conversation about what happened and how we can do better the next time around.

[Michael Barbaro]

So a final question, and you're starting to hint at it here. Since we can't go back and redo our response to Covid to the degree we can try to get it right next time, if there's a next Time. What is your prescription for that? Knowing what you now know and knowing how polarized this country remains over what happened.

[Steven Macedo]

I guess I would say that we need to consider the costs as well as the hoped for benefits of policies that are adopted, especially these kinds of non pharmaceutical interventions, social distancing measures and so on. And we need to have wider and more tolerant deliberation about these matters and not repose as much authority in narrow experts who have tunnel vision very often, who admitted after Covid to having tunnel vision. Francis Collins admitted quite frankly in July 2023 that public health officials, including himself, focused way too narrowly on a narrow set of public health outcomes.

[Michael Barbaro]

As a guy living inside the beltway, feeling a sense of crisis, trying to.

[Steven Macedo]

Decide what to do in some situation.

[Michael Barbaro]

Room in the White House with people who had data that was incomplete, we weren't really thinking about what that would mean to Wilk and his family in Minnesota, a thousand miles away from where the virus was hitting so hard. We weren't really considering the consequences in communities that were not New York City or some other big city. If you're a public health person and.

[Steven Macedo]

You'Re trying to make a decision, you.

[Michael Barbaro]

Have this very narrow view of what the right decision is. And that is something that will save a life, doesn't matter what else happens. So you attach infinite value to stopping.

[Steven Macedo]

The disease and saving a life.

[Michael Barbaro]

You attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people's lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite. Collateral damage. So there, yeah, collateral damage. This is a public health mindset and I think a lot of us involved in trying to make those recommendations had that mindset and that was really unfortunate. It's another mistake we made. That's a really, really fascinating thing to say aloud.

[Francis Lee]

I mean, that quote is excruciating, you know, and it goes right back to what, you know, you were asking us to confront a few minutes ago. You know, how. How can you tell us that all this bought us nothing, that it was futile? I mean, it's extremely painful. And I think that's one of the reasons why there's a hesitation even to look back at all right?

[Steven Macedo]

And in light of that quotation, how can we not. How can we not look back?

[Michael Barbaro]

It's an invitation to have a reckoning, right?

[Steven Macedo]

How could we not have the reckoning given what Francis Collins has said?

[Michael Barbaro]

Well, Steve and Francis, thank you both very much for your time. We really appreciate it.

[Steven Macedo]

We appreciate the conversation.

[Francis Lee]

Thank you.

[Michael Barbaro]

We'll be right back. Hey, I'm Robert Vinlowen. I'm from New York Times Games, and I'm here talking to people about wordle and the wordle Archive. You all play wordle?

[Steven Macedo]

Yeah.

[Michael Barbaro]

I have something exciting to show you. It's the wordle Archive. Oh, and if I I missed it, I can like, go back 100%. Oh, that's sick. So now you can play every wordle that has ever existed. There's like a thousand puzzles. Oh my God, I love it. Amazing. New York Times Games subscribers can now access the entire Wordle archive. Find out [e-mail] games work management platforms. Ugh, red tape, endless adoption time. It bottlenecks.

[Steven Macedo]

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[Michael Barbaro]

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[Steven Macedo]

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[Michael Barbaro]

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[Steven Macedo]

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[Michael Barbaro]

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[Steven Macedo]

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[Michael Barbaro]

Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve predicted that inflation would rise this year to 2.7% from 2.5%, and suggested that President Trump's tariffs on imported goods likely accounted for much of that increase. Still, the Fed said that it would neither raise nor cut the interest rate, its most powerful tool for influencing inflation, as it waits to see how Trump's policies affect the economy. And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has agreed to accept Russia's offer of a mutual pause in attacks on energy targets as a step toward a broader ceasefire. The agreement came during a call between Zelensky and President Trump, their first conversation since a dramatic Oval Office confrontation last month. Today's episode was produced by Astha chaturvedi and Caitlin O'Keefe. It was edited by Larissa Anderson and Lisa Chow. Fact Checked by Susan Lee. Contains original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to David Leonhardt, Paula Schuman, Nick Pittman, Sarah Celia Duggar, Michael Mason, Paige Cowett, and Jim Yardley. That's it for the Daily I'm Michael Balbaro. See you tomorrow.