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Mean to live the good life? What are the habits and practices that help facilitate human flourishing? On the Signal award winning POD podcast, no Small Endeavor host Lisa Camp examines these big questions and brings you conversations with those who are taking the questions seriously. Produced by Great Feeling Studios and prx, no Small Endeavor features thoughtful conversations with bestselling authors, artists and philosophers like Pushkin Industries co founder Malcolm Gladwell and New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks about what it means to find true happiness and flourish in our day to day life. If you're looking for somewhere to start, I suggest their recent episode with Hidden Brain host Shankar Vedantum about why we're not as autonomous as we think we are and the profound implications for the ways we act, think and live. It's a very compelling listen, so go ahead, follow no Small Endeavor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you are listening now. We're joined again today by Francis Lee and Steven Macedo, the authors, Princeton Professors of In Covid's Wake and what I want to do in this part of the show is anticipate what I'm sure are many questions that have been asked by my listeners which are all right, even if some things were wrong, there was a major pushback to The COVID orthodoxy that was much worse than the orthodoxy. And it shows up in the fact that there was a constellation of experts who might have been right about masking or the length of lockdowns, but they were totally wrong about the vaccine being unsafe. And to this day you see a lot of people within that constellation of so called experts who maybe are aligned with the idea that the lockdowns went on too long, but who are also talking about myocarditis rates, which while slightly higher in young men, are almost definitely not as dangerous or as deadly as Covid itself. So that is my question, professors, the confluence. If we are trying to defer to the right experts and identify the right experts, what do we do with the clustering together of unproven assertions or disproved assertions about the overall ineffectiveness and dangerousness of the vaccine with what you're pointing out, which is that our mitigation efforts were largely for naught?

Steven Macedo (11:46)

Well, I don't think there the people that advocated WHO pointed out that the measures we adopted were very costly. These non pharmaceutical measures that we talked about. And when this Great Barrington declaration was published in October, thousands and thousands of health professionals and scientists signed it. I don't believe those were predominantly vaccine skeptics. You know, there were some of those. Now there was some messaging around vaccines that was misleading. The World Health Organization changed the definition of herd immunity on its website over the summer to say that it was a concept that came from vaccination, not from vaccination plus acquiring the virus and recovering from the virus, which common epidemiology would have of course suggested that. But they changed the definition there in order to encourage people to get vaccinated. Apparently there was also a lot of messaging suggesting that if you got vaccinated you'd be a dead end to the virus, that you wouldn't pass the virus on to others. There was no good ground for claiming that the sterilizing effect of the virus was not an endpoint in vaccine research. So there was no basis for claiming that. And yet that was another claim that was advanced, that was misleading to people and that may have led people to feel misled. So there was some misinformation around vaccines. And I don't think that most of the people who advocated, however, or who urged that we take more seriously the costs of these non pharmaceutical measures were vaccine skeptics. There should have been more discussion around, I mean, the recommendations on boosters in the United States has been much more widely sweeping than in European countries. Dr. Paul Offit at University of Pennsylvania Children's Hospital has pointed this out that we've recommended boosters in many cases for everyone over the age of 6 months when European countries have been recommending for everyone over the age of 65 years old. So there's some marginal issues involving vaccines that are worth discussing. But we're not vaccine skeptics. We think the vaccines were game changer for the vulnerable. And as we pointed out before, there's good evidence that states with higher vaccination rates had lower morbidity rates after the vaccines were available.

Mike Pesca (13:55)

And Paul Offit was on my show and I give him enormous amount of credit because he, we ticked through the list. I presented him with things he said and predictions he made and he would say, I got that wrong, I got that wrong. Do you think such a reckon. I don't want to say reckoning. Do you think such an exercise would be valuable is even possible with many in the public health community who did get it wrong?

Francis Lee (14:17)

I think people are not going to listen to, or many people are not going to listen to public health officials if they are not prepared to acknowledge what they got right and what they got wrong. Like, they need, they, they need to come clean in that way because there are many people in the public who doubt them now. I mean, you can see that in the uptake of the boosters. It's like 12%. CDC is saying everybody over six months should get them and the vast majority of Americans are not. So that shows there's a lot of skepticism. So how do you get that trust back? I think you have to treat people like adults and acknowledge what you got wrong.

Mike Pesca (14:56)

Do you think enough people in the public health community actually think they got things wrong, important things wrong?

Francis Lee (15:03)

I think they don't yet. I mean, they kind of circled the wagons, I think, in the polarization that occurred during the pandemic. And there wasn't a lot of self criticism in public health, just like, I mean, there hasn't been a lot in academia or journalism for that matter, which is, you know, those are the targets that we take on in our book, that we think that there's room for a lot of self criticism among experts of all varieties in the wake of the COVID pandemic.

Steven Macedo (15:34)

Let me give another example which I think is also quite important. We haven't talked and I know we don't have time to talk about the origins of the virus, but that's another topic on which discussion has been constrained and in which there's been far too intolerance of the theory that the virus might have originated in the lab. I mean just in February, this past, this past February 2025, Nature magazine published an article saying what sparked the COVID pandemic. Mounting evidence points to raccoon dogs. Well, I don't think there is mounting evidence pointing to raccoon dogs. More and more international intelligence agencies have said that the virus likely, likely originated in the lab. The French National Academy of medicine voted 97% to 3% just a couple of weeks ago that the lab origin was much more likely. And yet Nature magazine public only quotes six scientists in this article. All six scientists are well known proponents of natural origins. They quote no one on the other side of the argument. So I think, you know, scientists in general and science journalists need to be much more frank about mistakes that have been made, things that need to be fairly re examined. And certainly the possibility that the virus originated from China's leading bat coronavirus research institute in Wuhan is hardly a far fetched possibility. And let me just make one final point. One other point which is, you know, a premise of the attacks on science and universities is that they're politicized. If we're not willing to ask these hard questions and address these hard questions, you know, we sort of prove that true that we're, that we're politicized. The only way to refute that suggestion is by being willing to ask these hard questions and admit mistakes where they've been made.

Mike Pesca (17:18)

Let me ask you, without picking on an individual, someone who shows up 18 times in your book, Greg Gonzalez, who's an associate professor of epidemiology at Yale and a MacArthur fellow. And early on in the pandemic he was cautious about restrictions and NPIs. And then he became a leading voice of lockdowns. And then years after the lockdowns were lifted, he wanted to continue the lockdowns. He wrote an op ed in 2022 the moral danger of declaring the pandemic over too soon. He criticized Dr. Lena Wen, who is very much in the mainstream of wanting lockdowns as essentially damning thousands of people to their Deaths by, by 2022, saying that the lockdowns should be lifted. It seems like nothing has happened to his credibility. Let's not pick on this one guy. I think he probably stands for many, many, many people. But I just saw a JAMA article where it deferred to him as the expert and asked him why haven't we learned the right lessons of COVID How or how is there ever going to be a chance for reform if people's Reputation actually only grows after getting it exactly wrong.

Francis Lee (18:29)

Well, that just shows what kind of bubble academics exist in right now that you know that. I mean, if you, if you consult a broader array of people, you would encounter folks who have a lot of questions about what was done in the pandemic. But we were talking to other like minded people in these settings in public health. And I don't exclude academia more generally or even political science fully from that characterization, but I think that's how we get these conversations that just sound so completely out of touch because, well, we are and it's a very self selected group of people who, you know, who've wound up in these professions.

Steven Macedo (19:12)

No, it just leads to decline of trust. And again, on the virus origins issue, the vast majority of the public thinks it leaked from the lab. So it's not as though this, everybody being on the same page, refusing to admit mistakes and so on is convincing the public because it's not any more than it is with the boosters being recommended for people over the age of 6 months. So why don't we try something else? Why don't we try being frank and honest with people and see if that does it. But why don't we try behaving in a trustworthy manner and see if that restores some of the trust?

Mike Pesca (19:40)

That's, that's a good call to ethical action. What do you think? You're academics, you believe in free inquiry. But there was, I mentioned Lena when she was to speak at an American Public Health association meeting. And there was a petition signed by hundreds and hundreds of people, self identified members of the public health community. Hundreds of people put their name and academic affiliation on this petition saying that she was engaged in eugenics. This was very much a mainstream, which you criticize, very much a mainstream voice on advocating for lockdowns. But by 2022 she had said, let us ease the lockdowns. What do you think should be done with those hundreds of people who self identify and put their names and put their institutions down? Should they have no professional or any other consequence?

Steven Macedo (20:34)

I mean, this is not a matter that we've contemplated. We do think that we need to investigate these matters, that those who have behaved in an intolerant manner should be shamed for themselves. But you know, there are many issues out there that, including on the origins of the virus and so on, where it doesn't seem as though people have been entirely frank about what they were thinking when they were writing, that it came from nature and so on and so forth. There's been an unwillingness to respond to empirical criticism of theories like a geospatial analysis of the first cases around the wet market and so on, where the authors of a leading theory that supports natural origin just don't respond to critics, from what we can tell. So it is surprising to us. We're political scientists and we tend to think that in our discipline, actually, you know, when it's suggested that people have engaged in misconduct or not being completely frank about the data and so on, there has been accountability. And we're a bit surprised that the standards in public health and science related to public health and so on. There seems to be less room for internal criticism and openness to criticism within the, within the profession. And that's just something that surprised us as we've gotten into this.

Mike Pesca (21:43)

Yeah. And I've heard you talk about and write about your sense of risk in even tackling this issue, which is a bad and scary thing.

Francis Lee (21:53)

I mean, we saw many people over the course of the pandemic who raised questions, come in for reputational attacks. I mean, you know, everyone involved with the Great Barrington Declaration experienced that. Are you have Brown economist Emily Oster, who collected data on the effects of school reopening and just, you know, you know, harsh attacks leveled at her, or you mentioned Lena threats.

Mike Pesca (22:20)

I mean, I've had her on the show a couple of times. She even wrote an article for the Atlantic saying, can't we just declare a piece, a moratorium on the harsh rhetoric? Not even saying I was right. No, this was not allowed. Got more death threats based on that. Yeah.

Francis Lee (22:36)

So it's been a dangerous area to work in. And so we were expecting, as we brought the book out just to get, you know, enormous blowback. And instead what we've got is a pretty respectful hearing. It's been a much better experience than we were anticipating. You know, now, you know, this is one where, you know, Steve and I, you know, as collaborators, Steve has had a more optimistic view of what the potential for this project was. But I had watched what had happened with others who had raised questions. And I had my dad, well, he's.

Mike Pesca (23:09)

The theorist and you're the empiricist, so that makes sense.

Steven Macedo (23:12)

That's right. I have a sunnier view. But we've been, you know, PBS NewsHour had us on and William Wrangham was terrific. He'd read the book and, you know, it seemed to register with them deeply at the New York Times and other places. So it may be that at the five year mark here, we're entering a period where people are willing to engage in more of a reexamination. We certainly see that students, having lived through this as high school students and college students, suffered a kind of trauma that they probably would benefit from acknowledging and having discussed. And certainly I think at a time when we did have worries about we're releasing this book at a time when the science is being attacked and defunded and the universities are being attacked and defunded and so on. And you know, our hope is that a frank reckoning and being willingness to acknowledge mistakes from our, you know, our own tribe, as it were, educated elites will be good for the health of these institutions, that we're better off admitting mistakes where they took place. And so far we feel that we've been treated pretty fairly for the most part.

Mike Pesca (24:13)

Yeah. I will note that on the Daily and Michael Barbara did a typical thorough interview. The title was Were the COVID Lockdowns Worth It? When of course, your book clearly argues the COVID lockdowns were not worth it. And I just suspected that had they titled the episode that it would anger their listeners or maybe people in the organization a little too much. Wanna ask you one last thing, which is about the day we're speaking. Harvard has just rejected the Trump administration's demand that they have forced viewpoint diversity. But what the book argues for and in fact, from what I know of how the book originated, which was, Stephen, you were contemplating all these areas in academia without viewpoint diversity to the detriment of the Democratic Party, not understanding things like immigration or abortion or where Republicans stood on that or the good points they made. But what would you say? I'm going to assume you don't think by government dictate, dictate we should have forced viewpoint diversity. But would you say it's a net, it's an inevitable outcome of operating with blinders on. You are to paraphrase David Frum on immigration, if the Democrats or if liberals don't get it right, than the fascists will.

Steven Macedo (25:36)

Right at this time when universities and science being attacked, we need to make sure that our own houses are the best possible order. And I think I felt for a while, I think Francis does too, that we're alienated from society in a way because we don't represent important parts of society. We don't have represented in our ranks nearly enough important parts of society. We're not asking questions that ordinary people have. And yes, I started out thinking about immigration as another issue where I think progressives have often not paid enough attention to the interests of working class people. And the grievances about these matters and some other matters as well. So I do think greater viewpoint diversity would be good for universities. It should not be forced on universities by the government, but I would hope that universities embrace that value and try to address it in the future.

Francis Lee (26:27)

You know, I teach it up in a policy school and we have students who want to go out and work in policy related fields and in order for them to be prepared to do that, they need to encounter the full range of arguments that exist in society. Arguments and analyses that exist in society and academic settings are just not doing a good enough job at that, in my view.

Steven Macedo (26:52)

Yes, I agree.

Mike Pesca (26:54)

Steven Macedo and Francis Lee are professors at Princeton University. They are the authors of In Covid's How Our Politics Failed Us. And I hope you got from this conversation how enormously beneficial and important I think this book is. Thank you both very much.

Steven Macedo (27:09)

Thank you Mike. Thank you so much.

Mike Pesca (27:20)

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And now the spiel and now I want to talk about the idea that the experts have let us down. And you know why I want to talk about that? Because damn it, the experts have let us down. They're always letting us down. Pick your example nearest or the one that most chafes your heart. Be it the Iraq war, be it the Great Recession, be it I don't know the Minecraft movies potential to excel at the box office. Experts always getting it wrong. And I want to just put a pin as they say in this idea that experts are always getting it wrong and talk about what's happening all around us. And it's an example of experts getting it absolutely right. And do the experts get any credit? No. They're part of a war and they're part of arguments and they're part of recriminations. But I'm talking about tariffs. Now, before Donald Trump imposed these wide tariffs, every expert, every real economic expert said tariffs are at best a blunt tool and at best have extremely limited use cases. But the vast consensus among experts were trade wars are not easy to win. And what Donald Trump was doing in general, and they couldn't even know of the specific, was going to be a disaster. And then it was a disaster. And did we say, well, maybe the experts were right? We did not. I mean, maybe you did and I did, but I'm not even talking about the people who are saying, wow, O'Donnell just screwed up again. A lot of these are the same people who will tell you, you can't trust the experts on Covid. You can't trust the experts on the war in Iraq. You just can't trust the experts. And the idea of expertise in general doesn't get rehabilitated. It doesn't even get rehabilitated one iota. And so I have this rule or this theory about the credibility insisting class. Those who trade on the idea of credibility can't just be right most of the time, can't be right ⅓ or 3/4 of the time. They, the credibility people have to be right an overwhelming amount of the time almost every single time. Do you have to be right if your brand is. We are the people who can tell you what's right because the critics can say, hey, we were criticizing and we were right to criticize. Look at the big wins we had on something like, I don't know, cloth masks. Those people will never say, oh, yeah, hydrochloric. Quinn, remember that? That was funny. But they might say, ivermectin, not as bad as we once thought. So the critics are the critics and they have a purpose. And even if the critics right some of the time, they can be entertaining as critics. They could provoke better answers from the credibility institutions. But they are being judged and they should be judged by a different measurement, the credibility people, those who say they are the fact checkers, those who say they are the arbiters of what is misinformation and disinformation. And in the case we've been talking about the public health experts, also the economists, which is what we're talking about. But that's a little unfair. Economists usually give a probabilistic range. But the public health experts and the fact police really have to be right almost every time. And I do think, looking back on Covid, I think two things that are a little bit in conflict with each other. The first thing is it wasn't a bloodbath of expertise. Who were the people who invented the vaccines? Who are the people who invented the very type of vaccine, the MRNA vaccine? They were experts, were they not? They delivered us from the pandemic. But even, even though all those experts were right, the fact that so many in the public health community, publicly communicating epidemiologists, the fact that they said so many things, we have to grasp hold of so many things that were wrong, requires a little bit of contemplation, as Lee and Macedo are inviting us to contemplate, and a little bit of, I don't know, course correction. Will the course be corrected? I mentioned Greg Gonzalez. Hate to pick on the guy. From what I understand, he's done wonderful things with HIV. He's a Yale expert, he won the MacArthur genius grant. But I just couldn't believe in 2022, this was when vaccines and boosters were in everyone's arm who wanted them. And in fact, some people were just pressured to get them. This is when Covid was in abatement. And it goes in swells, but he was saying that to outside and to have a public event where people laughed at some sort of gridiron dinner was amusing or laughing ourselves to death. So Gonzalez went on the Brian Lair Show. He did this in print too. He tore into Lena Nguyen. And Lena Wen's views were extremely mainstream. She's not a top epidemiologist. I'm not denigrating her credentials. She ran Planned Parenthood for a time. She was the public health commissioner of Baltimore. But she would go on CNN a lot. She was a public communicator. She tried to make things simple for people. She was in fact, a near facsimile of what the Biden admin administration was thinking at the time. So this is April of 2022. Gonzalez is using phrases like nihilist to describe Lena Wen. And he is saying that the pandemic is not over. He is saying, he said on the show that the worst is not behind us. He described when this way. The point is, is Dr. Wen has staked out an extreme position which is basically, let's go back to normal. And normal meaning actually resuming most of the things we did in 2019. Going back to normal, Gonzalez said, meant throwing the vulnerable out of the lifeboat. That was the metaphor he used. So Again, this was April 2022, and in fact, the worst was behind us. The death toll had increased by over 1000% from April of 2020 to April of 2021. Let's take the next year. From April of 21 to 22, it increased by 80%. But over the year from when Gonzalez talked to April of 23, the death toll would increase by 10%. It was pretty much in line with flu deaths by then. And in fact, the next day after this appearance, passengers on planes would cheer when it was announced mid flight in some cases that the mask mandate was over to no ill effect. When, as I said, was generally a reflection of median 50% public health thinking. When the public health community said lockdowns, she said lockdowns. When they said, it's time to get back to normal, she said that too. And this got her labeled a eugenicist. I recently read that petition that I referenced. The petition called her a eugenicist. Oh, what a relic from a different time. Let me read some of it to you. When was to be a speaker at the 2022American Public Health association meeting in Boston and these petitioners, and there were 500. I quoted 500 on the show. It's up to over 600. Through her platform on news outlets and social media, Dr. Wen has promoted unscientific, unsafe, ableist, fat, phobic and unethical practices. During the COVID 19 pandemic, for instance, in a recent article, Dr. Wen suggested that infection should be accepted as, quote, the new normal. Yeah, that's it. That's. That's the bill of particulars. Against her next sentence. In another article, she writes about how learning loss is a threat to children from parents who want to keep their kids safe. So the petitioners did not like the idea of considering the risk of learning loss against the benefit of keeping kids safe. Just the very consideration, or weighing that consideration with giving it some credence that was cause for a petition that described these activities as eugenics. And there are 629 names on this petition. And right there, there's Molly Lesner, a JD worker. There's Christina Dogby Smith, MPH epidemiologist. There's Sarah Reed, a PhD MSPH postdoctoral fellow at Emory. I feel bad reading these names. I feel, I don't know, a little bit like Joseph McCarthy in Wheeling, West Virginia, waving around a list of known extremists, but people whose credibility should be called into question. Rachel Viquera, MHS epidemiologist. David Colston, MPH, PhD student, UN UNC Chapel Hill Amelia MacKenzie, PhD public health scientist Jacqueline John Professor, Drexel University Dorns Life School of Public Health not saying drum out of society, strip their jobs or anything like that, but I would just think that the next time they're up for a job or they're up for a promotion, or they're just to be evaluated in an institution that considers itself part of the truth seeking institutions of the university, or those who communicate some scrutiny should be given. Maybe they themselves should scrutinize the stance they took. Maybe we should all say something like, we have to as a side, as a society, allow for a range of opinions. We have to allow for getting it wrong. May of 2022 was a little post the getting it wrong allowable date and demanding someone not be a speaker because of eugenics then. But if you're a truth seeking institution, there should be some small cost to being so misaligned with the actual truth of the matter. And what happens is that I'm not going to do it. I don't think the schools are going to do it. I think there's something kind of odious about punishing people for their opinions, even if their opinions are odious and wrong and have consequence and denigrate the entire field of public health. But if we don't do it, and not me, and not you, I'm talking about the institutions, as David Frum says, who will? The fascists will. And then Donald Trump and his minions sweep through academia not with scalpels or a demerit in the permanent file, but with chainsaws and firings. And what I want to do is to be like Paul Offit, to analyze positions we may have taken and to embrace the idea, yeah, I got it wrong. And here's why I got it wrong. So that's what I'm trying to do on the show. And that's what I'm asking everyone who signed the petition evaluates those who signed the petition or just heard about it one too many times on the GIST to do themselves. That's it for today's show. GIST is produced by Cory Wara and CBSO Michelle Pesca OOM Peru G Peru du Peru. And thanks for listening.