Many posts have discussed COVID and pandemic preparedness.
Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, In COVID's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton University Press, 2025), 197, 199, 294.
The central message of this book is that several tenets of basic rationality evaporated under the stress of the Covid onslaught. One of the greatest failures, as we have shown, was the failure to weigh the expected costs of policy against the expected benefits. Such failures were evident in government advising processes, as well as outside government in news media coverage and academic analysis. These failures occurred despite the public health field’s substantial investment in developing pandemic plans before 2020. These pre-2020 pandemic plans correctly anticipated many of the costs and ethical dilemmas that emerged during the Covid pandemic response. But such considerations played little role in informing discussion about what to do in 2020. Previously untested, unproven policies were implemented wholesale across society in earnest hope of benefits, heedless of costs.
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The pandemic response also raises some other troubling concerns about the quality of democratic deliberation involved. Pandemic policy seems to have been driven by a profound form of short-term bias. Any benefits of the policies in delaying infection and death were top of mind for policymakers. For many months, national newspapers, cable news outlets, and even local news led their daily coverage with the latest num-bers of Covid infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. Meanwhile, in almost all cases, the costs were much less vis i ble and experienced at some delay. Many of these second- and third-order costs—for education, mental health, cancer diagnoses, social disorder—unfolded only over lengthy timelines and emerge clearly only in hindsight. Clearly, democracies are likely to struggle with any policies having these features, as political incentives for elected officials are to attend predominantly to the short term and to discount the long term.
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Experts, including scientific experts, play an important role in the policy process, but it is also of necessity a limited role. Experts must stay in their lane, so to speak. We must be more willing to engage in political deliberation, including or especially with those on the other side of the political spectrum. American democracy is defined deeply by polariza-tion based on having (or not having) a four-year college degree; educational polarization, in turn, has the unfortunate but unmistakable effect of placing the weight of the experts on one side of the partisan divide. A rebalancing of the role of experts could help address that tendency. At minimum, we have relearned that it is important to listen to more than one kind of expert in formulating policy on complex, society-wide issues. We must also not forget that experts tend to come from well-off positions in society and can be oblivious to their class biases
