‘A case study in groupthink’: were liberals wrong about the pandemic?

In Covid ’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us , Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee argue that public health authorities, the mainstream media, and progressive elites often pushed pandemic measures without weighing their costs and benefits.

The book grew out of research Macedo was doing on the ways progressive discourse gets handicapped by a refusal to engage with conservative or outside arguments.

Reports by Johns Hopkins , World Health Organization , Illinois and British government had expressed ambivalence or caution about the kind of quarantine measures that were soon taken.

Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a wargaming exercise in October 2019 , shortly before the pandemic began, to simulate a deadly coronavirus pandemic.

Dr Anthony Fauci and other top public health figures were evasive or in some cases dishonest about the possibility of a lab leak, Macedo and Lee say.

Since then, the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have cautiously endorsed the lab leak theory.

The reception to In Covid’s Wake has been more positive than they expected perhaps a sign their arguments have penetrated the mainstream.