Before the covid-19 outbreak, public health officials around the world largely agreed that containment of a flu pandemic is largely futile so better to focus on the most at risk populations: speak honestly, encourage healthy behaviors and work fast on a vaccine.
It didn’t all go to plan. In the United States, the Trump administration successfully oversaw a historic vaccine development, while injecting hostile politics into the system. Meanwhile, left-leaning states over-relied on non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as widespread masking and extended school closures, that had limited gains for considerable cost. Right-leaning states contributed to vaccine skepticism, which led to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.
The new book In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, written by Princeton University political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, attempts to put forward an unimpassioned assessment of the American-led public health response. I simplified their assessment of a handful of the most prominent public health measures into the chart below, and in a social video here.
It’s one of my favorite nonfiction books of the year. Below I share my notes for future reference.
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