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Five years ago, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. This has introduced widespread lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccines, and has great social and economic damage. William Brangham spoke with the authors of “On Wake from Covid’s Wake: How Our CHA Failed in the U. S. “”The U. S. Labor Agency,” a new e-book that is highly critical of how the U. S. has responded to this crisis.
Notice: Transcripts are from devices and humans generated and altered for accuracy. They would possibly involve mistakes.
Geoff Bennett
Five years ago, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which introduced the blockages, mask mandates and vaccines, and had a massive social and economic impact.
William Brangham talks to the authors about a new e-book that sharply criticizes the United States for responding to the crisis.
William Brangham:
This new eBook is “in Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. “
And look back in the way in which the American institutions, the Government, the Global Educational and the press between them, the pandemic occurred, and how their reaction ignited distrust, repressed dissent and gain the country greatly.
Its authors are two political scientists from Princeton University, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee. And now it’s us.
Welcome from you.
One of the main themes of this book, as is for me, is that, in the first days of this pandemic, while our leaders discussed the locks, how to react, that any dissent or a genuine debate about the prices and benefits of those movements were submitted to.
Stephen Macedo, co-author, “On Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us”: Well, that’s interesting.
In March 2020, when locks were enacted in the United States and many Western countries, dissidents spoke out in March. Some well-known people have warned that such measures were unsuccessful and would be very expensive.
And then, the consensus seemed to expand in April and May that these types of methods promulgated through the Chinese and that had been implemented in Italy, the national blockade and through a giant component of the United States, which is the right strategy, that everyone had to be on board for this, which is an important feeling of unity, that the government, the academy, the sciences, the journalism that is united to be united, that is united to be united. forcing the mandatory.
And, in fact, at that time, the voices of dissent have become rare. Social media corporations began to eliminate some publications that did not agree with government messages, and dissent decreased during summer and autumn.
William Brangham:
Frances, one of the things in which a genuine revelation for me is the way he documes in the electronic book that, before Covid, that many analysis of what is happening were carried out if a respiratory virus arises.
And the consensus or some edition of a consensus was that the blockages so effective and that they would greatly charge society.
Frances Lee, co -author, “in Covid’s Wake: how our policy failed us”: yes, there was a huge painting that made plans for what to do when the next pandemic arrived.
And we take action at the beginning of the pandemic that disagreed with the recommendations. In some cases they had been in some cases. There was a report by the World Health Organization in November 2019 that analyzed what was known about all proposed non -pharmaceutical interventions.
William Brangham:
These are masks, lockdowns, isolation, testing, tracing, etc.
Frances Lee:
Business closures, school closures, proved what is known about the effectiveness of each of those measures. And in all areas, the report indicates that the basis of the evidence of the effectiveness of each of them poor.
Therefore, it is so surprising that you get six months later and those measures are used worldwide, political resolution, manufacturers that say they adhere to science. And, of course, it is evident that all these measures have great costs.
Therefore, as political resolution manufacturers weigh their alternatives, there are advantages, but safe costs.
Stephen Macedo:
I mean, there’s one thing: some other thing in those early pandemic plans that are applicable to this issue, which are those plans warn that science, that government officials, public servants will be tempted to adopt those measures, those strict lockdown measures, to show that they’re in charge, to. . .
William Brangham:
To say, hey, they gave us this.
Stephen Macedo:
Yes, exactly, to take control.
And those first plans remain firm in the advice of Mavens and public officials of physical conditioning so that they are in advance with the public on the thin foundation of evidence for them and the certainty of costs. So he ignored.
Then, of course, there was the World Health Organization, a project that went to China, returned here after spending a week there and supported China’s locking strategy without qualification, and said that the global total attached to this strict blocking direction to suppress the virus.
There was a prediction that came out here, based on mathematical models from Imperial College London, that predicted 2. 2 million deaths in the United States through August 2020 if we haven’t implemented this series of measures that led to a kind of panic, I think, and a lack of rationally pricing those measures and the likelihood of their success.
William Brangham:
There are many public fitness experts who look at our delight and say, either in the warmth of the moment and in what we learned later, that keeping other people away, that social distancing was first an essential detail of the protection of other people.
And what am I? What is your opinion about it?
Frances Lee:
Well, it’s a theory that if we can separate people, that we can buy the time before vaccines have become available. But it had only been attempted on a giant scale.
And I think that what was overlooked this plan to make plans was the vital component of the force of paintings that deserves the paintings, either Isarray.
William Brangham:
The so-called workers.
Frances Lee:
The essential personnel constitutes approximately a third of the force of paintings that had to continue making their paintings in the user of the locks.
And so, the virus will have to continue spreading under those conditions.
William Brangham:
When you look at how other states have reacted here in the United States, we have noticed other incredible responses, some use very strict policies, others are a bit more loose.
What evidence of how these states have functioned?
Frances Lee:
There were locks in the United States; 43 governors have issued House orders. Where to see the divergence in politics in the United States is in the process of reopening.
Democratic states have remained blocked 2. 5 times more than Republican states. Even if democratic states have begun to reopen, they have maintained more restrictions than Republican states. But when he looks at the accumulated accumulated mortality at a time when the vaccine deployment has begun, there is no difference between states that have followed cocovid policies and states that were more lax.
We conclude from this that these measures do not work, but it does mean that there is still a lack of evidence to do so.
William Brangham:
Especially in the soft of what we now know as the psychological, economic, and educational charge for children, for people, for businesses across this country.
Frances Lee:
And also budget costs, the amount of mandatory borrowing to finance closures. It’s roughly equivalent as a component of GDP to what we spent on the New Deal and the 2009 bailout.
William Brangham:
Does your fatherhood of this electronic book give us a concept of how we have to do things if it is maximum, probably when the next pandemic comes?
Stephen Macedo:
Yes, I would say so.
I think we have to make sure that we are open to dissent and that we are open to dissent when it leaves the other side. One of the things we discover is that pandemic has polarized very. The democratic states were on one side. The Republican states were on the other side.
We deserve to have been more open than the complaint related to the other side. I think that applies to science. Science has politicized, journalism, unfortunately. And I think that even universities, to some extent, doubted to ask difficult questions about our delight on the covers due to the partisan inflection of some of those problems.
William Brangham:
There are many other elements in this book, social networks, freedom of expression, as you say, the debate about masks. I can’t get here.
I thank the two. The electronic book is called “in Covid’s Wake: how our policy has failed us. “
Frances Lee, Stephen Macedo, thank you very much.
Stephen Macedo:
Thank you William.
Frances Lee:
Thank you.
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