In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us is a 2025 book by Stephen Macedo and Frances E. Lee that critically examines the policies of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and the institutions that promoted them.
In the book, Macedo and Lee argue that political officials abdicated their responsibilities over policy-making when facing the pandemic to scientists and public health officials, who subsequently implemented wide-ranging and intrusive non-pharmaceutical interventions (ignoring a lack of evidence in favor of those interventions and the negative side effects those interventions would have on living standards and the economy) and instigated a moral panic against critics of those interventions, ultimately causing a collapse in public trust and a surge in political polarization over the course of the pandemic.
The book received widespread acclaim in the media and from political scientists, who argued that it offered an insightful critique of political and academic institutions, that it demonstrated clearly the risks of enforcing intrusive consensus on society, and that it constituted an important contribution to literature examining political polarization in the 2020s. The Economist, Compact, The New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal all named it among the best books of 2025. The book, however, received significantly negative reviews from scientists and medical professionals, who argued that the book misrepresented public health data and the political scene during the pandemic, including downplaying the impact of the virus on health and behavior, downplaying the role of disinformation and conservative politicians in driving pandemic polarization, and uncritically accepting alternative pandemic-response strategies proposed by advocates of the Great Barrington Declaration without questioning their feasibility.
Background Authors Stephen Macedo is an American political scientist based at Princeton University. Macedo's research has largely focused on political theory, American constitutionalism, and public policy, with an emphasis on liberalism. He has previously served as vice-president of the American Political Science Association and as director of Princeton's University Center for Human Values.
Frances E. Lee is also an American political scientist based at Princeton University, a professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Her research has focused on American politics, policy-making, and public affairs.
Development In an interview with Public Discourse, Macedo stated that the book originated as part of a 2022 project "on the current political moment and the highly polarized politics that we are involved in now. Specifically, about how progressives were not paying sufficient attention to conservative concerns on certain issues in a way that was undermining the strength of progressive arguments and positions. I was planning to focus on abortion, immigration, and COVID. Of the three, COVID — and COVID policy — happened to be the subject I knew the least about. Once I started working on it, I realized that was just a huge topic in itself and one that not many people were working on. So I decided to focus on COVID." In an interview with The Tocqueville Review, he stated that his interest in writing the book was "first and foremost as a window onto our profound political dysfunction, which is the result of an excess of moralized partisanship and extreme polarization, which has infected too many elite institutions including science, journalism, and, unfortunately, universities."
Macedo has stated that Lee joined him on the project after the two co-organized a workshop together on the subject. The workshop notably saw the attendance of health economist and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration Jay Bhattacharya. Lee has stated that the topic "fit neatly into my pre-existing scholarly interests, especially given that policy in this issue area was profoundly and pervasively shaped by partisanship," saying that during the writing of the book, she "took the lead on the more empirical chapters: tracing the evolution of the policy response across the federal system over time and examining how Covid policy traded off against other public policy issues (e.g., non-Covid health, education, employment, crime, fiscal balance)."
Summary In the book, Macedo and Lee critically examine the policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The authors argue that non-pharmaceutical interventions (such as lockdowns, quarantines, social distancing, closures of non-essential businesses and schools, as well as vaccine and mask mandates) had no scientific basis and ran contrary to pre-pandemic guidelines on how to respond to hypothetical pandemics. They argue that leading scientific and public health figures (which they describe as politically progressive and members of the "laptop classes") during the pandemic ignored this and instead told "noble lies" to the public to justify wide-ranging and intrusive implementations of non-pharmaceutical interventions. In an interview with Undark Magazine, Lee elaborated that epidemiologists were "the people who are most focused on the spread of disease by nature of their profession. They’re going to have some tunnel vision around that. Their views about the importance of protecting yourself from a respiratory infection are likely to be systematically different from other people. Their values, then, can’t guide the whole of society. Second, there’s class bias here. These are highly educated people for whom staying home and self-isolating was much more feasible than for the rest of society. So their perspectives on that, and their views on what exactly would be the hardships associated with that, were also biased," while also praising Bhattacharya for "exhibiting integrity as a scientist." The authors also argue that, once COVID-19 vaccine began to be rolled out, these scientific and public health officials promoted the vaccines in a way that overstated the actual evidence base behind the vaccines.
The authors then argued that these "laptop classes" shut down debate over COVID policy, dismissing and smearing dissenting viewpoints while also using thought-terminating clichés such as "follow the science." Among the viewpoints that the authors argue were suppressed were the COVID-19 lab leak theory, the Great Barrington Declaration, the Swedish government response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and skepticism over face mask mandates. They then argue that scientific and public health figures were overly willing to deprioritize freedom and quality of life, were enamoured with the strict Chinese response to the pandemic, were out of touch with the concerns and reality of everyday working class Americans, and following the end of the pandemic crisis, have been unwilling to assess the effects that interventions had. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph about the book, the authors argued that doubts over the responses to the pandemic were silenced by a "wartime mentality" and a "moral panic," with privileged politicians aiming to avoid accountability by deferring policy-making decisions to privileged scientists in a way that also overlooked the effect the policies would have on the working class.
The authors conclude that COVID-19 response policies in the United States became deeply politicized and created widespread confusion among Americans. They also conclude that the policies caused significant harms to public health, education, the economy, and living standards, disproportionately affecting the less well-off in society. As a result, the authors argue that the polices significantly increased political polarization and had a significant negative effect on public trust in scientific and government institutions.
In an interview with The New York Times, Macedo explained "the biggest theme that runs through the book, I think, is that these, as we call them, truth-seeking institutions, did not function as well as they should have during COVID. That there was a premature policy consensus. There was an unwillingness to re-examine assumptions. And there was an intolerance of criticism and divergent points of view that emerged fairly quickly in the pandemic, and that hurt us, that hurt our policy responses, that hurt our ability to course correct over the course of the pandemic as we learned more and had greater reason to course correct."
Publication history In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us was published by Princeton University Press in March 2025.
Critical reception Acclaim J Oliver Conroy of The Guardian has written that "the reception to In Covid’s Wake has been more positive than Macedo and Lee expected."
The book received widespread praise in the news media and among literary critics. The Economist listed the book among its best books of 2025, describing it as "insightful," as did Compact, which described it as "the first comprehensive account of how liberal governance failed the Covid test," and The New Yorker, which wrote that its "conclusions are chastening, clearly demonstrating the risks of enforcing a “consensus” and purging the countervailing views that make intellectual inquiry work." The Wall Street Journal listed it as one of the top ten books of 2025. Columnist George Will of The Washington Post reviewed the book positively, saying that it was "dismaying, but also exhilarating... Macedo and Lee identify much broader and deeper cultural sicknesses. But their meticulous depictions and plausible explanations of the myriad institutional failures demonstrate social science at its finest." Columnist David Scharfenberg of The Boston Globe praised the book as "scathing," saying that it "feels convincing — in no small part because Macedo and Lee are of the liberal, data-driven tribe they critique." The New Yorker staff writer Jessica Winter compared it to the 2025 book An Abundance of Caution that criticized the policies of school closures during COVID in the United States, saying that it was "a similarly brutal COVID postmortem." Financial Times columnist Edward Luce praised the book as "seminal," saying that it helped explained the rise of the far-right in the 2020s and "should be compulsory reading across the spectrum. That it has not been reviewed by most major newspapers is troubling."