“COVID policy—happened to be the subject I knew the least about.”
My book, We Want Them Infected, shared several key features with the book In COVID’s Wake. They both discussed our disastrous pandemic response and featured doctors who are now MAHA/MAGA royalty. That’s where the similarities end.
We Want Them Infected described the “insane situation” I witnessed working in Bellevue Hospital throughout the pandemic. It chronicled the harm done by pro-infection disinformation doctors in great detail and warned of their threat moving forward.
In COVID’s Wake was written by two Princeton University political science professors, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, who experienced the pandemic from their laptops. They admitted they began their project from a place of ignorance. In one interview, Professor Macedo said:
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.
It’s not clear if they sought input from any doctor who worked on a COVID unit to educate them about what the virus could do when it was allowed to spread uncontrolled, though this was hardly classified information.
They also admitted the purpose of their book was not to honestly critique our pandemic response, but rather to push an overtly political agenda. In the same interview Professor Macedo said:
I wanted to write a book 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.
Given their ignorance of the topic and stated desire to skewer “progressives” and promote “conservative concerns,” it’s no surprise that Macedo and Lee lauded the same pro-infection disinformation doctors I warned about, absurdly portraying them as oppressed pandemic superheroes. These doctors Tweeted they “would have” opened schools and protected the vulnerable, and that was good enough for Macedo and Lee. They were convinced. In their pundit fantasy world, opinions mean everything, actions mean nothing.
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.“
Our books also elicited very different receptions. We Want Them Infected received a handful of reviews, all of them positive, and many nice online comments, for which I am grateful, but it wasn’t feted by major publications and elite opinion-makers. Such is life.
However, while my book didn’t receive voluminous press, it also didn’t generate any serious rebuttals. No one even tried. This is not to say the doctors I discussed ignored it. Several of them hurled a deluge of juvenile insults and dishonest straw man arguments at me, but they never pointed out anything wrong with anything I actually wrote.
Of course, that would be hard to do. After all, 25 pages of We Want Them Infected were just instances of these doctors declaring the pandemic over starting 6 years ago. (The audio section of that chapter is below). Most other sections followed a similar format. It’s hard to argue with my collection of accurate quotes, it turns out.
In contrast, In COVID’s Wake received a lot more attention than my book, and I am sure it sold many more copies. The sheltered pundit class, eager to stick it to those dastardly “progressives” and nurture those “conservative concerns,” fawned over it in their endless stream of opinion pieces and podcasts. According to the book’s Wikipedia page:
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 Wintercompared 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 explain the rise of the far-right in the 2020s and “should be compulsory reading across the spectrum.”
Paul Peterson, a professor of education at Harvard and Stanford’s Hoover Institution, wrote a glowing review titled COVID Crimes that said:
For a devout post-modernist, open discussion is subordinate to a single-minded pursuit of justice. Long a debating point within elite universities, post-modernism escaped, like a laboratory leak, into the real world of Covid politics at the beginning of this decade. To protect innocents from harm, our thoroughly post-modern masters silenced dissent and encouraged falsehoods. Public health officials took upon themselves the burden of convincing parents and politicians that schools must be closed, masks worn, and social distancing practiced—even when supporting evidence was thin at best. Those who objected were denied platforms in legacy and social media outlets.
As they tell this story in their new book, In Covid’s Wake, Princeton professors Stephen Macedo and Francis Lee hoist their flag to John Stuart Mill’s standard. A democratic republic that denies itself discourse about the central issue of the day risks becoming a tyranny of the majority, they argue. Suppression of dissent proved to be the worst of all Covid co-morbidities.
Over a million Americans died of COVID.
Unlike We Want Them Infect, however, In COVID’s Wake also received an avalanche of detailed, good faith criticism from people who knew what they were talking about. From accusations they misquoted people to claims “Lee and Macedo play fast and loose with statistics” there was no shortage of devastating takedowns of the book, including my own, though I’ve never seen its authors grapple with any of them.
“If the country had had more scientific leaders like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya—and more who were willing to listen to him—our policymaking could have been based more on evidence and less on hubris.”
It’s fair to say that beyond their shared subject matter, these two books were opposites in every way. We Want Them Infected sought to document and preserve the words of MAHA/MAGA doctors, while In COVID’s Wake sought to erase them and rewrite the history of the pandemic.
Given this, it’s unsurprising that Macedo and Lee shared very different sentiments than I did when MAHA/MAGA was on the precipice of power in the fall of 2024. Like many others, I feared what Trump, Kennedy, and their band of medical misinformers would do with power. I knew their danger, and in my own podcasts and opinion pieces, I desperately tried to warn about them.
Conversely, Macedo and Lee instructed us to embrace it all for our own good. In fall 2024, Kennedy premiered the movie Vaxxed III: Authorized to Kill, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya wrote a glowing endorsement of Kennedy, and Macedo and Lee wrote an article glorifying Dr. Bhattacharya titled Restoring Trust in Public Health, which blamed “educated elites” both for Trump’s return to power and a lack of trust in institutions. They said:
Educated elites bemoaning the return to power of Donald Trump would do well to ask how they contributed to this outcome. Trust in institutions is down, perhaps especially for those institutions charged with helping the public discern the truth. Observers often blame the “information ecosystem”—in particular, the internet—but elites have also undermined public faith by allowing science and the wider pursuit of truth to be politicized. The incoming administration presents the opportunity for a reset.
To that end, Trump should nominate Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health. Bhattacharya exemplifies qualities that were lacking in our nation’s scientific leadership during the pandemic. The ostracism and condemnation he faced for his dissenting views provides a vivid illustration of elite failures to live up to their own deepest values…
In reality, Dr. Bhattacharya didn’t just have “dissenting views.” He spread obviously fake statistics all the time and claimed the mass infection of unvaccinated people under age 60-70 would end the pandemic in 3-6 months. None of this bothered Macedo and Lee. They portrayed Dr. Bhattacharya as a visionary who cracked COVID’s code with his one-page online petition, the Great Barrington Declaration, a document written under the watchful eye of a pro-tobacco, child labor advocate. They continued:
If the country had had more scientific leaders like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya—and more who were willing to listen to him—our policymaking could have been based more on evidence and less on hubris. During the pandemic democracy’s “truth-seeking” institutions were infected by politics, partisanship, and dogmatism. What we need now is a strong dose of fresh thinking and institutional reform from experts prepared to challenge the reigning consensus and renew our commitment to the basic values of science and liberalism.
“The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in 1 year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm.”
Well, Macedo and Lee got exactly what they wanted. How’s that working out so far?
Enough time has passed that we can begin to answer that question, though it would take another dense tome to document the scientific sabotage of the past year alone. The Lancet weighed in with their essay Robert F Kennedy Jr: 1 Year of Failure, which said:
The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in 1 year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm.
That’s probably true, and the star doctors of We Want Them Infected and In COVID’s Wake have been key instigators and perpetrators of all this. Though Dr. Bhattacharya boasted he “would have” perfectly handled COVID in 2020, when given the opportunity to prove his mettle in 2026, he can’t even fix a few shot-out windows at the CDC. Along with Dr. Martin Kulldorff, another pro-infection disinformation doctor glowingly profiled in In COVID’s Wake, he helped to decimate the CDC’s vaccine schedule. Under his watch, measles is spreading in ICE camps.
Though Dr. Bhattacharya claims science should be “apolitical,” he routinely speaks at right-wing propaganda events, such CPAC and Turning Point USA. He’s become the nation’s scientific censor-in-chief, eagerly implementing the MAGA/MAHA agenda at the institutions he leads. While scientists are reasonably wondering if they have a future in this country, Dr. Bhattacharya claims that it’s “ridiculous slander” to say that Trump is anything but a champion of science and confesses his literal “love” for the man.
This is who I warned about in We Want Them Infected. This is who Macedo and Lee claimed would “restore trust in public health”.
And thus we can see that whatever intentions the authors of In COVID’s Wake may have had, the book’s core function was to portray “progressives” as the true threat to science and to numb people the obvious threat of MAHA/MAGA doctors by providing a veneer of academic legitimacy to their pro-infection agenda and COVID Amnesia Project. Indeed today, MAHA/MAGA saboteurs routinely and explicitly use the type of pandemic revisionism promoted by Macedo and Lee as a pretext to justify their scientific vandalism and anti-vaxx agenda. Just watch.
As such, it’s no surprise that it wasn’t just reactionary centrist pundits who fawned over In COVID’s Wake in their opinion pieces and podcasts. Wikipedia had an entire section of the “widespread praise” the book received among right-wing and libertarian think tanks”. Though this crew hated my book- “they wanted us locked down forever“- In COVID’s Wake was a huge hit with these powerful people. It told them everything they wanted to hear, and it served a very useful purpose for them. It allowed them to launder their anti-science agenda through a series of “progressive” Princeton professors and “liberal” media outlets, The New Yorker, the New York Times, and PBS, who credulously promoted their revisionist history and petty grievances all in the name of polite discussion and civil debate.
Thus, we come to the final difference between me and Macedo and Lee. I still constantly discuss MAHA/MAGA doctors. I’ve never stopped chronicling their damage and sharing their words. Macedo and Lee, meanwhile, have magically morphed into quiet church mice. Though they were ubiquitous media stars not long ago, today they don’t seem to have anything to say about the powerful doctors they helped unleash on us all.
Why is that?
Professors Macedo and Lee are always welcome on my podcast for some polite discussion and civil debate about all of this. I also hope all the complicit publications and pundits who gave them softball interviews when their book came out, allowing them free reign to push MAHA/MAGA talking points, will invite them back to discuss how things are going with their heroes in power. And if they refuse, as I expect they will, I’ll be happy to take their place. I am not afraid to defend my book by discussing the real-world job performance of the MAHA/MAGA doctors featured in it.