A new book titled In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee was recently published. The authors have been making the media rounds, claiming that studies that found “stringent COVID-19 restrictions were associated with substantial decreases in excess deaths during the pandemic” don’t exist. Macedo and Lee, both political scientists at Princeton, never saw what COVID could do when it spread unchecked, and at least from what I read, their ignorance of and indifference to what happened in hospitals was on stark display.
Before deciding whether to read the whole book, I skipped to the section on the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) and its three authors, Drs. Sunetra Gupta, Martin Kulldorff, and Jay Bhattacharya. Based on that chapter, I am not going to waste my time reading further. There are so many things wrong with it, it’s hard to know where to begin. I feel nearly every paragraph should come with some sort of disclaimer that reads, “no one who worked on a COVID unit would ever say anything like that.”
First, however, I will start with one thing Macedo and Lee got right. Though it’s a trivial achievement, they at least quoted several paragraphs of the GBD, including the core section that laid out their plan of herd immunity via mass infection:
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
A lot has happened since then. There’s plenty of natural immunity but nowhere in the world has herd immunity. Reasonable people have correctly concluded that since the central premise of the GBD was a complete failure, the rest of the document has little value.
In contrast, Macedo and Lee argue that if one discards everything the GBD got wrong, what remains is correct. Similarly, if one throws out the Yankee’s losses last year, they had a perfect season. To salvage the wreckage of the GBD, Macedo and Lee employ many of the propaganda techniques I’ve described previously.
Treating Proposals As Accomplishments
Macedo and Lee wrote that:
The authors of the Declaration argued that for the low-risk majority, normal life should otherwise resume. Schools and restaurants should reopen, and teaching should be in person (with special provision made for older or immunocompromised teachers and students).
This is true. From the comfort of their offices, the authors of the GBD argued for wonderful things and claimed they would have done them. They didn’t help schools open or protect the vulnerable, but they would have. Macedo and Lee were very impressed by these “would have” statements and treated them as genuine accomplishments.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya would have done so many wonderful and amazing things
As those of us who operate in the real world know, there was a big difference between writing the words “open schools” or “protect the vulnerable” and actually accomplishing these tasks when COVID was swirling. In areas where the GBD had influence, they failed to accomplish a single thing they would have done. In October 2021, just after the Delta wave ravished the state, Dr. Kulldorf stated, “One place where we had some success was Florida.” Let’s examine their “success” there:
- They failed to protect “vulnerable” people: “Florida Leads Nation in Number of COVID-19 Deaths of Nursing Home Residents and Staff,” August 2021.
- They failed to protect “not vulnerable” people: “Child Covid Deaths More Than Doubled in Florida as Kids Returned to the Classroom,” September 2021.
- They failed to keep schools open: “School Closures Reported In Five Florida Counties; Districts ‘Drowning’ In COVID,” August 2021.
- They failed to protect educators: “15 Miami-Dade Public School Staff Members Die of COVID In Just 10 Days,” September 2021.
- They failed to achieve herd immunity: “Florida’s COVID Deaths Reach Nearly 6,000 in 2024,” January 2025.
Macedo and Lee were careful not to let this uncomfortable reality intrude into their fantasy of the GBD.
Indifference to Disinformation
Macedo and Lee wrote the following:
The Declaration’s authors were hardly infallible. Like everyone during the Covid years, they got some things wrong.
They got some things wrong. That’s like describing the Grand Canyon as a pothole or a terrorist attack as an unfortunate accident. The authors of the GBD didn’t just say a few silly things in hastily-worded Tweets like I did. They deliberately and drastically downplayed COVID at every stage, repeatedly spread fake statistics, and treated rare, temporary vaccine side effects as a fate worse than death. These were not all innocent errors. The authors of the GBD engaged in a years-long pattern of sustained disinformation. It has taken volumes to begin to categorize their false predictions and factual errors. This 2-hour long video of mine just scratches the surface. Moreover, their errors weren’t “like everyone” else’s. I rapidly acknowledged and corrected my goofs. The authors of the GBD never did this. My errors were barely noticed and didn’t hurt anyone. In contrast, the authors of the GBD were famous and influential. Their disinformation drove policy and had tragic, real-world consequences.
Indeed, aside from the obvious fact that COVID is more dangerous for older people, essentially every premise of the GBD was wrong. These flawed premises were:
- People could be easily and neatly divided into “vulnerable” and “not vulnerable” categories
- Infections in “not vulnerable” people could be prevented from spilling over into “vulnerable” people
- Children don’t spread COVID
- Death was COVID’s only meaningful harm
- Reinfections were rare
- Herd immunity was inevitable
Macedo and Lee devoted just two sentences to these errors and even then used that as an opportunity to fluff the GBD’s authors. They said:
In an interview published on May 21, 2020, for example, Sunetra Gupta opined that “I think that the epidemic has largely come and is on its way out in” the United Kingdom. In another interview published two months later, she speculated that the threshold for herd immunity might be lower than others supposed and that it might have already been reached or at least approached in some places. In both instances, she was laying out possibilities and arguing for ranges of uncertainty greater than policymakers were acknowledging. She was drawing attention to the costs of lockdowns, especially for the poor, and calling for more tolerant debate and discussion of a wider range of theories, projections, and policy responses.
According to Macedo and Lee, even when Dr. Gupta was repeatedly wrong about basic things, she was fundamentally right.
In reality, the authors of the GBD relentlessly sought to numb people to the risks of the virus because they wanted to infect people with it. The core belief of the GBD was that spreading the virus was necessary to tame the virus. It claimed that “as immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls”.
The GBD objected to mitigation measures not because they thought they failed to slow the virus, but precisely because they knew that’s what they did. As such, they wanted schools open without testing, masks, and vaccines, and even said it was “more dangerous for public health” to vaccinate everyone than no one. They lamented that suppressing SARS‑CoV‑2 “postponed the inevitable”- as if that was a bad thing– and delayed herd immunity, which they claimed would arrive in just 3-6 months, if only the virus was allowed to do its job. Watch below as they lay out their plan to end the pandemic by Christmas 2020 by letting the virus “sweep through the population”.
Macedo and Lee did not mention this absurdly optimistic time frame, which GBD’s authors repeated often on social media. Yet, even though the core premise of the GBD was totally wrong, Macedo and Lee blew this off, absurdly implying that only the GBD’s authors and supporters cared about the harms of mitigation measures and thought about trade-offs.
Worse still, Macedo and Lee even spread misinformation about the GBD’s disinformation. They wrote things like this:
The most notable thing about these cases is how unusual they are. The risks of Covid to healthy 22-year-olds and athletic 41-year-olds were extremely low.
While healthy young people were not immune to COVID’s harm, something obvious to those of us who worked in hospitals, this wasn’t the age range given by GBD. Dr. Gupta claimed COVID’s risk began at age 65 while Dr. Bhattacharya said COVID was “much milder” for people under 70. Macedo and Lee did not tell this to their readers, nor did they inform them that COVID was a top killer for young people in 2021, even with effective vaccines. All this would have been much worse had 250 million unvaccinated Americans simultaneously contracted COVID in the fall of 2020 as the GBD proposed.
Macedo and Lee also offended on behalf of the virus. They felt it didn’t get enough “positive” things said about it. They wrote.
Denying the positive contribution of natural infection and recovery to herd immunity became a staple of public health messaging, as we will see.
No one who worked on a COVID unit would say anything positive about natural immunity. Many people didn’t recover.
Woke-Washing the Pandemic
According to Macedo and Lee, the authors of the GBD were benevolent souls, motivated by leftist concerns of social justice and inequality. They supposedly abhorred the privilege of the “laptop class”, a phrase Macedo and Lee used many times, and were deeply concerned for the fate of:
Grocery clerks, janitors, food packing and processing workers, transportation workers, and other such people— who, in the United States, were disproportionately Black and Hispanic.
Macedo and Lee did not explain why the working-class people I saw die would have been better off if only more lawyers and bankers had died next to them. They also provided no evidence that if there were no lockdowns, “healthy low-risk people” would have happily gone to offices, schools, and restaurants where they would have been perfectly willing to contract COVID en masse.
In reality, the GBD was sponsored by a pro-tobacco, libertarian, child-labor advocate, and its authors were the epitome of laptop class privilege. During the signing of the GBD, just before the worst wave of the pandemic when 3,000 Americans would die daily, they had a champagne toast to celebrate their plan for mass infection. As Dr. Neil Stone put it:
I will never forget, at the height of the pandemic, with patients and families and healthcare workers going through awful traumas, the Great Barrington Declaration being signed in a wood paneled room to the chink of champagne glasses was the ultimate in smug, privileged disconnect
Macedo and Lee did not mention the inglorious origins of the GBD, nor any of their connections to right-wing financers and politicians, whose concern for poor Black and Hispanic janitors is decidedly lacking.
Treating YouTube Videos as More Important Than Lives
However, the longest section of their chapter opened with this abhorrent sentence:
Ultimately, the Great Barrington Declaration is less significant than its reception.
They also wrote:
Many other accomplished academics and doctors who dissented from orthodox views on Covid policy were subjected to reputational attack and social media censorship both in the United States and around the world.
That’s right. According to Macedo and Lee, the flesh and blood victims of the GBD’s anti-vaccine disinformation were less consequential than the indignities suffered by its authors. Macedo and Lee felt that advocates of herd immunity via mass infection were the pandemic’s Main Characters. They suffered “reputational attack,” which of course, they richly deserved. Macedo and Lee singled out Dr. Gregg Gonsalves for sending mean Tweets and not centering the feelings of pro-infection doctors. Macedo and Lee devoted many pages to the fate of various social media posts and the hurt feelings of Dr. Scott Atlas, an early advocate for herd immunity via mass infection who spread gross misinformation in his role as President Trump’s advisor.
Similarly, even though Dr. Bhattacharya became a media celebrity who earned $12,000 from his Twitter posts and cavorted with world leaders, parlaying his fame into a top position in the Trump administration, Macedo and Lee claim he was “censored.” They described a CNN appearance as “a rare mainstream media appearance for Bhattacharya.” They felt he was owed more TV time, and that he didn’t get enough opportunities to deceive people, claiming that 9 flu deaths are more than 123 COVID deaths for example.
I confess that I only skimmed this section. With all that’s going on, I couldn’t summon the will to care that the authors of the GBD were called “fringe“. It’s not that big of a deal. No one should care whether or not Stanford upset Dr. Atlas by censuring him. It was a meaningless slap on the wrist. Dr. Atlas wasn’t silenced and he is just fine, no matter how hard Macedo and Lee try to portray him as a victim. Other doctors suffered more.
Meanwhile, Macedo and Lee casually brushed aside the deaths and disabling of “healthy young people” by saying it was a “small number.” While they mourned the loss of a YouTube video, they ignored children in Florida, like Victoria Ramirez, who died because their parents were told, by the authors of the GBD, that they should let their unvaccinated children contact COVID. The images below are just 6-weeks apart, though Macedo and Lee didn’t mention either of them.
“Ultimately, the Great Barrington Declaration is less significant than its reception.“
While Macedo and Lee felt disinformation doctors were owed a safe space, their demands of civility and decorum were predictably applied only to critics of the GBD, not to its authors. They made no mention of Drs. Atlas’ and Bhattacharya’s juvenile, unprofessional insults and personal attacks, especially towards doctors who worked on COVID units, unlike them. Even though Dr. Fauci and his children needed bodyguards, Macedo and Lee ignored the threatening behavior of Dr. Kulldorff, who tweeted out a picture of a guillotine with the words “the carnage is unspeakable” and compared “Faucism and fascism.”
It Needed to be Grappled With Fairly and Honestly.
Macedo and Lee concluded:
The most difficult question for pandemic management was always how to strike the right balance across harms from Covid and harms from Covid policies. The answer to this question would never be easy, but that’s just the point. It needed to be grappled with fairly and honestly.
That sounds nice, but if Macedo and Lee actually believed that, they would have explained how the authors of the GBD prevented fair and honest discussion by spreading fake information and throwing tantrums against those who corrected it.
Perhaps the rest of their book is much better and I owe its authors an apology. From what I read, while Macedo and Lee claim to be spokesmen for poor Black and Hispanic janitors, in reality their goal is rewrite the history of the pandemic and erase the victims of disinformation. This is because Macedo and Lee are exemplars of laptop class who wrote a book about the laptop class to protect and glorify the laptop class. This required them to spin an absurd fable where famous, sheltered doctors who wrote an error-filled, pro-virus Declaration at the behest of wealthy right-wing benefactors, were actually oppressed heroes. Today these laptop class doctors are cheering on RFK Jr. and are poised to join a regime that is actually censoring science and purging scientists.
That’s whom this book defends.