Stephen Macedo, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics at Princeton University, delivered a lecture entitled, “In Covid’s Wake: Science, Liberal Democracy, and Elite Failure” on October 3, 2025, at the invitation of the Center for Citizenship & Constitutional Government at Notre Dame. The subject of Macedo’s lecture centered around the themes of his most recent book, In COVID’s Wake: How our Politics Failed Us (Princeton University Press), which he co-authored with fellow Princeton Professor, Frances Lee. His book explored what the pandemic revealed about and contributed to the degraded state of liberal democracy in America. Macedo’s lecture delved into the policies made during the pandemic, and contended that educated elites should reflect on their shortcomings in order to restore the corroded public trust in institutions.
Macedo, a self-identified progressive, began his remarks by focusing on the premature moralization of discussions surrounding the pandemic. He examined how the politicalization of “truth-seeking departments" of liberal democracy—namely scientific and journalistic institutions, as well as universities—fostered excessive intolerance of dissent, partly due to the Democratic Party’s rise within them.
The first aspect of COVID-19 policy that Macedo examined was the state of epidemiology research prior to the pandemic. He argued that the evidentiary basis for workplace and school closures during pandemics, as well as non-pharmaceutical social distancing, was weak, and that the social costs of implementing them were severe. In reference to the United Kingdom’s pandemic plan published in 2011, he quoted, “The expectation must be that the virus will inevitably spread and that any local measures taken to disrupt or reduce the spread are likely to have very limited or partial success at the national level and cannot be relied on even as a way to buy time.” Accordingly, Macedo contended that the closure practices implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic, previously considered to have limited effects, were thus counterproductive.
Macedo then addressed the World Health Organization’s endorsement of the Chinese strategy to contain viral spread in Wuhan, entailing harsh lockdown measures presented as proof that the virus can be suppressed and controlled through “aggressive case identification and extreme social distancing.” He illustrated how these extreme measures, along with a “bombshell report” from Dr. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, which predicted that the absence of extreme lockdown measures would consequentially lead to the death of 2.2 million Americans by August 2020, reinforced U.S. policy. Many similar studies became influential in fueling the American consensus on national lockdowns, marking a turning point in the United State’s pandemic measures.
However, the emerging consensus was not universal. Macedo provided examples of early dissent that proposed an “alternative strategy of focused protection on the vulnerable segments of the population.” Dr. Michael Osterholm, one of the world’s leading experts on epidemiology, co-authored a Washington Post op-ed, which Macedo summarized by highlighting Osterholm’s proposal that the best alternative entails “letting those at low risk of serious disease continue to work while advising higher risk individuals to protect themselves through physical distancing and ramping up our health care capacity.” Macedo continued, “We could then gradually build up herd immunity via natural infection and recovery, without harming millions of school children.”
Despite calls for these alternative strategies, Macedo stressed that by the time spring turned to summer, tolerance for dissent had waned. Wartime framing of the pandemic in particular, Macedo observed, was adopted to advocate for national unity on this matter. He then provided examples of planning documents that adopted and advocated for this “war on COVID,” one being the Ethics Center at Harvard University, led by Danielle Allen and backed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the New America Foundation. The Center released the first national report adopting a “test, trace, and supportively isolate” strategy, a plan which Macedo argued seemed to resemble the “Chinese attempt to suppress the virus.”
Macedo explained that such a national containment strategy requires broad collective support that must extend from media, universities, technology companies, and the government. There was a significant amount of pushback towards these early lockdown measures and calls for alternative approaches from within the scientific community. Macedo noted “The Great Barrington Declaration” as recognizing the costly effects of current strategies, particularly surrounding school closures, and advocating for alternative ones. However, such dissent was met with resistance from institutions like the National Institutes of Health, and condemnation from many prominent educated elite leaders. By the summer of 2020, the “war on COVID” stopped permitting tolerance of dissent.
Macedo discussed Missouri v. Biden (2024; now known as Murthy v. Missouri), a Supreme Court case ruling that the Biden administration violated the First Amendment by “improperly influencing tech companies’ decisions to remove or suppress posts on the coronavirus or election.” Macedo explained that government actors were in contact with social media platforms like Twitter, informing them on what or who to censor regarding COVID-19 information. Macedo also spoke of public officials’ withholding of information on possible lab origins and funding in the Wuhan Institute of Virology from the National Institutes of Health.
After spending the greater part of his lecture illustrating how the lack of transparency and intolerance for dissent from public officials produced a politically reinforced consensus, Macedo concluded that the “public health mindset” was the driving force in pandemic policy decisions. By attaching an infinite value to stopping a virus, Macedo argues that zero value was attached to whether this will “disrupt people's lives, destroy the economy, and [have] many kids kept out of school in a way they’d never recover from.”
The lecture was well attended, with a packed room of students, faculty, and other members of the Notre Dame community. The themes of this lecture particularly resonated with Gregory Robson, Associate Research Professor at the Mendoza College of Business, who commented, “This was an extraordinarily important lecture on a topic of vital public and scholarly interest: lessons all can learn from the difficult COVID years. Whatever one’s own views, Professor Macedo’s empirically grounded argumentation developed a number of points well worth considering.” He continued, “Among other things, Macedo argued that decision-makers during the pandemic ignored key data or, important to me as a justice theorist, failed adequately to learn from diverse policymaking under federalism and internationally.”
Another audience member, Evelyn Behling, a PhD candidate in the department of Political Science at Notre Dame, reflected on Macedo’s willingness to discuss such a contentious topic, saying, “I appreciate his seeking to bring clarity to this polarized question, especially coming from such a respected institution and his courage in addressing the question.”
Macedo ended his lecture by calling for “greater toleration of disagreement and respect for dissent," and a greater openness and transparency in science and science journalism. He also highlighted the importance of "humility on the part of experts and elites," and "greater honesty acknowledging uncertainty, especially in public health.”
The full recording of Macedo's remarks can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
Stay tuned for additional programming this fall by checking out our events page.