Five years ago, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of COVID-19 a pandemic,

and that launched widespread shutdowns, mandates for masks and vaccines, and had an enormous

social and economic impact. William Brangham speaks with the authors of a new book that's sharply

critical of how the U.S. responded to the crisis.

That new book is called In COVID's Wake, How Our Politics Failed Us.

And it looks back at how critical American institutions, the government, academia, and the press

among them, performed during the pandemic, and how their response inflamed distrust,

crackdown on dissent, and cost the country tremendously. Its authors are two political scientists from Princeton University,

Stephen Macedo and Francis Lee, and they join us now. Welcome to you both. One of the main themes of

this book, as it seems to me, is that in the early crazy days of this pandemic,

as our leaders were debating lockdowns, how to respond, that any dissent over or real debate about the costs and benefits of those actions was squelched.

Well, it's interesting. In March 2020, as the lockdowns were being enacted in the United States and across

many Western countries, there were dissenters who spoke up in March.

Some very well-known people warned that these measures were unlikely to be successful and

would be very costly.

And then a consensus seemed to develop in April and May that the kinds of strategies enacted

by the Chinese and that had been implemented in Italy, national lockdown, and across much

of the United States, that that was the correct strategy, that everyone needed to be on board

for it, that there needed to be a sense of vital unity,

that government, the academy, science, journalism, all needed to pull together,

and that this was what we were going to do, and that this is what we needed to do.

And indeed, at that point, voices of dissent became scarce.

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