Free Speech Lessons In COVID’s Wake

Patrick J. Wolf is a Distinguished Professor of Education Policy and the 21 st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas. He has authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited five books and over 200 journal articles, book chapters, and policy reports on private school choice, charter schools, homeschooling, special education, civic outcomes, free speech, and public administration. Follow him on X (@FlowTap1).

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I hate to bring up the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a miserable time of panic, social isolation, and, for over 1 million Americans, death from a horrible disease. However, since the Justice Department launched an investigation into Dr. David Morens, a close aide to Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in late April, the pandemic has been back in the news. Morens is suspected of circumventing public records laws and destroying government documents related to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them. Morens, if guilty, tried to prevent us from learning.

The main lesson that I glean from the COVID pandemic is that free speech and viewpoint diversity should not be curtailed during a medical crisis. Challenging popular elite opinion is just as important, if not more so, when society faces an unexpected danger, such as a deadly “novel” virus.

Those thoughts were provoked by my reading and discussion of an outstanding, courageous, and engaging book by Princeton University scholars Stephen Macedo and Francis Lee about the many failures of individuals and institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us is unsparing in its explication of how elites in the U.S. and globally failed to meet the challenges of the pandemic with prudence and fairness. The authors explore three vital questions in the book:

• Why did we accept the widespread and ruthless suppression of liberties when there was no scientific evidence that they would yield significant health benefits?

• Why was censorship and the intolerance of dissent such a major aspect of the COVID response?

• What are the implications for academia and society?

First, why did we accept the widespread, ruthless, and unsupported suppression of liberties?

As the authors emphasize, prior to the pandemic, the elite consensus was that “`Communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.’” (p. 27) So, why did we allow elites to inflict lockdowns, social distancing, and masking mandates on us? The short answer is that it was in the interests of key actors, including ourselves, for us to surrender to their demands. Public health officials want to control human behavior because freedom entails risk. Politicians want to be seen as “doing something,” because being seen as a “do nothing” is political suicide. People are comforted by the thought that human action is protective against nature, that we are masters of our world. Declaring, “Let nature run its course,” scares the crap out of most people, so there is some psychological benefit to actions that seem to be protective even if they are not. Think of the many masked drivers we saw alone in their cars.

As the authors write, a timely 2019 Johns Hopkins University Report on preparing for a pandemic states that, in spite of the ineffectiveness and likely negative effects of the general category of interventions dubbed non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), which include masking and social distancing, “governments may resort to these measures to `abate fear’ or for other political reasons, such as to be seen as doing something or to appear to be in control.” (p. 32) While the JHU report stresses that political leaders should communicate to the public the clear downside of NPIs, even if they are recommending or mandating their use, it is naive to expect that politicians and their agents would muddy the waters by directing people in a crisis to do something and, in the same breath, explain to them the potential downsides. It is no surprise that elites refused to do so.

NIH Director Francis Collins is a great example of this problem. In a 2023 post-mortem on the “`public health mindset,’” Collins explained, “`You attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in the way that they never recover from…” (p. 167). A great tragedy is that the ruinous disruptions Collins acknowledges didn’t necessarily save a single life, a likelihood known to health officials pre-pandemic.

The World Health Organization abandoned its prior stance that NPIs are largely ineffective in a pandemic by quickly claiming that COVID could be “controlled.” (p. 51) The main reason for that about-face, in my view, was that the WHO could be controlled, by China, as the authors mention in several parts of the book. It was in China’s interest to both claim that they did not cause COVID and to claim that this novel virus, which they certainly didn’t manufacture in a sloppy lab, could be controlled, when neither was true. The empirical chapter in the book demonstrates that COVID outcomes were completely unrelated to the intensity and duration of lockdown, masking, and social distancing mandates.

In an especially poignant passage, an elderly woman recounts her despair during the pandemic (p. 194). The problem wasn’t so much for her that her friends were dying. That happens to anyone blessed (cursed?) with longevity. It was that they were dying and being buried alone, because hospital visits and large gatherings such as memorial services were banned during COVID. As the authors write, “After years of recommending social distancing, who can fail to appreciate the painful irony of the 2023 surgeon general declaring a ‘public health crisis of loneliness and isolation’”? (p. 198)

Why was censorship and the intolerance of dissent such a major aspect of the COVID response?

That’s the main question of the book. Censorship served the interests of three major players: Epidemiologists (to cover up the possibility of a lab leak); public health officials (who like to control other people’s behavior), and unionized teachers (who have a long history of supporting work restrictions even absent a pandemic).

The Wuhan Lab Leak Theory had the potential to do to epidemiology research what the Three Mile Island disaster did to nuclear power – set it back 60 years. That would have been career-ending for many prominent epidemiologists. That is why they had to steer the narrative about the source of COVID away from the likely truth of a lab leak, supported by plenty of circumstantial evidence. As the authors write, “With respect to the question of COVID origins, for example, there appear to have been an astonishing degree of politicization, significant undisclosed conflicts of interest, and apparent deception–all compounded by a media environment that censored and suppressed opinions diverging from government sources.” (p. 15)

Eventually, a dissenting group of epidemiologists muscled their way into the spotlight, at least temporarily. “The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration were doing exactly what scientists and academics are supposed to do. They challenged assumptions and made arguments based on their knowledge and expertise in an effort to persuade others that better policies could be devised.” (p. 103) But the well had been so badly poisoned by then that the dissenters were roundly vilified at the time.

Crises require swift action. Once politicians and their supporting institutions have adopted a specific strategy, in this case to control the spread until we reach zero COVID, they will use every weapon at their disposal to defend that strategy and cast aspersions on those who oppose it. Politicians no longer change their positions on major issues, and nobody apologizes. That leads to one of my favorite quotes in the book. An expert acknowledged that the pursuit of zero COVID would require extreme social distancing, as practiced in China. The authors point out, “`Extreme’ social distancing is certainly right: people were being welded into their apartments by authorities.” (p. 54)

What are the implications for academia and society?

What have we learned? First, as Macedo and Lee helpfully point out, “Simply to frame an issue as an existential threat is to precondition the policy response to it.” (p. 7) Once a “war on COVID” had been declared, letting nature run its course was seen as a position of disloyalty. And “loose lips sink ships,” so the dissenting position had to be censored to support the war effort. It is unreasonable and reckless for people to toss around the “existential threat” phrase as loosely as many do these days.

Art by The Apollonic

There are few true threats to human existence. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Doing so provides a clear playbook for autocrats. The authors write (p. 90) that, shockingly, “COVID revealed how autocracy can and does work.” Either acknowledge or invent a dangerous situation (e.g. the Nazi’s Krystal Nacht), declare martial law to deal with it, include censorship as a key requirement of martial law, treat dissent as criminal, watch the public “celebration of government controls in the name of [crisis] suppression,” and very soon you have Iran and all the human misery that goes with it. While thankfully, we did not go far down that dark path during COVID, we did traverse a bit of it, and that fact alone is frightening.

Why did Blue-state politicians, who maintained lockdowns much longer than Red-state politicians, suffer no apparent adverse political consequences for their policies? After all, 15 of 16 incumbent Democrat governors who ran for re-election in 2020, 2022, and 2024 were re-elected, the exact same number who ran and were re-elected in the three even-year elections prior to COVID.

As Slartibartfast states in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “I’d much rather be happy than right any day.” Blue-State voters were happy to follow their tribal consensus, even though it appears to have harmed their children and community. In their conclusion, Macedo and Lee quote a UK policy advisor, “`our panicked politicians lost their nerve.’” We should remember the two words on the cover of The Hitchhiker’s Guide: “Don’t panic.” The Hitchhiker’s Guide should be required reading for anyone advising the public.

Macedo and Lee urge us to choose introspection over panic or amnesia. “We also need greater willingness to acknowledge profound uncertainties, greater toleration of disagreement, and recognition of the reasonableness of people with varying views on such questions.” (p. 5) While I share their aspirations, I wonder whether we can reach that promised land in our current environment, where objective truth supposedly doesn’t exist, and Critical Race Theory tells us to evaluate every statement not by whether it is true but by whether it advances an important political agenda.

The authors of In COVID’s Wake conclude by stating, “institutions depend on participants’ commitment to honest and open inquiry, a willingness to follow reason and evidence without fear or favor, and to judge contending arguments with fairness and impartiality.” (p. 296) That compelling statement leads to my final observation. COVID taught me that free speech and toleration of political and social dissent are nothing short of the safeguards of human freedom. If they go, it’s game over. That’s why free speech and viewpoint diversity are the hill that I would die on. I hope that others are with me, because, like the elderly woman mentioned in the book, I just don’t want to die alone.

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