In March 2020, Princeton University, like thousands of other higher education institutions around the country, sent home students, faculty, and staff to reduce the risk of infections from the novel coronavirus that was just beginning its catastrophic global rampage.

One of those faculty members, Frances Lee, recalled thinking that measures hurriedly enacted in response – such as school closures – were likely to fail.

“I had doubts about whether the policies that were being implemented would work,” said Lee, a professor of politics and public affairs and co-director of Princeton SPIA’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics. “I could see the how broadly the virus had spread around the world. It didn’t look containable to me.”

Five years and more than 7 million confirmed deaths, according to the World Health Organization, later, Lee’s fears about COVID-19 turned out to have been well founded. In a provocative new book, “In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us” (Princeton University Press), Lee and Stephen Macedo, the Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values, argue that “what might be thought of as the central truth-seeking departments of liberal democracy” — journalism, science, and universities — failed to encourage alternate viewpoints, failed to consider the significant costs of the measures enacted, especially among disadvantaged populations, failed to engage in “honest and open inquiry,” and failed “to follow reason and evidence without fear or favor.”

“We need a wider public conversation about how pandemic policies were made, as well as their social and economic costs,” Lee and Macedo write. “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.”

In an interview, Lee noted that experts who studied prior pandemics had warned about the lack of evidence that non-pharmaceutical measures were effective. Pandemic plans written before Covid acknowledged uncertainty as to whether these measures would work and — at the same time — pointed to their enormous societal costs. While there was some disagreement, the general consensus was that they could well do more harm than good.

“I couldn't understand why there was no skepticism,” she said. “And if the policies are not going to work, well, then we're paying very, very hefty costs — not just economic costs, though we shouldn't dismiss those, but also ethical ones.”

Lee said that the lack of any kind of risk-benefit analysis “completely short-circuited the whole process” of developing and implementing effective, ethical policies.

“It was sort of a domino effect,” she said. “Governments following the example in Wuhan, because they certainly threw out their pre-pandemic work in the midst of that crisis because of panic.”

“In Covid’s Wake” is the first comprehensive political assessment of how American institutions fared during the pandemic. Lee and Macedo present pre-COVID plans regarding how a respiratory pandemic should be handled, explore the origin of the coronavirus, examine China’s response, analyze the hyper-partisanship that was a hallmark of the period, explain the range of policies adopted by the 50 states, discuss how the science was politicized, and examine the role of experts during the crisis.

A large part of the problem, according to Lee, is that officials engaged in “wishful thinking,” assuming the measures would work and not reviewing emerging evidence that pointed to the opposite.

“It was a horrible crisis, but you have to be realistic as a public official,” she said. “I think that there was a lack of realism there, a preference to imagine that the world could be as we wanted it to be.”

COVID-19 was perceived to be an existential threat to humanity, she said, when “more careful thinking” would have led officials to more carefully assess both the threats from the virus and the threats from the response.  Officials would have been better served consulting “a wide array of voice” and researching the prior literature on these questions.

“They would have discovered a lot of uncertainty about the effectiveness of these measures, which should have tempered some of the response and made it more advisory,” Lee said. “Recommend that people take actions to protect themselves, but don't assume that you know what will work for the whole of society.”

Learning the lessons of what worked and what didn’t, Lee and Macedo conclude, is no mere academic exercise.

“If a national conversation on the Covid crisis is every going to take place, now is the time,” they write. “We believe that such a conversation is necessary to confront our failures to live up to basic norms of liberalism, science, and democracy — before the next occasion for existential fear arises.”