In Covids Wake, Stephen Macedo
In Covids Wake, Stephen Macedo
1 Rating(s)
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In Covid's Wake
How Our Politics Failed Us

Author: Stephen Macedo, Frances Lee

Narrator: Curtis Michael Holland

Unabridged: 11 hr 41 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/15/2025


Synopsis

The Covid pandemic quickly led to the greatest mobilization of emergency powers in human history. By early April 2020, half the world's population were living under quarantine. The most devastating pandemic in a century and the policies adopted in response to it upended life as we knew it. In this book, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee examine our pandemic response and pose some provocative questions: Why did we ignore pre-Covid plans for managing a pandemic? Did we adequately consider the costs and benefits of different policy options? And, aside from vaccines, did the policies adopted work as intended?

With In Covid's Wake, Macedo and Lee offer the first comprehensive—and candid—political assessment of how our institutions fared during the pandemic. They describe how, influenced by Wuhan's lockdown, governments departed from their existing pandemic plans. The policies adopted largely benefited the laptop class and left so-called essential workers unprotected; extended school closures hit the least-privileged families the hardest. Science became politicized and dissent was driven to the margins. In the next crisis, Macedo and Lee warn, we must not forget the deepest values of liberal democracy: tolerance and open-mindedness, respect for evidence and its limits, a willingness to entertain uncertainty, and a commitment to telling the whole truth.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Samuel on March 20, 2025

This book will likely serve as the one of the first to examine how academia and the elite lost the trust of the general public and political class they ought to serve. To me the core arguments of the book was: * That an "elite laptop class", those who had the wealthy and privilege to be able to work......more

Goodreads review by Andy on June 21, 2025

Alas, this is still not the book that explains the COVID pandemic. The authors demand clarity of thought and language from organizations like the WHO, and they are right to do so. Indeed, they do bring up many good points. But then their arguments are mired in inflammatory rhetoric and fuzzy logic. N......more

Goodreads review by Courtney on June 07, 2025

Wow. Mind blown. Full disclosure, I definitely was a follower of all Covid protocols and dismissed naysayers as difficult, probably due to my own risk status. This book, written by two self-professed liberal progressives, unveils conflicts of interest, deliberate lies and coverups, and suppression o......more

Goodreads review by Anita Geisler on June 21, 2025

As someone in the medical profession caring for children, I witnessed first hand (and continue to see) the devastation to kids. In real time I had scratched my head about the draconian school closures. This book methodically, with the use of discovered emails, lays out how the narrative took precede......more

Goodreads review by Ian on May 01, 2025

Some thorough research presented lucidly. Though I'd prefer less in-depth study of data in the middle chapters and more detail on social media platforms behavior during the pandemic. Not enough was said on that topic. also, to present Hayek as a laudatory figure to end your book off with is question......more