When the Experts Failed During COVID-19

Experts hate to be wrong. When I first started writing about the public’s hostility toward expertise and established knowledge more than a decade ago, I predicted that any number of crises—including a pandemic—might be the moment that snaps the public back to its senses. I was wrong. I didn’t foresee how some citizens and their leaders would respond to the cycle of advances and setbacks in the scientific process and to the inevitable limitations of human experts.

The coronavirus pandemic, in particular, would prove the perfect crucible for accelerating the decline of faith in experts. Paranoia and appeals to ignorance have long been part of the American political environment, but they were especially destructive at a time when the U.S. was riven by partisan hostility. The pandemic struck at multiple political and cultural weaknesses within the edifice of American life: A mysterious disease—from China, no less, a nation that typically serves as a source of American anxiety—forced citizens to rely on the media, including outlets that many of them already distrusted, for scattered pieces of information from white-jacketed experts and relatively unknown government officials.

Many elected leaders, especially at the national level, failed in fact to lead. The dysfunction of President Donald Trump’s administration, on COVID-19 and on so many other issues, has been amply documented in numerous books and articles. Despite the undeniable success of Operation Warp Speed, the government’s crash program to work with private industry to develop a vaccine in record time, Trump and his people have much to answer for—including the hesitancy they engendered among Americans to take the very vaccines that his administration helped develop.

The road to America’s pandemic meltdown, however, did not begin with Trump. When the coronavirus arrived, a significant number of Americans were already primed by the media, their political leaders, and their own stubborn narcissism to reject expert advice during a crisis. The collapse of gatekeeping authority in the media, the explosion of worthless online sources, the emergence of celebrity pseudo-experts, and the unwarranted self-confidence of millions of people who believed that they could simply “do their own research,” as the internet mantra has it, all combined to make a brutal outbreak of disease even more deadly.

[Uri Friedman: The coronavirus-denial movement now has a leader]

Nevertheless, where the death of expertise is concerned, the scientific community and its allies in the public-policy arena made two fundamental mistakes early on. One is that they tried to take the place of elected officials: They issued guidance and policy instructions while trying to fill the vacuum left by poor leadership in Washington, D.C., and other regions of the United States. And at the height of the lockdowns, doctors and local authorities in some cities made a nakedly political calculation about whether and when their ostensibly firm pandemic restrictions could be ignored.

Masks and lockdowns were among the most divisive pandemic measures. As usual, Trump was resolutely ignorant and self-centered. He and his movement coalesced around depicting such public-health measures as symbols of government autocracy. At a July 2020 White House meeting, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, advised him to advocate for mask mandates, which at that point even most Republicans supported. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, objected. “We can’t do the masks,” he told the president. “The base will just turn on you.” Trump sided with Meadows.

But many of Trump’s opponents themselves adopted a blinkered insistence on such mandates as their own version of political signaling. In an already polarized environment, each side hoisted their flags and charged into battle—with scant regard for evidence or expert advice.

The scientists unwisely stepped into this mess, with predictable results. The American public has little tolerance for nuance or complexity, and the recommendations on mask wearing were difficult to parse and changed over time. What kind of mask would work best? (An N-95 respirator—if worn correctly.) Would cloth masks work? Bandannas, maybe? (Probably not very well.) Should masks be worn everywhere? Indoors, outdoors—even at home?

The public wanted clear and unambiguous answers that the scientists could not give them: yes or no, safe or unsafe, on or off. Woefully unaccustomed to explaining complicated issues to ordinary citizens, they made a hash of the messaging and simply tried to push for masks as a generic measure, until many Americans—even those who wanted to be cooperative—gave up.

Advocates for lockdowns and strict masking rules argued that they had the stronger point in a time of uncertainty. Such prophylactic measures, they contended, even if ragged and inconsistent, were better than flatly ignoring manifest public-health dangers. But “following the science” means following all of the science, and these rigid, dogmatic responses downplayed the fact that the science was also showing that some COVID-19 policies did, in fact, carry a destructive price. The lockdowns, as the COVID Crisis Group (a nonpartisan collection of scholars and scientists) noted later, were not a solution but a “sledgehammer” that took the place of better preparation and resulted from an inability to agree on almost anything else.

The subsequent extended closure of public spaces in the U.S. produced deep social and economic wounds, but the controversy over when to reopen schools was a particularly important area of expert failure. The closures of educational institutions went on too long in many parts of the country, resulting in emotional and intellectual damage to American students.

[Read: Paging Dr. Hamblin: Why didn’t America’s shutdowns work?]

Many progressives, however, bitterly contested growing evidence both that in-person schooling was relatively safe and that school closures had created catastrophic learning loss. This was in many cases a stubborn reaction, a kind of polar opposition to the obdurate people on the right who dismissed almost all pandemic measures as oppression. For the left, as the New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait later noted, “the evidence did eventually win out,” while the Republicans descended into an “epistemic disaster” that persists to this day.

Unfortunately, the evidence did not win out in time to prevent harm, especially in schools. Public-school parents wanted their children to be back in the classroom, but many teachers were hesitant, and one of their largest unions, the American Federation of Teachers, and its leader, Randi Weingarten, were resistant to the point of militancy. Weingarten warned in July 2020 that the AFT might even support strikes if teachers were forced back to the classroom.

The pressure from the AFT had a clear effect on national policy subsequently. Within weeks of taking office in 2021, President Joe Biden backpedaled on his campaign promises to open schools. According to my Atlantic colleague Franklin Foer, Biden acquiesced to writing off the rest of the academic year as “the price of peace” with the union.

The teachers’ concerns were understandable, but the intransigence of some of their union leaders did significant harm to their already battered standing. Meanwhile, over those same months, another expert community—this time, medical professionals—needlessly inflicted a grievous wound on the impartiality of their own expertise.

On May 25, 2020, a white police officer murdered a Black man named George Floyd during an arrest in Minneapolis. The incident was captured on video and protests soon broke out all over America.

Doctors and scientists had a problem on their hands. Floyd’s killing produced an outpouring of grief and anger: Americans wanted to gather, they wanted to support one another, they wanted to vent their fury, and they wanted to shout their demands for justice into the face of their government. And yet because of COVID-19 restrictions, most Americans could not congregate in public. They could not go to church or sing in a choir. They could not celebrate their marriages, bury their dead, or even, in some areas, meet outdoors for a picnic. Schoolchildren were still trapped in their home.

America’s cities were beginning to boil, and public-safety officials faced a no-win situation: If states and localities tried to suppress the demonstrations, their directions would be ignored. But if they allowed the protests, they were admitting that the pandemic restrictions were capricious rules that could bend in the political wind. How could one cause be important enough to allow thousands upon thousands of people to gather in close proximity, while all other citizens were told that their rights—including their freedom to worship and to engage in peaceful assembly—were secondary to the needs of public health and that they must stay home?

[Read: Facing a Covid-19 resurgence and unable to act]

Dr. Anthony Fauci was at the time the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the the U.S. government’s main public-health spokespeople. He would later enter right-wing demonology caricatured as a leftist authoritarian, but in June 2020 he gave one of the most diplomatic and sensible answers to be found among the scientists:

It’s a difficult situation. We have the right to peacefully demonstrate and the demonstrators are exercising that right … It’s a delicate balance because the reasons for demonstrating are valid and yet the demonstration itself puts oneself at an additional risk.

The only thing we can do as public-health officials is to keep warning people to be careful. And if you are going to go out, please make sure you wear a mask and you keep the mask on at all times.

Other doctors, however, were eager to show solidarity with the protests. In June 2020, more than 1,200 medical professionals signed an open letter supporting the demonstrations, casting Floyd’s death as a health menace on the same level as the pandemic. “Infectious disease and public health narratives adjacent to demonstrations against racism must be consciously anti-racist, and infectious disease experts must be clear and consistent in prioritizing an anti-racist message,” they wrote. “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.”

Noble if stilted rhetoric, but even people who empathized with the protesters had to notice that the previous strict prohibitions on gathering were now, for the sake of an important political cause, apparently negotiable. According to The Washington Post, Ranu S. Dhillon, an infectious-disease expert at Harvard Medical School, characterized the protests as risky but necessary—just like working in a nursing home or grocery store, an approach that showed how out of touch many professionals were with ordinary people who were afraid to visit elderly relatives or go to the market.

The available evidence does not so far suggest that the protests created a major surge in COVID-19 infections. But to argue that the sudden reversal in public-health advice did not result in more infections is a post hoc rationalization—and, for experts, a trap.

At the time, the medical guidance was clear that people should not gather in large groups or be in proximity, and certainly not while singing and shouting. If doctors believed that the risks of such gatherings could be mitigated with masks or by being outdoors, they should have already been pressing for the lifting of the strictest measures everywhere, with the same advice they gave protesters. But if they were still holding to the theories that underpinned the lockdowns—and especially the school closures—then their approval of the demonstrations meant they were consciously setting aside those concerns in the name of a political cause with which they agreed.

Either way, they were acting as advocates rather than scientists. In the words of the environmental journalist Peter M. Sandman, they “clearly damaged the credibility of public health as a scientific enterprise that struggles to be politically neutral.”

The global pandemic emergency is formally over, and the experts are still assessing what they did right and wrong—as they should. But in the U.S., the political damage from the coronavirus wars remains. The most intrusive measures, including lockdowns and masking, are long gone. For most Americans, especially the elderly and other vulnerable groups, avoiding the most serious consequences of COVID-19 has become chiefly a matter of getting vaccinated and staying current on booster shots, as they would with flu and pneumonia.

And yet, the U.S. still lags the rest of the developed world in protection against COVID-19. According to the CDC’s most up-to-date data, from 2023, some 70 percent of Americans received an initial vaccination, but fewer than 20 percent have had any booster. The rates are much better among people over 65, who—for various reasons, including their awareness of the disease’s increased danger for their age group—are more attentive to getting vaccinated.

The ultimate numbers, however, obscure the deep political divisions over vaccination, preventive measures, and science itself. A New York Times/Siena poll in 2023 found that nearly 70 percent of likely Republican voters would trust “the common sense of ordinary people” over “the knowledge of trained experts.” (In a Pew poll a year earlier, 51 percent of Americans said that public-health officials had done an excellent or good job at managing the pandemic, but that number was anchored by the 72 percent of Democrats who felt that way; only 29 percent of Republicans agreed.)

Trump, of course, has continued his crude deployment of ignorance and fear in his second bid to regain the American presidency. When new variants of the virus began to spread in the summer of 2023, Trump released a video decrying the “tyrants” who were going to impose new pandemic mandates. “We will not comply,” he said, defying measures that did not actually exist. Fortunately, most people in the United States now have some level of immunity, and governments at all levels have learned a great deal about monitoring and treating the disease.

Nonetheless, as the COVID Crisis Group noted in 2023, “one key predictor of infections and total COVID deaths” in each state during the pandemic “was the share of people that voted for President Trump in the 2020 presidential election.” Or, as a member of the group remarked in an overview of the pandemic’s course and the American lives lost, “Trump was a comorbidity.”

[Jay Varma: The public-health calculus has shifted]

The experts failed at some important points, especially in the early days of the pandemic, but much of what the public believed to be failure was better described as science—the way that knowledge itself is developed as experts worked through a new problem with limited data. They argued and tested competing explanations and solutions. Such debates and discussions, along with the inevitable costs of trial and error during a time of emergency, are the normal processes of scientific investigation. But America’s political environment in 2020, poisoned by ignorance and rigid tribalism, virtually guaranteed that almost all aspects of the pandemic response—both failures and successes—would become divisive and partisan issues.

Experts are fallible human beings, and they will sometimes give poor advice or make mistakes. But an advanced society and its government cannot do without them, no matter what a significant number of Americans seem to believe. To ignore expert advice is simply not a realistic option: Policy making is complex, and citizens have some responsibility to stay informed about issues that directly affect their own well-being. Experts always need to remember that they are the servants, not the masters, of a democratic society and a republican government. But as James Madison presciently warned, if citizens are to be the authors of their own fate, they must first equip themselves with knowledge, and then practice the civic virtue based on reason and cooperation that makes an informed democracy possible.

Before the next crisis—and there will always be another—citizens, experts, and policy makers have to engage in a difficult debate about the role of experts and educated elites in American democracy. For now, such possibilities have been thwarted by the partisan combat that erupted after the coronavirus pandemic. I still have confidence that we can, at some point, embrace the reality-based understandings we once accepted as obvious: Chief among them is that although every single vote in a democracy is as equally valid as every other, every single opinion is not.

America needs to reestablish new rules for productive engagement between the educated elites and the society they serve. But after the political events and natural disasters of the past decade, the creation of a more productive relationship between the experts and the public is going to be a challenge, and it will require time. The sooner the better, because the clock, as always, is counting down to the next unknown disaster.

This essay is adapted from a new edition of the author’s book The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters.