How COVID Broke Our Trust In Government

Hard questions still need to be asked about the pandemic response.

Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies in Congress, June 3, 2024. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

In early June, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the face of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, testified in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. It was an ugly and mostly pointless scene. The testimony bogged down in a partisan debate about the origins of the virus, and America’s yawning divides were on display, with Democrats falling all over themselves to defend Fauci and Republicans attacking him as the devil incarnate. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) even refused to call Fauci “doctor.” Instead, in a display of playground bullying that speaks to our modern lack of civility, she insisted on referring to him as “mister.” 

But the real tragedy was in the lost opportunity that the hearing represented. There really are plenty of questions to be asked about America’s response to COVID-19. And Dr. Fauci was at the center of much of our response. It’s increasingly clear that our government didn’t know what it was doing—how could anyone, at least in the early months?—but also that public health officials and our political leaders refused to learn as the pandemic ground on, instead disseminating favored narratives with more and more vehemence. “Follow the science” became a mantra for all good people—unintentionally ironic given that there was never much science. The cost couldn’t be higher: a total breakdown in trust in government. 

Of course, one of the big unanswered questions is how lockdowns became our strategy. There was no precedent, no study that showed that lockdowns would save lives. Yes, for centuries, infected people had been quarantined in their homes, where they would either recover or die, but that’s very different than locking down an entire city. The West, desperate and afraid, more or less just copied China’s draconian policy, one that the World Health Organization called “unprecedented in public health history.” Early on, in March 2020, Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told The Washington Post that “these kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective.” And yet, by the summer of 2020, it was hard to find a virtuous person who wasn’t patting themselves on the back for “staying safe” at home (albeit while having essential workers deliver Amazon goodies and meals).

The initial rationale, which was to protect hospital capacity, made some degree of sense in hard-hit areas of the country. But as it became clear that most hospitals in most places were not overwhelmed, the rationale shifted to abolishing COVID-19 entirely. Many of the country’s biggest cities continually reimposed lockdowns whenever there was an uptick in COVID cases—not just telling people to shelter in place, but also closing small businesses and restaurants, outlawing sports events and social gatherings, and shutting down in-school learning. Even in the face of evidence that this was not influenza—healthy children were not likely to die from the virus, nor, according to multiple studies, were schools hotbeds of transmission—schools remained closed. Ultimately, less than 20% of schools offered full-time classroom instruction during the fall 2020 semester. 

The basic questions went not only unanswered—but unasked. What would happen when restrictions were lifted? Could you make a highly contagious respiratory disease go away once it was widely seeded through the population? Who needed to be protected the most? Was the collateral damage from lockdowns worth the cost? Those who did ask such questions were shamed, accused of not caring about human life.

There can be no better example of how debate was stifled, and of the role Dr. Fauci played in stifling it, than the Great Barrington Declaration. In October 2020, three scientists, Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, signed an open letter calling for the “focused protection” of high-risk populations such as the elderly or those with pre-existing medical conditions, while allowing other people to function as normally as possible. Although thousands of scientists eventually signed the declaration, there was virtually no public debate—because public health officials wouldn’t allow it. When Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through 2021, heard about the GBD, he promptly sent an email to Dr. Fauci. “This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention … There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Dr. Collins wrote. “Is it underway?” he asked. It was indeed. The press dutifully followed the lead of Drs. Collins and Fauci; eventually, Facebook even censored mentions of the Great Barrington declaration. 

We don’t know the precise details of how discussion of the GBD was shut down—i.e. of how it came to be that suppression of the topic was so uniform across news media and social media. It’s important that we understand that process better. 

Because here we are. If there’s a convincing case—not just an assertion—to be made that lockdowns saved a significant number of lives, no one has yet made it. On the contrary. In the summer of 2022, The Lancet published a study comparing the COVID infection rate and death rate. It concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 deaths disproportionately clustered in U.S. states with lower mean years of education, higher poverty rates, limited access to quality health care, and less interpersonal trust—the trust that people report having in one another.” These sociological factors appear to have made a bigger difference than lockdowns, which were “associated with a statistically significant and meaningfully large reduction in the cumulative infection rate, but not the cumulative death rate.” 

If the benefits were debatable, the costs were immense. Even putting aside the lost livelihoods, the sky-high national debt resulting in part from the two huge spending packages passed by President Trump and by President Biden in order to cope with the effect stay-at-home orders had on the economy, the increase in mental health issues, and on and on, by far the biggest cost was born by those whom we were all supposed to protect—children. The Annie E. Casey Foundation just published a white paper about the unprecedented declines in student math and reading proficiency brought on by the pandemic. Reading and math scores plummeted. Six indicators of child well-being worsened between 2019 and 2022, including educational achievement and the child and teen death rate. The child and teen death rate also remained elevated in 2022, with 17.0 deaths per 100,000 children and adolescents, compared to 14.7 in 2019.

Dr. Fauci has been asked in various fora whether he regrets his advocacy of lockdowns. “Sometimes when you do draconian things, it has collateral negative consequences … on the economy, on the schoolchildren,” he conceded during the 2022 Atlantic Festival. But, he added, “The only way to stop something cold in its tracks is to try and shut things down.” Except it was never possible to stop COVID cold, unless you kept people locked in their own individual boxes forever. Given the cost of lockdowns, wouldn’t it be worth understanding how the rationale shifted from protecting the hospitals to doing the impossible?

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If lockdowns are the most dramatic example of how what was held out to be science actually was not scientific at all, there were many others. Masks, for instance. Maybe they protect individuals. But do mask mandates work? Meta-analysis has found no evidence that they do. The rule that we had to be six feet apart, the sad remnants of which you still see in many public places? “It sort of just appeared,” Fauci said during a preliminary interview for the congressional hearing, adding that he “was not aware of any studies” that supported it. The incoherent way in which already unscientific rules were enforced, like allowing diners to take off their masks while eating, but insisting that they put them on to walk to the restroom? Or forcing toddlers to wear masks? Or refusing to recognize the basic facts of how COVID was being transmitted, instead closing parks and shaming people for going to the beach, while sending the less well-off back into cramped, poorly ventilated apartments? How did all of this happen?

It may always have been too late to figure out COVID-19’s origins, given China’s determination to resist inquiries. But if there were a possibility early on, then that too was stymied, because you weren’t allowed to ask. “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots,” New York Times health and science reporter Apoorva Mandavilli tweeted in 2021, reflecting the general view in polite progressive society. Public health officials, including Dr. Fauci, demeaned anyone who dared to raise the idea. “Dr. Fauci Throws Cold Water on Conspiracy Theory That Coronavirus Was Created in a Chinese Lab” was one typical headline. But, as unredacted e-mails have shown, NIH scientists close to Fauci gave credence to the hypothesis in conversations amongst themselves. In his congressional testimony, Fauci conceded that there “has not been definitive proof one way or the other” of COVID-19’s origins. Then why couldn’t the question be raised in public?

The vaccine was a marvelous accomplishment, a triumph of both science and of the industrial mobilization needed to produce a vaccine in massive quantities. And yet, even that triumph was undermined by the same intertwined forces of public health and the mainstream media. People were forced to be vaccinated under the theory that vaccinated people didn’t transmit. “This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” said then CDC head Rochelle Walensky in the summer of 2021, reflecting the belief that only unvaccinated people were getting and spreading COVID-19. But her views reflected wishful thinking, not science. No one knew whether vaccinated people transmitted, because transmission was not an end point of the vaccine’s clinical trials, as both drug company executives and the FDA had acknowledged. Even as data emerged that healthy young men might face more risks from the vaccine than they did from COVID-19 itself, there was a refusal to acknowledge that vaccination could be a matter of personal choice. Today, the U.S. is an outlier in continuing to push boosters on everyone over five years old, regardless of the underlying risk factors. Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at the University of Pennsylvania, has worried about the effect incoherent recommendations will have on people’s willingness to get vaccines that are actually needed.

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Why? That’s a question that needs answering.

The problems with our COVID-19 response went deeper than incoherent, unscientific public health mandates. If the global financial crisis of 2008 started a mistrust of capitalism, the pandemic exacerbated it. For instance, despite what we say about the importance of small business to our economy, people saw that when push came to pandemic-era shove, small businesses suffered while big business benefitted, both from the largesse of the Federal Reserve and from a lockdown policy that closed small operators and left big ones open. Again, why? Is there a way to make sure that doesn’t happen in the future?

We also saw the downsides of a healthcare system in which capitalism often runs amok. Nursing homes, which have been infiltrated by private equity and run solely for their bottom lines, were death traps in the pandemic. If we had a hospital system in this country, instead of an incoherent, uncoordinated mishmash, then there might not have been overrun hospitals, because it would have been possible to transfer patients from one overwhelmed hospital to another one with beds. If we hadn’t outsourced manufacturing of essential goods like masks and gowns to China, then maybe there wouldn’t have been such a mad scramble for PPE. Shouldn’t this make us think more deeply about how critical infrastructure should be managed?

It turns out that our world is more fragile than we’d wanted to believe. The fragility isn’t just because a pandemic can happen, out of the blue. It’s because our institutions, from capitalism to public health, also rely upon trust, and trust itself is fragile. It breaks easily. So it needs to be cherished and protected. But doing that requires humility, an ability to say “I don’t know,” or “I was wrong,” along with an ability to tolerate uncomfortable questions—all things that we refused to do in the pandemic. It requires a willingness to look at the way our systems work and be honest about who benefits, and who gets hurt, and think about how to change things if we don’t want the same thing to play out again. “Trust, not information, was the key,” wrote Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at Princeton, in a recent New York Times column. “But just when it was needed most, some of the officials in charge of our Covid response undermined it.” As she pointed out, once people lose trust in institutions, they become more open to conspiracy theories. 

If there is a way back, it has to begin with a hard look at the past.

Bethany McLean is a contributing editor at Business Insider and Vanity Fair. She's the co-author of three books: Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis and The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind.

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