How Christian Anthropology Explains Pandemic Mistakes

When COVID-19 became a dominant factor in American life in 2020, virtually every institution of higher learning sent students home and went online around spring break. That was the beginning of a new government regime that eventually included mandatory masking and social distancing, and attempts at a vaccine mandate. It inspired the growth of remote work and education. It led to restrictions on church gatherings and funerals and to loved ones dying alone in hospitals. It caused devastating losses of jobs and business revenue, a stock market meltdown, and runaway government spending.

Now that we’ve gained a little time and space from the crisis, we’re seeing a reckoning unfold. Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, both political scientists teaching at Princeton University, wrote In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us to evaluate our national response to the pandemic and the roles that scientific and medical elites played in it. The account they offer is devastating.

This book is particularly powerful because it was written by Ivy League elites and published by an Ivy League press. This isn’t an outsider critique. It’s a case compiled and a judgment rendered by individuals who occupy space among American elite culture. Additionally, the authors have gathered substantial evidence for their claims.

Unexpected Apology

In July 2023, I attended the Braver Angels convention at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health during much of the COVID-19 pandemic, had frequently interacted with our group and was on the program for the convention. His participation made news because he offered what might be construed as an apology for his leadership during the pandemic.

When asked by his host to answer for the many negative effects of our national response, Collins gave the kind of direct answer that had been lacking in the middle of the crisis. He recognized the damage done and admitted he and others in the public health apparatus had failed to take into account the effects on children and religious communities, the economic wreckage, and various other results of our pandemic response. Collins acknowledged that his response to COVID-19 had been narrowly focused on preventing the virus’s spread at all costs.

As I stood in the back of the room, his answer took my breath away. The man who had brilliantly overseen the Human Genome Project admitted to what many of us had suspected: a potentially catastrophic misjudgment.

I defended Collins when his remarks became public. I argued that the real failure had come from our political leaders. It had been their job to account for factors other than pure public health. With a few exceptions, they’d simply deferred to the medical and scientific experts.

Unsettling Evidence

However, it turns out there’s more to the story. In Covid’s Wake spotlights evidence of American public health officials such as Anthony Fauci and Collins trying to shape the narrative over the virus’s origin by marginalizing good-faith critics. They went to great lengths to undermine any investigation into the theory that the virus was leaked from a laboratory performing gain-of-function research, which is research that Fauci and Collins both supported.

In Covid’s Wake also demonstrates how the pandemic response went against what we knew before the virus hit. Before the pandemic, public health consensus dictated that nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPI) like masking, social distancing, and lockdowns weren’t worth the massive social disruption they’d impose. Looking back from the other side of the pandemic, it appears the original judgment was correct.

The pandemic response went against what we knew before the virus hit.

Governments such as Sweden, which resisted the NPI approach, have largely been vindicated. It was good to try to protect the elderly, but by and large, life needed to go on for the rest of the population. Yet during the confusion of the pandemic, Sweden ended up as an outlier because China claimed it was prevailing over the virus with a much stricter policy. It has become clear that China wasn’t really winning, but many in the public health community largely accepted those claims and tried to follow suit.

When Collins made his apologetic statement, the other panelist shook his head ruefully and remarked, “Collateral damage.” It’s good that Collins apologizes now, but if the book can be believed (and I think it can), then Collins, Fauci, and others actively worked to prevent important questions from being asked, evidence from being weighed, and alternatives from being considered.

Understanding Anthropology

Amid a wave of suspicion toward institutions in our culture, the evidence of In Covid’s Wake won’t increase trust in political leaders or encourage deference to elite opinion in the future. The people making decisions about our nation’s COVID-19 response didn’t cover themselves in glory during that deeply challenging hour.

Macedo and Lee expose the flawed decisions through careful analysis designed to shape future policy decisions. Their approach differs drastically from Deborah Birx’s 2022 memoir, Silent Invasion, which garnered national attention for its sharp criticism of President Trump along with her admission that “two weeks to flatten the curve” was a myth invented to begin an indefinite lockdown. In Covid’s Wake will surprise some readers because it shows that many of the trusted experts weren’t making entirely altruistic decisions.

Yet the lessons that Macedo and Lee draw from their research shouldn’t surprise those who understand Christian theological anthropology. We look at the nature of human beings and see sinfulness, pride, self-protectiveness, and a propensity to misuse power.

Common grace often restrains the worst excesses. Yet apart from Christ, many of us would struggle with the desire to abuse power. We spend our lives seeking sanctification to take us off our counterfeit thrones and to bow before God’s righteous rule.

The authors of In Covid’s Wake saw pride. They saw a disregard for those who disagreed in good faith. They saw a willingness to use power to prevail where honest debate would have been better. They saw a willingness to impose costs on those least prepared to bear them. They saw a laptop class ruling like mandarins from their home offices. They don’t explain their observations in terms of sin—they don’t have a category for it.

We spend our lives seeking sanctification to take us off of our counterfeit thrones and to bow before God’s righteous rule.

However, they do plead with readers to abandon the pride, classism, and privilege that led to a failure of more reliable cognitive processes of scientific inquiry and legitimate critical evaluation. Though they lack the words to describe the natural human condition that leads to abuses of power, it’s clear they understand something about it from their secular perch.

The temptation for many readers of In Covid’s Wake will be to say, “I told you so.” Yet the bigger lessons for Christians should be that power tends to accentuate sinful tendencies and that sin will always be exposed in time. There’s no way we’ll make correct decisions all the time, but we’ll always be well served by pursuing truth, goodness, and beauty with generosity toward those who dissent. In Covid’s Wake offers pastors and church leaders a powerful case study to help them lead through difficult circumstances with grace and wisdom.