In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us is a 2025 book by Stephen Macedo and Frances E. Lee that critically examines the policies of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and the institutions that promoted them. In the book, Macedo and Lee argue that political officials abdicated their responsibilities over policy-making when facing the pandemic to scientists and public health officials, who subsequently implemented wide-ranging and intrusive non-pharmaceutical interventions (ignoring a lack of evidence in favor of those interventions and the negative side effects those interventions would have on living standards and the economy) and instigated a moral panic against critics of those interventions, ultimately causing a collapse in public trust and a surge in political polarization over the course of the pandemic. The book received widespread acclaim in the media and from political scientists, who argued that it offered an insightful critique of political and academic institutions, that it demonstrated clearly the risks of enforcing intrusive consensus on society, and that it constituted an important contribution to literature examining political polarization in the 2020s. The Economist, Compact, The New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal all named it among the best books of 2025. The book, however, received significantly negative reviews from scientists and medical professionals, who argued that the book misrepresented public health data and the political scene during the pandemic, including downplaying the impact of the virus on health and behavior, downplaying the role of disinformation and conservative politicians in driving pandemic polarization, and uncritically accepting alternative pandemic-response strategies proposed by advocates of the Great Barrington Declaration without questioning their feasibility.
