Pandemic Dogma, Revisited

The pandemic will certainly be remembered as one of the most significant events of our lifetimes. It should also be remembered as a time when society lost its head.

We’re not here to criticize the way universities and governments handled the pandemic. After all, it was a period of intense uncertainty with lives on the line; many decision-makers did the best they could with the information they had at the time. Besides, there’s now plenty of literature dedicated to analyzing the policymaking missteps during the pandemic in extreme detail — and multiple pandemic policy-related courses at Harvard.

But this focus on the tactical mistakes made by faceless, behemoth institutions ignores the larger human dynamic at play. The more troubling story of the pandemic — and one that we must acknowledge — is the way that society steamrolled over this uncertainty and enforced adherence to a single, majority view. Particularly for us, as students of a university that has truth in its motto, this turn to dogmatism above critical thinking should be unacceptable.

Take the debate over the origin of the coronavirus, a story that has gained heightened attention in past months after the United States Department of Energy and the FBI stated, with low to moderate levels of confidence, that the pandemic most likely emerged from a lab leak.

For the majority of the pandemic, however, this position was so broadly attacked that outwardly expressing it was taboo. In February 2020, 27 scientists penned a statement in the Lancet, a top medical journal, in which they wrote, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The World Health Organization’s investigative team chair said the theory was “extremely unlikely” and “isn’t a hypothesis we suggest implies further study.” Discussions of the theory on Facebook were at one point taken down and kept from spreading. The New York Times called the idea one that “has been largely considered a fringe theory.”

We still don’t know where the coronavirus came from — we might never definitively know. But this is a fairly cut-and-dry case of pandemic madness: The lab leak theory was taken seriously by many reasonable people, well-educated on the topic — and with no strong evidence to the contrary, it was dismissed and censored for years. And many of us participated.

The national discourse around the vaccine roll-out was similarly crazed. Vaccine campaigns emphasized the selfishness inherent in passing up the vaccine and putting high-risk populations in danger. Those campaigns successfully suppressed even sensible vaccine skepticism, such as unease over rare but severe side effects. People who expressed concerns were portrayed as having little care for anyone but themselves. How could they, in good conscience, forgo a vaccine that would prevent infection and its resulting negative externalities?

This argument is sensible, but it was taken too far.

It’s now evident that the vaccines pose legitimate areas of investigation. There’s a lively debate about whether mRNA-based coronavirus vaccines increase the — albeit rare — risk of heart inflammation, particularly for young males. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have even noted considerations for clinicians given this risk.

Additional questions about specific vaccines appeared. The CDC ultimately downgraded their recommendation of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after reports of the heightened risk of blood clots — even as these cases were highly rare: 60 cases were reported and nine people died. In a similar vein, given the mixed conclusions of research on the effectiveness of subsequent booster shots, there might be a threshold at which the varied side effects of continued boosting outweigh the protection from infection.

This shouldn’t be misunderstood as a vindication of the skeptics. These are each complicated questions that the scientific community will continue to study for years to come. Rather, the point is that we missed out on having these conversations at all — or, rather, having them productively.

Some people who voiced concerns were bullied and forced to leave their jobs. This only inflamed the fury of the right-wing skeptics, potentially jeopardizing the credibility of other health messaging. And the enforcer of these social norms was not some amorphous thing out there — it was us.

Let’s call a spade a spade: Regardless of your view on who is right and who is wrong, this was a dark period of discourse in this country, one that blatantly turned away from truth-seeking.

What was particularly peculiar during the pandemic was not just the groupthink effect — a weaker version of this manifests itself somewhat regularly — but just how quickly the mob moved from one dogma to the next, sometimes in direct contradiction with the last. You get the feeling of whiplash, being pulled from one slogan (don’t trust Trump’s rushed vaccine) to the next (vaccine skepticism is anti-science). The science was messy, while the narratives were easy.

The pandemic forced us to make quick, important decisions with very little information. The rational response would be to be critical of our beliefs and measured in our actions.

Instead, some combination of action bias, fear, and group polarization pushed us in the complete opposite direction. We chose to have weak opinions, strongly held.

In our eyes, the pandemic was the first time we saw reasonable people with reasonable ideas be terrified of speaking out. A survey of the most catastrophic events in human history typically rhymes with this description — this should be alarming.

In short, we saw some of our worst instincts poke their head out during the pandemic. It’s important to interrogate what we believed, remember why we believed it, and honestly investigate if, based on the information at the time, that was the right decision.

It’s not a fun exercise — it takes us back into a sort of bad dream — but it’s crucial to prevent another slow slip into mob morality.

Roman C. Ugarte ’24 is an Applied Math in Economics concentrator in Eliot House. K. Oskar Schulz ’22 is currently on leave founding a startup in New York City. Their column, “Under-indexed,” runs on alternate Wednesdays.