Good morning.
Two of Fortune’s favorite alumni, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, have a new book out this week called The Big Fail, that examines how the U.S. badly bungled the COVID pandemic. Partisans will look to see where the authors come down on the great public health debates of the last four years: Lockdown or not; masks or no masks; vaccine or anti-vax. But partisans will be disappointed. McLean and Nocera are equal opportunity attack dogs. They have blistering criticism of Fauci and Trump, Cuomo and Abbott, Newsom and DeSantis, as well as the CDC, the teachers’ unions, The Business Roundtable, and just about everyone else. No one is spared. The only policy they find praiseworthy is Operation Warp Speed, which developed a COVID vaccine in record time. (For what it’s worth, I’d give more credit than they do to the economic policy makers who prevented a prolonged recession by stepping on the monetary and fiscal accelerators—even if they kept their foot on the gas for too long.)
So what’s the lesson? Here’s my takeaway: There’s little evidence that countries or communities with hard lockdowns and firm mask mandates did better than those without. There’s also little evidence that rich countries did better than poor, or authoritarian societies did better than democratic. In fact, the only variable that seems to explain COVID-fighting success is social trust. Societies with relatively high levels of trust—in each other, in their governments, in science, etc.—did better than those without.
