On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” Stephen Macedo, a Professor of Politics at Princeton, said that there was some dissent against coronavirus lockdowns but then there was an apparent consensus that lockdowns were “the correct strategy, that everyone needed to be on board for, that there needed to be a sense of vital unity, that government, the academy, science, journalism all needed to pull together and that this was what we were going to and that this is what we needed to do.” And then “voices of dissent became scarce, social media companies began removing some postings that were at odds with government messaging, and dissent dwindled over the summer and into the fall.”
“NewsHour” Correspondent William Brangham said, “One of the main themes of this book, as it seems to me, is that, in the early, crazy days of this pandemic, as our leaders were debating lockdowns, how to respond, that any dissent over — or real debate about the costs and benefits of those actions was squelched.”
Macedo responded, “Well, it’s interesting, in March 2020, as the lockdowns were being enacted in the United States and across many Western countries, there were dissenters who spoke up in March. Some very well-known people warned that these measures were unlikely to be successful and would be very costly. And then a consensus seemed to develop in April and May that the kinds of strategies enacted by the Chinese and that had been implemented in Italy, a national lockdown, and across much of the United States, that that was the correct strategy, that everyone needed to be on board for, that there needed to be a sense of vital unity, that government, the academy, science, journalism all needed to pull together and that this was what we were going to and that this is what we needed to do. And, indeed, at that point, voices of dissent became scarce, social media companies began removing some postings that were at odds with government messaging, and dissent dwindled over the summer and into the fall.”
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