Moving forward without ever looking back
A few weeks later, Europe was hit hard with the first catastrophic Covid surges — hospitals overwhelmed, bodies piling up, patients struggling to breathe in hallways — and the media started taking Covid seriously.
In a sense, this is exactly what is supposed to happen — people saw new information and changed their minds. But the fact that there was an abrupt swerve was rarely acknowledged.
When a journalist writes a piece that contains a clear factual inaccuracy requiring a correction, it's a pretty big deal. I've had to issue corrections, and quite a few people are involved: my boss has to spend a fair bit of time working with me on the wording, and their boss has to sign off.
Corrections are a high priority in the media — people will drop lots of other work to get a correction to a piece up. Journalists feel real pressure not to get things factually wrong, and to fix them when they do. A reporter having written several pieces that needed serious corrections is the kind of thing that will absolutely show up negatively on a performance review.
But there's no clear mechanism for similar reflection when a piece doesn't necessarily get the facts wrong, but just frames them wrongly. That's a problem, because framing can do just as much to misinform readers as facts.
The price of ignoring getting it wrong
In the case of the Covid pandemic, early coverage that dismissed peoples' fears and suggested they were irrational probably delayed our collective response — and lastingly decreased the credibility of the media and public health communicators when they later needed to muster a serious response.
A lot of the fault here lies with public health officials, many of whom initially downplayed the threat and called the lab origin theory a conspiracy. But too often the media tended to treat these proclamations without the skeptical questioning that was warranted, especially given the uncertainty. And while I've chosen to highlight the early February spats over whether Covid was less concerning than the flu, this pattern repeated itself over and over again.
The initial justification for lockdowns was that we just needed a few weeks to slow the spread so our first responders weren't overwhelmed; but then those lockdowns persisted, without clear acknowledgment that the plan had changed.
On masks, the line went from "masks don't help much and should be reserved for first responders and doctors" (the contradiction here rarely acknowledged) to "masks are crucial."
Outdoor gatherings were always much safer than indoor ones (and I said so here in Vox from early on), but a lot of public health officials criticized outdoor gatherings — up until the Black Lives Matter protests, at which point they largely said such events were fine.
Every one of these changes happened without much reflection on why we had previously got it wrong. Every one of them spent credibility that was desperately needed with the American people. Every one meant treating people, frankly, like they weren't very smart, and in the long run did incalculable damage to public trust.
So why hasn't there been more of a reckoning? The primary reason is that there are incredibly powerful incentives for everyone involved not to participate in one.
With something as new and as fast moving as Covid, it was almost inevitable that everybody would get something radically wrong. When we open up the Pandora's box of recriminations and accountability, our mistakes loom much larger than our correct calls.
The sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, one of the better pandemic commentators, wrote earlier this week about how we were lied to about the possibility of a Covid lab leak. She was met by near universal, seething hostility from Twitter, which blamed her for all of the New York Times's bad coverage of everything related to the whole pandemic.
A better way to cover uncertainty
I'm expecting a similar overwhelmingly negative response to this piece, in which I admit a mistake — initially dismissing the lab leak theory — that everyone had probably forgotten about. Ours is a media environment that doesn't encourage acknowledging your errors; it's much safer to memory hole them.
With Covid, this has been made worse by the fact that there are still major disagreements over key questions about our response. I think that masks work to prevent the spread of disease, though I also think we made the wrong tradeoff in requiring kids to wear masks and generally refused to acknowledge what a major sacrifice they were for many people who just hated the feeling on their faces.
But that's not satisfying to someone who thinks that all masking policy was a mistake and that a true Covid admission of errors would mean admitting that masks didn't work, period. I think the vaccines were great, so my takeaways on the lessons from Covid won't be convincing to the half of the country that thinks the vaccines were terrible.
Given all that, it's not shocking that there hasn't been a real Covid reckoning. But I think that has been very, very damaging.
Every single one of us lived through a devastating period during the pandemic. Many of us buried loved ones. Many worked to exhaustion in overcrowded hospitals. Many were asked to make sacrifices that they feel were later treated with contempt and indifference.
It was a massive, collective world-altering event — and now that it's over we barely talk about it, because talking about it would mean reckoning with it and no one in power wants to reckon with it.
So Covid's long-term effects will reverberate through the country: lower trust in institutions, an absolute unwillingness to think seriously about preventing the next pandemic, failing schools, and rising isolation. And all that will unfold without any real clarity on how we got here and how we can make sure it never happens again.
—Kelsey Piper, senior writer
