The Politics of Epidemics

I think if you look at the history of other epidemics. before the rise of this modern expert class that I was describing, the contours of epidemics look surprisingly similar. It's no surprise, then, that he became a particular light and rod in the culture wars that ultimately consumed COVID policy. He wasn't sitting there just making war policy, but he exerted an enormous kind of political influence, media influence. That's just not really possible on a crisis like that. And it's certainly not what we were demanding of experts. We wanted answers. We wanted people to tell us what was safe and so forth.