A Review of “In Covid’s Wake”: According to Laptop Class Professors, the Heroes of the Pandemic Were Laptop Class Professors

Every big historical crisis eventually gets its bookshelf: sober policy autopsies, emotional memoirs, and at least one volume insisting that the real victims were… the authors’ friends.
In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us by Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee aims to explain how institutions bungled the pandemic. But in the Science-Based Medicine review titled “According to Laptop Class Professors, the Heroes of the Pandemic Were Laptop Class Professors,” neurologist Jonathan Howard argues that the book quietly recasts privileged academics and Great Barrington Declaration signatories as misunderstood heroes, while pushing aside the people who actually faced the virus in hospitals, nursing homes, and crowded buses.

This review article takes a closer look at Howard’s critique, the book’s core arguments, and the broader “laptop class” narrative that grew up around COVID-19. We’ll unpack what the authors get right about harms from restrictions, where they drift away from the scientific evidence, and why it matters who we cast as “main characters” in the story of the pandemic.

What In Covid’s Wake Tries to Do

Macedo and Lee’s book sits in a growing genre that treats the pandemic as a political failure above all else. Their central thesis is that American institutions and elitesespecially liberal onesoverreacted to COVID with overly stringent restrictions, failed to weigh trade-offs, and shut down legitimate dissent.

The authors frame In Covid’s Wake as a kind of postmortem for liberal governance: why did we get prolonged shutdowns, school closures, and mandates that, in their telling, weren’t clearly justified by data? They focus strongly on dissenting academicsespecially proponents of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD)and argue that these figures raised important questions about harms from lockdowns but were unfairly marginalized.

On its face, a serious examination of policy failures and unintended consequences is absolutely worthwhile. The long shadow of school closures, delayed medical care, and mental health strain is real, and it deserves rigorous scrutiny. The problem, according to Howard’s review, is that Macedo and Lee are far less rigorous with the scientific evidence behind COVID mitigation than they are with the hurt feelings of anti-mitigation intellectuals.

The “Laptop Class” and the Pandemic

First, let’s decode the key phrase: “laptop class.” During COVID, commentators began using it to describe relatively affluent professionalslawyers, professors, consultants, tech workerswho could keep their income flowing while working safely from home on a laptop.

The term is often used pejoratively, contrasting their safety and comfort with “essential workers”: grocery clerks, bus drivers, factory workers, aides in nursing homes, and hospital staff who faced daily exposure and could not simply move to Zoom.

In Howard’s telling, In Covid’s Wake leans hard into this laptop-class framingbut in a surprising way. Macedo and Lee argue that laptop class critics of lockdowns and school closureslike the GBD authors and aligned doctorswere bravely speaking out on behalf of the working class. Yet, as Howard points out, many of these figures enjoyed intense media visibility, elite institutional backing, and the ability to “log off” from the consequences of their ideas, in stark contrast to the people staffing COVID wards.

What the Science Actually Says About COVID Restrictions

A major flashpoint in the debate is whether “stringent COVID-19 restrictions were associated with substantial decreases in excess deaths.” According to Howard, Macedo and Lee have repeatedly claimed in interviews that such studies “don’t exist.”

That’s simply not accurate. Multiple modeling and observational studiessummarized in journals like JAMA Health Forum and other peer-reviewed venueshave found that combinations of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as masking, limits on gatherings, and temporary closures were associated with lower excess mortality and reduced transmission in many settings.

School closures are a harder case. Systematic reviews suggest that shutting schools may reduce transmission and community deaths, but the benefits are modest and context-dependent, while the harms to learning, mental health, and physical health (including increased anxiety and obesity) are substantial.

In other words, the evidence paints a picture of messy trade-offsnot “restrictions did nothing,” but also not “restrictions were pure net benefit in every form.” Howard’s criticism is that Macedo and Lee downplay or ignore the robust evidence that serious mitigations saved lives, in order to amplify a narrative in which dissenting laptop-class intellectuals were silenced truth-tellers rather than deeply controversial actors whose proposals carried their own risks.

The Great Barrington Declaration Under the Microscope

From “Focused Protection” to Mass Infection

A big chunk of both the book and the SBM review revolves around the Great Barrington Declaration, a 2020 manifesto authored by three academic scientists advocating “focused protection.” In practice, they argued that low-risk people should return to normal life and acquire natural infection, while high-risk people would somehow be shielded.

Howard summarizes the track record of the GBD’s core claims: that society could sharply separate “vulnerable” and “not vulnerable” groups, that herd immunity was just a few months away if we allowed the virus to sweep through, that children didn’t meaningfully spread COVID, and that reinfections were rare. He notes that real-world data and time have decisively falsified these assumptionsyet Macedo and Lee treat the GBD authors as fundamentally right in spirit, even if they “got some things wrong.”

The SBM review does not mince words here. It argues that the GBD wasn’t just an imperfect early document; it was a sustained campaign of misrepresentation that downplayed death, long-term disability, and overwhelmed hospitals. The critique is especially pointed when it comes to the dissonance between lofty rhetoric about protecting the vulnerable and the actual outcomes in places where GBD-style policies or messaging were influential, such as Florida’s high nursing home and staff mortality and repeated school disruptions despite a rhetoric of keeping schools open.

Turning Disinformation into Victimhood

Where Howard seems most astonished is in Macedo and Lee’s moral framing. In their reading, the truly grievous injustices of the pandemic were reputational harms to GBD-aligned doctorsonline criticism, loss of social media posts, and being called “fringe”rather than the very real harm caused by their inaccurate claims about vaccines, natural infection, and the prospects of herd immunity.

Put bluntly, Howard believes the book flips the script: instead of focusing on patients misled by anti-vaccine or “let it rip” messaging, the authors center the feelings and careers of those spreading the messaging. That’s the heart of his subtitle’s punchline: the heroes of the pandemic, in this telling, were laptop class professors and their allies.

Who Actually Showed Up in the Pandemic?

The “laptop class professor as hero” narrative grates particularly hard if you spent any time following reports from COVID wards. Healthcare workers, aides in long-term care facilities, respiratory therapists, and even non-medical essential workers like delivery drivers and grocery clerks bore huge risks with limited protection early on. Many got sick; many died.

Howard’s review repeatedly contrasts this reality with the relative safety of laptop-class pundits who recorded YouTube videos, did media tours, and argued that broad infection of healthy people was not just acceptable but morally preferable. He notes that many of these figures never treated COVID patients but were confident enough to portray clinicians as panicky, cowardly, or “sheep” for supporting masks and vaccines.

In that light, a book that spends pages lamenting that such pundits suffered social media backlash, while barely acknowledging the clinicians and patients who suffered tangible harm, feels profoundly misaligned. The review argues that In Covid’s Wake reflects a kind of elite solipsism: the most important tragedies are those happening in your own inbox or conference invitations.

What the Book Gets Right About Pandemic Harms

To be fair, even a harsh review like Howard’s concedes that Macedo and Lee are not wrong to highlight serious harms from some COVID policies. The educational, psychological, and social costs of prolonged school closures are no longer in serious dispute. Numerous overviews and inquiriesfrom academic reviews to national COVID investigationsnow document lost learning, increased anxiety, worsening obesity, increased exposure to domestic harm, and the fraying of the “fabric of childhood.”

Similarly, disruptions in routine medical care, economic precarity, and the strain on single parents and low-income families are real and lasting. Any honest accounting of the pandemic must grapple with how to better balance infection control with these long-term costs next time.

Where Howard and other critics differ from Macedo and Lee is not in observing those harms, but in how they assign causality and moral weight. For the laptop-class narrative, the primary villains are overcautious public health leaders and censorship-happy platforms; for science-based critics, the story also has villains on the other sidefigures who trivialized COVID, discouraged vaccination, and promoted unrealistic strategies based on wishful thinking rather than data.

Where the Laptop Class Narrative Falls Short

The big weakness of the “laptop class professors as heroes” frame is that it treats a small, privileged subset of pandemic commentators as the central moral actors. The story becomes one of brave, embattled contrarians versus rigid institutional elites, instead of a far more complicated clash of imperfect policies, evolving data, human fear, and political polarization.

That simplification matters because it encourages readers to see every future crisis through the same lens: if experts caution against risky behavior, they must be self-interested elites; if some academic claims to speak for “the workers,” their claims must be virtuous. Reality is messier. Many of the loudest laptop-class critics of mitigation never had to walk through an overflowing ICU or talk to a family whose unvaccinated relative regretted their choices as they struggled to breathe.

Howard’s review is a reminder that experience with the virus itselfin hospitals, in nursing homes, in communities that saw repeated wavesis a crucial form of evidence. It does not replace randomized trials or statistical models, but it certainly should not be treated as irrelevant. When books like In Covid’s Wake treat GBD authors and allied pundits as persecuted moral visionaries while barely acknowledging the damage their recommendations might have caused, they risk rewriting history in favor of the people least exposed to that damage.

How to Read Pandemic “Reckonings” Critically

For readers trying to make sense of the growing pile of COVID retrospectives, Howard’s review implicitly offers a checklist:

• Follow the evidence trail. Does the author fairly represent the body of scientific literature on NPIs, vaccines, and school closures, or cherry-pick studies that support their narrative?
• Watch who is centered. Are the main characters policymakers, pundits, and professorsor the people whose lives and health were directly on the line?
• Separate criticism from victimhood. Being criticized on social media is not equivalent to being censored, nor is it comparable to losing a loved one to a disease you were told was “mild.”
• Beware easy heroes and villains. A pandemic is a systems failure, not a simple morality play.

The Science-Based Medicine review is not the last word on In Covid’s Wake, but it is a necessary counterweightone that insists we keep real-world consequences, not just laptop-class narratives, at the center of our post-COVID reckoning.

Shared Experiences from the Laptop Class Era

Theory and evidence are important, but part of what makes the “laptop class professors” framing so grating is how it clashes with the lived experience of many people who worked from home during COVID. Most weren’t masterminding global policy from cushioned desk chairs. They were juggling Zoom meetings with first-grade math, worrying about aging parents, and doom-scrolling through hospitalization graphs at midnight.

Picture a mid-career university professor in spring 2020. Overnight, their job turned into a one-person media studio: learning to record lectures, run breakout rooms, and troubleshoot internet outages for students who sometimes sat in parked cars for Wi-Fi. Did they experience physical risk differently from the respiratory therapist intubating patients? Absolutely. But many also felt a gnawing unease that their own safety depended on armies of people still going outdelivery drivers, lab techs, custodial staff, cafeteria workerswhose risk they could not fully see but could not ignore either.

Or consider a K-12 teacher who spent a year teaching through a laptop balanced on a stack of cookbooks. Their “classroom” was a grid of faces, some cameras off, some siblings wandering through, some kids clearly struggling in crowded apartments. They knew remote school was suboptimal and often heartbreaking. They also knew that with shifting variants, no vaccines yet, and poor ventilation in their building, going fully back in person felt terrifying. To cast them as either villains for backing caution or as simplistic heroes for pushing reopening is to miss the real story: they were constantly weighing imperfect options, with no guarantee that anyone would support them if things went wrong.

Many healthcare-adjacent professionalsmedical school instructors, public health faculty, epidemiology grad studentsoccupied an uneasy middle ground. They weren’t on the COVID wards every shift, but they were in close contact with people who were. Some spent their days analyzing data that told them exactly how bad things might get; their nights were filled with texts from friends in ICUs saying “we’re out of beds again.” For them, supporting masks, distancing, and vaccines was not an abstract exercise in control. It was a desperate attempt to keep the graphs from matching the worst-case scenarios they were modeling.

At the same time, many laptop-class workers could see the cracks in policy from their vantage point. They watched children regress academically and emotionally. They listened to friends in hospitality and retail lose jobs while white-collar hiring boomed. They saw how unevenly relief funds were distributed. This dual visionfear of the virus and frustration with policy clumsinesswas common, even if it rarely appeared in op-eds. In reality, plenty of people could simultaneously believe that COVID was genuinely dangerous and that some restrictions were poorly designed, poorly communicated, or kept in place too long.

That’s what makes the heroes-and-villains framing of In Covid’s Wake feel so off. Most “laptop class” people did not experience themselves as brave dissidents or selfish cowards; they experienced themselves as fallible humans trying to protect their families, support their students, keep their teams afloat, and stay sane while the ground kept shifting. They might have changed their minds as more evidence emerged. They might carry regretabout being too cautious or not cautious enough. What they rarely did was imagine that their personal story should crowd out the voices of nurses in overwhelmed ICUs or families whose loved ones died after being told the virus was overblown.

A more honest narrative about the pandemic would start from that messy reality. It would acknowledge that a grad student who never left their tiny apartment, a professor arguing about school policies on email threads, and a grocery clerk who never stopped going to work all lived through the same pandemic in radically different ways. It would resist the temptation to declare that one groupespecially the group with the most media accesswas the true “hero” or the ultimate victim. Howard’s review pushes us in that direction, inviting readers to be suspicious of any story in which the laptop class just happens to emerge as the protagonists of everyone else’s suffering.

Conclusion: Remembering Who the Story Is Really About

In Covid’s Wake promises a reckoning with how politics failed us during the pandemic. The Science-Based Medicine review suggests that, instead, the book performs a quieter failure: it recenters the story on well-connected commentators, especially Great Barrington Declaration allies, and waves away the consequences of their errors while amplifying their grievances.

A science-based perspective doesn’t deny the harms of lockdowns, school closures, or social isolation. It simply insists that those harms be weighed against the equally real harms of uncontrolled viral spreadand that we be honest about who bore which risks. If we’re going to learn the right lessons for the next pandemic, we’ll need books that grapple deeply with both sides of that ledger, not just with the “reputational injuries” of the laptop class.

meta_title: In Covid’s Wake Review and the Laptop Class

meta_description: A critical, science-based review of “In Covid’s Wake” and the laptop class narrative that recasts professors as heroes of the COVID-19 pandemic.

sapo: In In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, Princeton professors Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee argue that elites overreacted to COVID and that dissenting academics were unfairly silenced. In his Science-Based Medicine review, neurologist Jonathan Howard counters that the book downplays evidence that restrictions saved lives and recasts laptop class professors and Great Barrington Declaration allies as tragic heroes while sidelining frontline workers and patients. This article unpacks that clash, examining what the science actually says about lockdowns and school closures, how the “laptop class” narrative distorts who really carried the risks of the pandemic, and why it matters whose perspective dominates our post-COVID story.

keywords: In Covid’s Wake review, laptop class professors, Science-Based Medicine, COVID-19 pandemic response, school closures and lockdowns, Great Barrington Declaration, public health interventions