How to Respond Better to the Next Pandemic: Remedying Institutional Failures (Tanner Lectures on Human Values)

There is no shortage of criticisms of U.S. COVID-19 policy. This book argues that officials at the highest levels lied to the public or deliberately suppressed relevant information, shamelessly over-sold the efficacy of masks and vaccines, and enacted lock-down policies of unproven value that caused massive economic, educational, and psycho-social damage.

In How to Respond Better to the Next Pandemic Allen Buchanan argues that, contrary to widespread opinion, the primary cause of flawed COVID-19 policy was not defective leadership, but rather institutional failure. Decisions were made through processes that lacked the most basic safeguards against the large-institution “yes-man” and group-think phenomena and included virtually no provisions for holding decision makers accountable. More fundamentally, policy makers did not fulfill the crucial duty to provide plausible public justifications for their decisions. They disguised the fact that scientific opinion was divided on the appropriateness of the policies they endorsed and labeled those who disagreed with them as anti-scientific. In some cases, they responded to criticism, not by engaging it on the issues, but by branding their critics as quacks.

Allen Buchanan is the author of over 150 articles and 15 books. His most recent books include The Evolution of Moral Progress: A Biocultural Theory, coauthored with Russell Powell, and Our Moral Fate: Evolution and the Escape from Tribalism. Buchanan has served as a consultant or staff philosopher to all of the U.S. national bioethics commissions, as a consultant to the Secretary of Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on Genetic Testing, as staff philosopher to the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, and as the only nonscientist member of the Advisory Council for the National Human Genome Research Project.