Virus Politics: Public Health Experts Promote Black Lives Matter Protests, Reject Lockdown Protests

Virus Politics: Public Health Experts Promote Black Lives Matter Protests, Reject Lockdown Protests

If there were any lingering doubts that Democrat politics was at the bottom of the Wuhan coronavirus lockdowns in Democrat states and jurisdictions, they are out the window now.

Doctors and other medical professionals have stripped off the mask, so to speak, on the great public health fraud of 2020.  Forget social distancing, forget Wuhan coronavirus!  They are now urging everyone to join the swirling mobs of protesters, looters, vandals, arsonists, and murderers swarming the streets of cities across the nation.

The Wuhan coronavirus is nothing, they declare, compared to the health emergency that is racism.

IHME Professor @AliHMokdad on @KING5Seattle:

This is a public health issue — racism is. We should speak up and we should not accept it. Today we have over 107,000 deaths [in the US] from #COVID19. But in my opinion, racism is more dangerous to my country than COVID-19. pic.twitter.com/RM9lAQR2Dn

— Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) (@IHME_UW) June 5, 2020

Slate reports:

There has been a lot of concern on how the protests over the past several days may produce a wave of coronavirus cases. This discussion is often framed as though the pandemic and protests in support of black lives are wholly separate issues, and tackling one requires neglecting the other. But some public health experts are pushing people to understand the deep connection between the two.

Facing a slew of media requests asking about how protests might be a risk for COVID-19 transmission, a group of infectious disease experts at the University of Washington, with input from other colleagues, drafted a collective response. In an open letter published Sunday, they write that “protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.”

Politico has more on this need to ignore everything we’ve been told for months, the jobs lost, the livelihoods destroyed, the barbers and salon owners arrested for breaching stay at home orders.

The restaurant owners who had their licenses revoked because their being open created a profound risk to public health, the law-abiding citizens arrested for surfing alone, for being alone in parks, for being on playgrounds were all nothing but pawns in a disgusting political game aimed at tanking our economy ahead of a presidential election, harming good Americans for cheap fascist thrills, and ultimately, of course, hurting President Trump’s reelection chances.

For months, public health experts have urged Americans to take every precaution to stop the spread of Covid-19—stay at home, steer clear of friends and extended family, and absolutely avoid large gatherings.

Now some of those experts are broadcasting a new message: It’s time to get out of the house and join the mass protests against racism.

. . . .  The experts maintain that their messages are consistent—that they were always flexible on Americans going outside, that they want protesters to take precautions and that they’re prioritizing public health by demanding an urgent fix to systemic racism.

But their messages are also confounding to many who spent the spring strictly isolated on the advice of health officials, only to hear that the need might not be so absolute after all. It’s particularly nettlesome to conservative skeptics of the all-or-nothing approach to lockdown, who point out that many of those same public health experts—a group that tends to skew liberal—widely criticized activists who held largely outdoor protests against lockdowns in April and May, accusing demonstrators of posing a public health danger. Conservatives, who felt their own concerns about long-term economic damage or even mental health costs of lockdown were brushed aside just days or weeks ago, are increasingly asking whether these public health experts are letting their politics sway their health care recommendations.

. . . . “Their rules appear ideologically driven as people can only gather for purposes deemed important by the elite central planners,” Brian Blase, who worked on health policy for the Trump administration, told me, an echo of complaints raised by prominent conservative commentators like J.D. Vance and Tim Carney.

I have no words.

Okay, I have a few words because the cognitive dissonance is almost overwhelming.  Anyone not already a die-hard lunatic leftist has to be listening to this, watching this, and be utterly, to-their-bones appalled.  Normal Americans across this great nation who submitted to voluntary (and not so voluntary) home quarantines of perfectly healthy people must be experiencing one of the most profound epiphanies of their lives.  It was all complete . . . um, nonsense.

Politico continues:

Conservatives also have seized on a Twitter thread by Drew Holden, a commentary writer and former GOP Hill staffer, comparing how politicians and pundits criticized earlier protests but have been silent on the new ones or even championed them.

“I think what’s lost on people is that there have been real sacrifices made during lockdown,” Holden told me. “People who couldn’t bury loved ones. Small businesses destroyed. How can a health expert look those people in the eye and say it was worth it now?”

Some members of the medical community acknowledged they’re grappling with the U-turn in public health advice, too. “It makes it clear that all along there were trade-offs between details of lockdowns and social distancing and other factors that the experts previously discounted and have now decided to reconsider and rebalance,” said Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School. Flier pointed out that the protesters were also engaging in behaviors, like loud singing in close proximity, which CDC has repeatedly suggested could be linked to spreading the virus.

“Reconsider and rebalance”? Are you kidding me?

Nothing demonstrates the utter and complete hoax perpetrated upon the world like the sudden insistence that the Wuhan coronavirus has been “reconsidered” and “rebalanced” to now pose little to no threat to those protesting the just cause of police brutality, systemic racism, and blah blah blah.

How insidious and disgusting is this plot against the American people?

Money quote: "This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives." https://t.co/J771zB3riN

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) June 5, 2020

To prove that it’s no threat at all to join the “right” protests for the “right” reasons, medical professionals are donning useless masks (i.e. not N95 masks), standing shoulder to shoulder, and essentially mocking everything we’ve gone through as a nation for the past several months.  It’s stomach-churning disgusting on every single conceivable level.

And it’s infuriating to even one of the most even-tempered, rational, and benefit-of-the-doubt-giving people I know:

Fuck them. We destroyed millions of jobs on their say so, now they're all SJW and don't give a shit about public health. Seriously, these are bad people. https://t.co/1qcMFDfv2D

— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) June 5, 2020

He speaks for millions of Americans who are watching this travesty taking place before our eyes.  These are bad people, and so are all of the people selling this snake oil to an American public who tried to do the right thing and then found out they’d been had by bad actors who put their political agenda ahead of the American people.

To trot out a trite but true observation:  If you aren’t mad as hell, you aren’t paying attention.

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