Conservatives play the Lucy football game too often. One of the most frequent mistakes is taking lefty premises and principles at face value and then arguing against them by showing inconsistency or hypocrisy. Or, even worse, proposing to out-left the left. “I’ll ask a Muslim bakery to bake a Mohammed cake”. “Why not believe Tara Reade?” “Democrats are the ones responsible for racism and police brutality”.

Right.

The Left has one solidly consistent principle. “I win, you lose”. Everything else is momentary strategy and messaging. Now the farcial profession of public health expert, which suddenly turned obscure cogs into unelected tyrants, is predictably pivoting to explain why we have always been at war with racism and that’s a much bigger public health crisis than #StayHome #WashYourHands #LoseYourRights.

“We should always evaluate the risks and benefits of efforts to control the virus,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, tweeted on Tuesday. “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”

Killing grandma is much less important than defunding cops.

But key words, “public health risks”. Friends, this party is just getting started. Every lefty cause will be a public health crisis. Think of the “public health risks” of not protesting for the environment or protesting Trump, “a one-man health crisis”. And, it ought to go without saying, that Democrats and their conventions are a vital means of upholding public health while Republican gatherings are a public health hazard.

If the coronavirus continues to dismantle civil liberties for the public health crisis regime, that regime will wipe out all political dissent.

For “public health”. Why do you hate science?

“The injustice that’s evident to everyone right now needs to be addressed,” Abraar Karan, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital physician who’s exhorted coronavirus experts to amplify the protests’ anti-racist message, told me. “While I have voiced concerns that protests risk creating more outbreaks, the status quo wasn’t going to stop #covid19 either,” he wrote on Twitter this week.

Wait, it wasn’t? So why were we terrorizing people for burying their dead? Why did people die alone in hospitals?

former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden, who loudly warned against efforts to rush reopening but is now supportive of mass protests. Their claim: If we don’t address racial inequality, it’ll be that much harder to fight Covid-19.

Tom Frieden is an inept leftist hack? I’m shocked.

It’ll be that much harder to fight the coronavirus if we don’t clump lots of black people together without social distancing making it more likely that they’ll catch the virus? Which white supremacist came up with that genocidal ploy?

 There’s also evidence that the virus doesn’t spread easily outdoors

As Liz Warren would say, “Those are right wing talking points.”

Remember when it was crazy right-wing anti-science people saying stuff like that.

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.

It’s consistent. We have always been at war with Eastasia. 

We have consistently told people to huddle under their beds and avoid contact with other human beings for fear of killing everyone around you… unless it’s to protest racism.

Don’t you understand this magnificent consistency, Comrade?

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.

“At least for me, the sudden change in views of the danger of mass gatherings has been disorienting, and I suspect it has been for many Americans,” he told me.

I haven’t checked, but I imagine that Flier is an old white man. This is clear evidence that he doesn’t care about black voices funded by the Ford Foundation. 

Yet many say the protests are worth the risk of a possible Covid-19 surge, including hundreds of public health workers who signed an open letter this week that sought to distinguish the new anti-racist protests “from the response to white protesters resisting stay-home orders.”

Those protests against stay-at-home orders “not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives,” according to the letter’s nearly 1,300 signatories. “Protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.”

Don’t you get it? Bad racist protests for personal freedom are a public health threat, Good protests against racism, police, and private property are a public health benefit.

On April 30, heavily armed and predominantly white protesters entered the State Capitol building in Lansing, Michigan, protesting stay-home orders and calls for widespread public masking to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Infectious disease physicians and public health officials publicly condemned these actions and privately mourned the widening rift between leaders in science and a subset of the communities that they serve.

But there’s no rift in science anymore because the science will now support going out and looting in mobs.

However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital
to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States.

There you go. The science has spoken. Why do you hate science?

Therefore, we propose the following guidance to support public health:

● Support local and state governments in upholding the right to protest and allow protesters to gather.

● Do not disband protests under the guise of maintaining public health for COVID-19 restrictions.

● Advocate that protesters not be arrested or held in confined spaces, including jails or police vans, which are some of the highest-risk areas for COVID-19 transmission.

Oppose any use of tear gas, smoke, or other respiratory irritants, which could increase risk for COVID-19 by making the respiratory tract more susceptible to infection, exacerbating existing inflammation,and inducing coughing.

● Demand that law enforcement officials also respect infection prevention recommendations by maintaining distance from protesters and wearing masks.

● Reject messaging that face coverings are motivated by concealment and instead celebrate face coverings as protective of the public’s health in the context of COVID-19.

Prepare for an increased number of infections in the days following a protest. Provide increased access to testing and care for people in the affected communities, especially when they or their family members put themselves at risk by attending protests.

The new public health mandate is…

1. Exempt lefty protesters from all coronavirus restrictions.

2. Order cops to avoid arresting them or using tear gas when they throw bottles at the police to stop coronavirus spread

3. Prepare for the infections and accommodate the rioters who are infected.

#Science has spoken.

This letter is signed by 1,288 public health professionals, infectious diseases professionals, and community stakeholders.

Now you know exactly how seriously to take their recommendations. 

Was it fair to decry conservatives’ protests about the economy while supporting these new protests? And if tens of thousands of people get sick from Covid-19 as a result of these mass gatherings against racism, is that an acceptable trade-off? Those are questions that a half-dozen coronavirus experts who said they support the protests declined to directly answer.

“I don’t know if it’s really for me to comment,” said Karan. He did add: “Addressing racism, it can’t wait. It should’ve happened before Covid. It’s happening now. Perhaps this is our time to change things.”

Shut up, he explained. And it’s Trump’s fault.

“Trump will try to blame protestors for [the] spike in coronavirus cases he caused,” a spokesperson for Protect Our Care, a progressive-aligned health care group, wrote in a memo circulated to media members on Wednesday. While acknowledging the risks of mass protests, “the reality is that the spikes in cases have been happening well before the protests started—in large part because Trump allowed federal social distancing guidelines to expire, failed to adequately increase testing, and pushed governors to reopen against the advice of medical experts,” the spokesperson claimed.

It’s not our fault if coronavirus cases spike after we gathered in mobs of thousands to hate America. It’s Trump’s fault for allowing the federal social distancing guidelines we weren’t following anyway to expire.

But these will be the official talking points if cases do spike. And anyone who questions them will be accused of not believe in science.