Covid Exposure: The Floyd Hypocrisy

The George Floyd protests exposed a hypocrisy that led to a collapse in institutional trust

When telling the history of Covid response, the story of George Floyd must be included. George Floyd was detained died on May 25th, after police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee to Floyd’s back and neck for almost 10 minutes. Floyd’s death was met with immediate protests in Minneapolis. The month of June saw widespread and massive protests across the United States in which at least 14,000 people were arrested.

I don’t have a lot that I want to say in this piece about either the Floyd case or the protests themselves. This is about how the response to these protests laid plain the deep incompetence and hypocrisy of the media and the expert class of academics and public health professionals.

Will Protests Spread Covid?

After nearly 2 months of lockdowns and stay-at-home orders (almost three for those of us in the Seattle area), there didn’t seem to be an end in sight. But these restrictions that had ruled our lives did not stop people from protesting.

The flagrant disregard of restrictions and mitigations did not go unnoticed. People started asking why the protestors got to flaunt the laws while other citizens (for example, churchgoers) were still subject to restrictions and fines for disobedience. As Rob George noted at the time:

New Yorkers saw police officers throwing a young mother forcibly to the ground for the “offense” of not having her mask on correctly. Yet for four days, thousands marched and assembled close together, hardly any social distancing either with themselves or with the police (many of whom were maskless). The rules do not apply for mass protest.

This blatant hypocrisy wasn’t just a matter of impotence on the part of government officials to end, coordinate, or control these protests. Many of them engaged in active and formal hypocrisy.

New York City had put together a system for contact tracing to try to identify activities and patterns of Covid spread in order to support and enforce quarantine and other mitigations. Contact tracers were instructed not to ask about whether or not infections were connected to the protests. There was obvious utility in understanding if the protests were driving Covid spread. This was important data to collect and reveal. The data was not to be gathered because the governing officials did not want to know and did not want to embarrass their ideological allies.

There was immediate unrest among those who had submitted themselves to these strict mitigations. It was clear that there were distinct classes when it came to the enforcement of Covid mitigations and these classes were politically demarcated. If your religion said you should socially gather together go to church or synagogue, you were in the disfavored class and you would be arrested.

If your religion said that you should socially gather together to protest against police brutality, you were in the favored class and you would be celebrated.

And then the worst thing happened for anyone who values institutional trust.

The Letter

On May 30th, a document titled “Open letter advocating for an anti-racist public health response to demonstrations against systemic injustice occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic” was published. It was signed by “1,288 public health professionals, infectious diseases (sic) professionals, and community stakeholders”.

This document was presented as guidance from public health experts in support of allowing and even encouraging the Floyd protests. It said explicitly that “white protesters resisting stay-home orders” should be condemned and disrupted while the Floyd protests must be permitted as “infectious disease experts must be clear and consistent in prioritizing an anti-racist message.”

NPR presented this document as formal declaration of support for the protests from public health and disease experts.

Politico ran the headline “Suddenly, Public Health Officials Say Social Justice Matters More Than Social Distance” in which the author, Dan Diamond, portrayed the signatories of this letter as the same public health experts who were responsible for stay-at-home orders.

I objected strenuously to this portrayal of the letter. I noted that none of experts who had put together the federal Covid response had signed this document. I pointed out that many of these “experts” were little more than med students or interns. I noted that Anthony Fauci didn’t sign the letter and maintained his insistence that engaging in these protests meant increasing the risks for everyone.

But none of that seemed to matter. Journalists and activists consistently refused to distinguish between experts who are reliable and consistent and “experts” who just claim to be experts for political, self-promotional, or narcissistic reasons. In many cases, it seemed like journalists preferred to rely on partisan experts who would prostitute their credentials in order to validate an ideology or narrative.

This may or may not be fair to institutions and genuine honest experts, but that is what happened. The collapse of institutional trust happened in this moment, right before our eyes. It was driven by partisan academics, journalists eager to validate a their narrative, and cowardly institutionalists who couldn’t bring themselves to stand in protest to this ideological steamroller.

What people saw was not a deep understanding of non-partisan expertise driving objective evidence-based policy. They saw their kids being banned from schools and birthday parties. They saw people dying and families denied the closure of a funeral. They saw the sacrifices they made to “slow the spread” and the loss of their faith communities. Then they saw “the experts” tell them that none of it was necessary because we can just throw the rules aside if we like the ideology of the people who disregard the rules.

But Then Nothing Happened

I spent no small amount of time trying to convince people that these experts were false experts. But I also had no evidence to support the idea that protests were spreading Covid. Given the spread speed and incubation time, we wouldn’t know for certain if the protests were spreading Covid for 3-4 weeks. If you were dedicated to answering these kinds of questions with data, there was nothing to do but wait.

I don’t want to make myself the main character of this review, but I have to make the point that, at this stage of the Covid crisis, I trusted Anthony Fauci. I believed the mitigations helped slow the spread of Covid in Seattle in March and I believed the protests would increase that spread.

I saw masses of people packed into the protestor takeover of Seattle city hall, many of them without masks.

This was obviously in violation of the social distancing guidelines and the lockdown orders. This was a higher density than my church ever had and we were forbidden from meeting.

I said to myself “Well, obviously we will see a spike in cases from this. It’s just a matter of time. Let’s find out what happens.”

And then nothing happened.

There was no indication whatsoever that these events were driving population-level Covid spread. Nothing. There were no Covid spikes in Minnesota, Washington, California or DC, where protests were massive and widespread. These protestors had flagrantly disregarded all the mitigations that had been put in place and nothing happened.

In fact, the Covid surges we were seeing by the end of June were coming from regions without massive protests. But if massive social events, indoor meetings, and high density gatherings weren’t driving an increase in Covid cases, why were we banning these things?

The truth that was starting to dawn on me was that these mitigations didn’t really matter one way or the other. In the following months, we would see that Covid was simply going to spread based on seasonal infection patterns and the mitigations didn’t change this in any measurable way.

The truth was that we really just couldn’t stop Covid through public health policy. But then why did our public health policy experts insist that we could? Why were they imposing these mitigations if they weren’t certain that they would be effective? And, given this new and compelling evidence that mitigations didn’t matter, why were we not changing course?

I had been defending the “real experts” who said that protests would increase infection rates. Why were they so wrong? Did they…

Did they not know what they were talking about?

Were their recommendations nonsense? Were they just making things up and telling us that these things worked when they didn’t work at all?

This was the beginning of something like a descent into madness for me over the next 2 years. A plain reading of the data was showing us that mitigations didn’t really work. The experts said we needed mitigations, contact tracing, and quarantine but those things weren’t working. They didn’t change the infection curves, they weren’t making a difference in the population data. They were causing massive amounts of harm to children, the sick, and the elderly, but they weren’t stopping Covid or even slowing it down. Why did the experts keep insisting on these things if they didn’t work? Were the people in charge of national and state health policy, who were disrupting the lives of millions of children, families, and citizens, who were implementing mandates across the country and imposing onerous restrictions on everyone under their power…. were these people they less aware of the data than a random idiot with a twitter account and a homemade data scraper?

This was where my trust in experts began its long slide.

Disney Shorts: Gulliver Mickey (1934)

New subscribers: I end every piece with a short cartoon. I started this as a way of keeping myself sane during Covid, but I’ve come to enjoy it. Come for the data but stay for the cartoons.

I really enjoyed this as a kid and it really is a spectacular short. Mickey gets tired of the chaos that is being caused by all the orphans he has in his care and tells them a tall tale of his shipwreck and capture by the tiny people of the island. This is clearly (as the title implies) a reference to the Lilliput portion of Gulliver’s Travels, but it’s cute and sweet and very well done. The whole thing is just a pile of fun and it even ends with the orphans playing a prank on Mickey to keep his silly ego in check.

Not a frame is wasted in this short. It’s just lovely gags, action, and joy all the way through.