Shared by permission of Jay Anderson from his Facebook page:
Looks like the Covid Cops and the Pandemic Preachers and the Keep-Your-Mask-On Karens are back in full force after taking the last month-and-half off — thus avoiding the un-“woke” discomfort of telling protesters, looters, rioters, vandals, and various and sundry iconoclasts to “Stay the **** home!” …
DO NOT let them off the hook so easily. THEY are the ones who have politicized a pandemic by looking the other way when it suited them politically.
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UPDATED
Let’s recall the timeline of this. For two and a half months, the country was in lockdown — from mid-March to the end of May. Some states had just started “Phase 1” of reopening. During that lockdown, people were not allowed to visit their loved ones, kids were not allowed to continue with their educations, graduations were cancelled, and people were not even allowed to bury their loved ones or have funerals for them (much less multiple funerals in multiple cities attended by thousands of people with politicians and various dignitaries showing up for the cameras and the media coverage).
And then, at the end of May, George Floyd was murdered. Suddenly, we went from lockdown to tens of thousands of people in cities across the country in public mass gatherings (there were even memes that joked “So I guess lockdown’s over?”). The same politicians and public health officials who had spent months enforcing the lockdown, even padlocking playgrounds so that children could not gather with one another to play, not only looked the other way, but encouraged and actively engaged in these mass gatherings of people. All for politics.
And now there is a spike in the number of Covid cases that just so happens to correspond with all those tens of thousands of people gathering together in public spaces, screaming, yelling, and chanting slogans, and those same politicians and public health officials want to try to convince us that this correlation is not causality. Just a coincidence. They think we’re that stupid, that gullible, that compliant.
Instead, they try to blame — who else? — that age-old villain in the American narrative: SOUTHERNERS. Those terrible GOP governors in Southern states are to blame.
When the problem always comes with a ready-made political narrative that always excuses the same “good guys” and always accuses the same-old “bad guys”, be intelligent enough to know you’re being had. Have the good sense to know you’re being gaslighted.
Good news. Along the Gulf Coast of Florida, where I live, mandatory mask wearing was voted down the other day. Our Democrat leaning, Trump hating local paper accused such irresponsible mayors and city councils of bad judgement and lack of courage.
Glad to hear that, Michael.
By the way, is there any kind of local newspaper left in these United States other than “left-leaning, Trump hating?” Even the rural weekly back in my northwest Illinois home town has contracted TDS.
On 20 April, in Denver, people drove their cars to downtown Denver to protest against the continued excesses of their state’s lockdown. By keeping in their autos, they maintained social distancing. Yet their progress was blocked by a person dressed in scrubs standing in traffic. That person was hailed by the media as a “heroic healthcare worker”, and the peaceful protesters were described as selfish, threatening thugs.
And one month later, actual selfish threatening thugs take to the streets and the media and healthcare workers sing a completely different song.
It appears to me that the differences in the media response must be because the anti-lockdown protesters weren’t useful to the people who control the narrative, and the BLM rioters most definitely are.
I’m not buying this correlation without some clear data:
“And now there is a spike in the number of Covid cases that just so happens to correspond with all those tens of thousands of people gathering together in public…”
If true, there should be very few (or no) regions with both large protest-riots and a stable virus case rate (like NY state?) And conversely, there should be very few (or no) regions with small or no protest-riots and a spiking virus case rate (like UT?)
Careful trying to pigeon-hole this virus
There’s a known issue with the spike being in part because of confirming possible cases– there’s also the mess out of Florida, where the official report had a lot of labs at or near 100% positive results, but when they were contacted by a reporter doing REPORTING they were shocked and said variations on “what? No! We’re under 10%!”
Foxfier in these times, we really need citations of this stuff. And now I’m going to violate my own advice by mentioning to Ben Butera (who is right) that I have heard the counties in FL with spikes in cases were counties that saw the heaviest protest. Though again, that’s repeated and I’ve not seen the raw data.
I noticed the raw, actual data seems to be harder to locate of late. Search engines in particular seem to be putting in extra effort to not be helpful.
I don’t think we’ll ever get a definitive answer to whether protests caused a spike in cases. The data is not being easily presented, but even if we had it there are too many compounding factors. For example, states with more testing will obviously tend to have more positive cases, once enough people are infected in a state it will be difficult for the case rate to remain high (since at least most people can’t get reinfected), age distributions and number of people in long term care will matter since the elderly and sick are the most susceptible, etc.
However, it doesn’t really matter if the protests (or to be more accurate, the riots) actually caused an increase in cases when it comes to evaluating the trustworthiness of medical professionals. Many of those professionals have categorically said that they didn’t, or at the very least are unwilling to go on record to say that there is even a possibility that they did. And they did this for explicitly political reasons. So regardless of what they actual data might be, these professionals can’t be trusted to interpret it.
Search engines in particular seem to be putting in extra effort to not be helpful.
Yep.
Here’s the 100% positive test rate; I can’t find the original story anymore, but Redstate has the station name along with most of the other details, at a quick scan.
https://www.redstate.com/bradslager/2020/07/14/more-florida-covid-craziness-one-local-news-station-finds-multiple-clinics-errantly-reporting-100-%e2%80%98positive%e2%80%99-test-results/
Here’s an example of a blacklog spike:
https://therivardreport.com/more-than-5000-new-coronavirus-cases-reported-as-state-clears-testing-backlog/
And this talk show has stuff on adjustments in numbers, starts at about 8 minutes:
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/the-joe-pags-show-22959056/episode/the-weekend-joe-pags-show-68668286/
I can tell you that the Mount Rushmore state was flat before Trump’s visit. And we’re still flat three weeks later.
I read ( a few weeks ago ) on MassLive.com, a relative of the local paper ‘The Republican’ , heh heh, that UMass fired the Dean of Nursing because she stated that all lives were … in an email.
Whether the protests actually caused the spike is not really the point. It’s that people did in very large numbers what we had been told NOT to do for the preceding 3 months, and then the same people who had been telling us NOT to do that then actively encouraged the behavior among the protestors, engaged in it themselves, and provided a ready-made cover that “the protests did not cause the spike” when they can’t possibly know that definitively. And then, to compound matters, went right back to telling the rest of us that we’re selfish for not abiding by their mandates.
Let’s change the facts slightly: What if, instead of BLM and Antifa protests, these had been protests demanding a return to business-as-usual or protests demanding that schools open in person 5 days a week. And what if those protests corresponded time-wise with the exact same spike in Covid cases. How would the media and the politicians and the public health “experts” be reporting this?
How would the media and the politicians and the public health “experts” be reporting this?
With napalm if they could. The calendar says 2020 but I keep seeing 1860. Mislearn history and you will repeat its more tragic bits.
Well put, Jay.
My mordant comment after the Floyd-death-related protests simmered down and the social distancing/mask scolds returned was:
“Oh, the pandemic is back on again?”
It’s not our fault that most of the health experts decided to set their authority and credibility on fire with tankers full of special pleading.
And then, at the end of May, George Floyd was murdered. S
Unless you fancy Ofc. Chauvin shoved a lethal dose of fentanyl into his maw, no he wasn’t.
It’s not our fault that most of the health experts decided to set their authority and credibility on fire with tankers full of special pleading.
Another indication of how ruined so many professional cultures are these days.