This archive report was first published on 6 July 2020.
Are Protests Unsafe? What Experts Say May Depend on Who’s Protesting What ¶
As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the United States, public health experts were clear: no students in classrooms, no in-person religious services, no visits to sick relatives in hospitals, and no large public gatherings. But when conservative anti-lockdown protesters gathered on state capitol steps in April and May, epidemiologists scolded them and forecast surging infections.
However, the brutal killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis on May 25 changed everything. Soon, the streets nationwide were full of tens of thousands of people in a mass protest movement that continues to this day. Rather than decrying mass gatherings, more than 1,300 public health officials signed a letter of support, and many joined the protests.
That reaction, and the contrast with the epidemiologists' earlier fervent support for the lockdown, gave rise to an uncomfortable question: Was public health advice in a pandemic dependent on whether people approved of the mass gathering in question? To many, the answer seemed to be 'yes.'
Thomas Chatterton Williams, an essayist and journalist, wrote in The Guardian last month, 'The way the public health narrative around coronavirus has reversed itself overnight seems an awful lot like... politicizing science.' What are we to make of such whiplash-inducing messaging?
Of course, there are differences: A distinct majority of George Floyd protesters wore masks in many cities, even if they often crowded too close together. By contrast, many anti-lockdown protesters refused to wear masks — and their rallying cry ran directly contrary to public health officials' instructions.
Still, the divergence in their own reactions left some of the country's prominent epidemiologists wrestling with deeper questions of morality, responsibility, and risk.
As of July 6, 2020, the coronavirus has infected 2.89 million Americans, and at least 129,800 have died. The virus has hit Black and Latino Americans with a particular ferocity, hospitalizing those populations at more than four times the rate of white Americans.
Some public health scientists publicly waved off the conflicted feelings of their colleagues, saying the country now confronts a stark moral choice. The letter signed by more than 1,300 epidemiologists and health workers urged Americans to adopt a 'consciously anti-racist' stance and framed the difference between the anti-lockdown demonstrators and the protesters in moral, ideological, and racial terms.
Others take a more cautious view of the moral stakes. Nicholas A. Christakis, professor of social and natural science at Yale, noted public health is guided by twin imperatives: To comfort the afflicted and to speak truth about risks to public health, no matter how unpleasant.
