Tipsheet

Expert Advice: It Looks Like the 180-Degree Turn on COVID Lockdowns Just Became a Huge In-Kind Contribution to Trump's Re-election

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  June 05, 2020 3:25 PM

Is this the end of the "expert"? If not, we're on that trajectory with the medical community's transparent shift regarding the lockdowns over the coronavirus outbreak. Businesses couldn't reopen because we needed to control the spread, flatten the curve, and ensure the hospitals were not overrun. Venturing out made you a selfish bastard. And then, a couple of weeks prior, though some of you were already poking holes through the narrative, there was a great reversal. Some were grounded in good news.

New York City, the mecca of the US-based outbreak, saw deaths decline and hospitalizations stabilize. Hooray! Then, a CDC study showed that the mortality rate was around .04 percent, which makes the virus less deadly than the flu. Then, the CDC said that this virus doesn't spread as easily on surfaces—this was one of the main reasons for the stay-at-home orders. Asymptomatic people could touch stuff and pass on the pathogen. The curve was flattened. States not heavily impacted were set to reopen, and the liberal media went haywire. Florida was supposed to be awash with bodies. That was over eight weeks ago—and we still have no mountains of dead bodies. Some of us, myself included, overreacted. Initially, I think most were fine with the quarantine over the health care system overload and stopping the spread reasons, but some Democrats, in typical fashion, decided to move the goalposts to say we need to stay inside until we have a vaccine.

No. That was never possible. We would all be out of work. The overreach seen in some states is horrific but hardly a shock given the political leadership at the helm. Are we shocked that deep-blue and insufferably liberal New Jersey went off the rails in enforcing its lockdown measures, measures that Gov. Phil Murphy admitted to drawing up without giving a thought to constitutional rights? No. It is time to reopen. And now, the liberal media and the health experts agree, but only because riots have sparked across the country that could be weaponized to make the Trump administration look bad.

George Floyd died under police custody in Minneapolis on May 25. It's all on video. It's heinous. It's an atrocity. Floyd died when arresting officer Derek Chauvin kept his knee on the back of his neck. He kept it there for nearly ten minutes. Floyd can be heard crying out that he was having trouble breathing. He was killed. Period. Chauvin was fired and charged with second-degree murder. The three other officers involved were also fired and charged with aiding and abetting murder.

Protests were held across the country, and many devolved into full-blown riots. There should be outrage. In fact, the country was united in anger, but that breaks down when looting, vandalism, and mayhem become rampant, and that has happened in our cities. Oh right, the lockdowns, yes—they're over. Given how the medical community now says that racism is just as dangerous as COVID, the expert class has been exposed as true pod people. We've gone from stay home and be a hero and help medical staff to get out there and protest, or you're supporting white supremacy. That's quite the 180-degree turn. Academia is infested with liberal bias, but as the woke legions graduate and continue to spread their cancer into other institutions, this is what you get. Pseudo-scientific nonsense and decisions based on bashing Trump.

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It's outright madness. The chair of the NYC health committee actually said if there is a spike in COVID cases in the Big Apple, blame racism, not the rioters. If anything, it shows that being "woke" and politically correct probably exacerbated the outbreak when it first arrived in the city, as Trump was bashing China at the time. Chinese New Year was in full swing, come on down to show Trump what for—and get exposed to a virus that was out of control at the time.

It's gone off the rails. The real danger is down the line. How can we trust these clowns again when a real deadly pathogen bubbles up? And it will. As long as there is life on Earth, the virus will stick around. It's scary, but Trump-derangement from the professional Left, which dominates these fields of study, will be to blame.

You have to admit, this lockdown narrative was a well-executed strategy. The liberal media keeps up the doom and gloom news, which tanks the markets. The political class seeing this chooses the "better safe than sorry" approach and enacts stay-at-home orders, and then the pinch on businesses begins. The hope was to keep fear alive and let this eat into Trump's re-election chances. Those who deviate are shamed. Rinse and repeat until the data starts to show this was an overreaction. And now, with a new issue that can be used to attack Trump, get on out and riot.

Liberal reporter Michael Tracey, who has gone after other Lefties for their insanity over Trump-Russia collusion, has been on a tear. First, he rightfully slammed the left-wing activist-media complex for being coddled babies who are totally insane. Now, he's set his sights on the medical folks who now say put COVID on pause, as if this is a video game, and smash racism.

Tracey kicked a hornet's nest, and a whole lot of insanity came pouring out.

Take a look at this tweet from a Johns Hopkins epidemiology professor who wrote, "We should always evaluate the risks and benefits of efforts to control the virus. In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus."

I mean, even Politico is highlighting the odd turnaround here [emphasis mine]:

“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.

It’s a message echoed by media outlets and some of the most prominent public health experts in America, like 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. There’s also evidence that the virus doesn’t spread easily outdoors, especially if people wear masks.

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.

[…]

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?”

[…]

…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.”

And this is how you morph a colossal event that possibly could have hurt Trump in 2020 into a massive in-kind contribution to his re-election effort. Why? Because liberals are stupid. Yes, their allies in the media did a swell job selling panic and trashing the market. And then thinking this reversal after everything that's been said—it's just…you cannot make it up. The liberal bias is explicitly clear, and be prepared to defend every suggestion you make from here on out because the default position should be to look on these clowns with contempt and skepticism.

Sorry, small business owners protesting over these Democratic governors arbitrarily extending the lockdowns are not grounded in white supremacy. Also, do these "experts" think that black small business owners weren't impacted by this quarantine? If anything, these people telling folks it's ok to go outside and protest have done more to harm their communities than COVID ever could with the violent turn that has occurred. Minneapolis burned. The Big Apple descended into chaos. Cops are being targeted by mobs. It's mayhem out there, but it's fine because "orange man…bad," right. The lockdowns are over. Ignore their advice from here going forward. They're finished.