To be clear, I actually meant just the public health community in general and their stance on the protests, not the CDC in particular. I actually don’t recall what they said about it.
My language could have been more precise.
The public health community never said, “these rallies are safe”. That was just right wing commentary. Some parts of the public health community said, “these rallies are important enough to be worth the risk”, and others said, “if you attend or organize rallies, here are suggestions for mitigating the risk”.
There nothing wrong with either of those communications.
There HAVE been a number of communication miss-steps by our public health authorities, but BLM is not one of them.
I think the underlying issue for many of the issues may be that people, on general, are very bad at interpreting probabilities. You see “of the vaccine works, why do i need to take any other precautions?”, for instance. Or, on the flip side, “if there are breakthrough infections, why should i bother getting vaccinated.”
I think it’s a failure of our (US) public health authorities that they haven’t made any attempt to grapple with these subtleties. But i acknowledge that it’s a challenging issue.
You didn’t say that, but phrasing it as “it still hurts the credibility of the CDC” frames the discussion in a way that places the blame in the wrong spot. It implies that there is something the CDC can or should do to “improve their credibility”, rather than making it clear that partisan political hacks should stop lying about the CDC.
Here’s the fundamental problem: if partisan attacks have been so effective that a large segment of the population no longer believes what the CDC has to say, then nothing the CDC can say will change that. By their very nature, the attacks on the CDC shield themselves from this very defense.
I’m not at all sure how to fix this, but I’m damn certain putting the burden solely on the CDC won’t work.
I remember many in the public health community being very concerned about the rallies. By then, we already knew how to mitigate risks so news programs and articles had people telling everyone to wear masks because people won’t be able to distance. Plus, they were telling people to quarantine after going to a rally. I distinctly remember how surprised everyone was after cases remained low in areas that had restrictions and contact tracing was not bringing up a lot of spread in those areas. There was a gps study that showed that people tended to stay home when there were protests. However, the major thought is that the protests had two major things going for them: 1) outside and 2) masks. Contrast that with superspreader events that summer like Trump rallies and Sturgis.
That’s true, but the CDC brought some of this on itself by consistently bad communication. Starting with intentionally misleading information about masks, and moving on from there.
That’s how you see it. Try putting yourself in the shoes of someone who is religious and told that even outdoor worship is forbidden, or a blue collar landscaper forced to give up outdoor work in areas with almost no one around, but that mass protests are okay because they are ‘worth the risk’.
That’s a political value judgement, not a medical one. That so many experts came out and said exactly that made many conservatives feel that public health recommendations were being made with a thumb on the political scale. And they were.
One of the areas of bias is that almost everyone involved in deciding the lockdowns were people who would still have jobs during the lockdowns. White collar workers and bureaucrats never felt the pain of lockdowns in the same way as small business owners, laborers, and others who absolutely needed to work to keep their careers and lives afloat.
Just try imagining this: You are a landscaper. You worked for 15 years for a company, then followed your dream and branched out on your own. You took a second mortgage on your house to pay for the equipment. You have big payments to make, but you are good and getting lots of work and everything is going swimmingly. Then the government locks you down and says you can’t work, even though all your work is outdoors with a crew of four or five people. Bills pile up, your business is failing, you could lose your house. Stress at home is through the roof.
Then you turn on the TV and see 100,000 people marching shoulder to shoulder in the streets, and public health experts who demanded you lock down come out in support of the protests because ‘the risk is worth it’,
How would you feel? And how would you feel about acceptng any future guidance from those people?
Were there permits given for these protests, then? Were they allowed, or did they happen in protest? My impression was that they were neither allowed nor encouraged, but couldn’t be stopped because of that pesky first amendment.
I can’t relate to this. I live in a liberal state that instituted lots of covid restrictions. But we never banned outdoor religious worship, nor landscaping. I went to an outdoor Rosh Hashanah service when our numbers were terrible, and i saw landscapers at work (often maskless, and with two guys in each other’s faces opposite a heavy shrub) everytime i walked around my neighborhood. How many places actually banned these? Did they also have rallies?
That’s because it never happened. It’s not even a strawman argument; it’s a strawstate argument.
This is just simply not true.
The important thing to remember, is that this is probably what a theoretical health agency would have done in a hypothetical situation. Our imaginary gardener would have known this, and it would have made him mad. The story has elements of truthiness about it, so we cannot discount it.
I believe the Alberta “lockdown” last spring was much the same as here in Saskatchewan. Virtually all businesses were “essential” outside of hospitality (nightclubs and casinos closed, restaurants take-out only), personal services (hair salons and the like), and retail (food & hardware exempt, and others could be open for curbside pickup). The approximate number of blue collar workers who weren’t working during the “lockdown” was zero. The service industry was shut down, and white collar jobs were work from home, but blue collar stuff didn’t even slow down. Install one of those portable plastic sinks on your construction site, tell everyone to stay 2m apart, ignore when they don’t stay 2m apart because the work they’re doing requires them to be closer, and make them all sign a form saying they aren’t sick every morning. That was my experience of the “lockdown.” One general contractor decided to enforce their own mask mandate prior to the provincial mandate, and so on their sites everyone wore a mask on their chin and pulled it up when the safety officer came around.
This is what it looked like in BC, as well.
Actually, i take it back, a landscaper was supposed to remove a tree in my backyard the day after the lockdown, and they called to say they weren’t sure if they could legally do the work, so they weren’t coming. But after a few days it was clarified that they were essential, and they rescheduled.
That was long before the BLM marches. But okay, yes, they were shut down for a couple of days.
I just don’t see how any of this talk about the CDC makes the actions seem reasonable. Okay, so you’re skeptical about what the CDC says. I can understand that. I was skeptical about the idea that vaccinated people didn’t need to wear a mask. So what did I do?
Did I got to my politicians? Did I look at one-off cranks? No. I looked at other reputable medical sources. I looked at actual data. And, before I was sure, I erred on the side of caution, like any other rational adult would.
But that’s not what happened with this. People were instead like “The CDC changed its position, and that’s proof it’s all just a conspiracy.” “This guy who claims to have invented the vaccines says they are bad, so they must be.” “This post from my friend claims they knew a person who heard from someone else that they saw a bunch of people who died in car accidents listed as dying of COVID-19.” “This guy claims he makes all the masks and says they don’t help.” “This Facebook meme says masks are actually dangerous.”
None of this is the way reasonable people act. It’s the way people act who want to believe something. They didn’t want to be inconvenienced. They didn’t want to defy their favorite politician.
There is just no reason why the CDC changing its guidelines over time, fixing mistakes, and such, should lead to people deciding that masking and vaxxing are all a conspiracy.
That said, I do think that better messaging on how vaccines protect others would be good. But I guess they thought they learned from the mask situation that this was a bad road to go down. They assumed (with good cause) that people were too selfish to do anything for others.
But the result is that there are people who wore masks who were vaccine hesitant at best, and thought they had as much time as they wanted.
Except it didn’t happen - the landscaper was ultimately mistaken, right? There was no government ban on outdoor landscaping.
I hope your magnanimity in conceding your non-error will be appropriately appreciated.
I thought California had lockdowns on outside work as well. In any event, the specific industry wasn’t the point. Feel free to substitute anyone else whose business was shut down and then watched the protests be supported by the public health community because the risk was worth it.
And churches were definitely locked down - even outdoor events - in many places.
I hear there’s a sale on some really lightweight goalposts at Canadian Tire. Really portable and easy to move.
But when I go to Target, I can’t find those goalposts you mention at all!
(They must have been moved.)
I would again point out that you are conflating the public health officials who were advising governments at various levels to put restrictions in place, and healthcare workers who opined publicly that BLM protests were worth the transmission risk. The open letter you posted upthread as a cite for this is signed by lots of medical students, university professors, and practicing doctors and nurses, but I do not see that it was endorsed by any actual public health officials. But there are a lot of signatories, so perhaps I missed some?
Or perhaps you could provide a some cites of actual public health officials, you know, the same people who were recommending the restrictions those BLM protests were violating, saying that it was fine for the BLM protests to be violating those restrictions?
Or are you only asserting that there were some healthcare workers who supported BLM protests, and that alone is sufficient to undermine the trust of conservatives in the entire public health apparatus, because how dare they not be entirely monolithic in their take on pandemic response? I hope not, because that would be a really, really weak argument.