This Was the Moment the COVID-19 Experts Betrayed Us

Some tweets live in infamy. Six years ago this week, NPR shared a link on X (Twitter at the time) to an article by correspondent Bill Chappell: “Protesting Racism Versus Risking COVID-19.”

This was June 2, 2020, in the grips of the pandemic. By that time, Americans had been forced to confront the reality that “two weeks to slow the spread” was a lie. The two weeks had come and gone at the end of March, yet government health advisors had continued to pressure authorities at the federal, state, and local levels to maintain lockdowns, mask mandates, and prohibitions on social gatherings.

These policies were initially sold to the public as temporary measures that were necessary to give hospitals time to receive an influx of COVID-19 patients. By the start of the summer, it had become clear that public health experts would continue to insist on heavy-handed mitigation measures until either case counts crashed on their own or a vaccine became widely available. This meant that in Democratic-controlled municipalities, where it was fashionable to “trust the science,” relevant policymakers would keep lockdowns in place, require masks in all public spaces, and discourage large gatherings—even outdoors.

Washington, D.C., was once such location. The streets were generally empty. When people did venture outdoors, they were expected to wear masks, even when walking by themselves or engaging in vigorous exercise.

But then something happened: a black man, George Floyd, died while in police custody after an officer, Derek Chauvin, kneeled on his back for nine minutes. Chauvin would eventually be convicted of second-degree murder. Video footage of Floyd’s death caused a massive public outrage and generated protests against racism and police violence across the country.

One might have expected public health experts to express sympathy with the cause but maintain their ironclad support for mitigation measures. After all, they had had no problem recommending that government officials close down schools, churches, and funeral homes, all of which serve vital social functions. They did not.

“Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests,” noted NPR in the tweet. “‘White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,’ they wrote.”

Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests.

“White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,” they wrote.https://t.co/EewPNgDSu3

— NPR (@NPR) June 2, 2020

The actual NPR article captured a bit more nuance than that, but the open letter itself is outrageous. It begins by condemning the protests against lockdowns, and then draws an explicit contrast with the racial justice protests, which are explicitly condoned.

With respect to the anti-lockdown protests, the letter said this: “Infectious disease physicians and public health officials publicly condemned these actions and
privately mourned the widening rift between leaders in science and a subset of the communities that they serve.”

With respect to the anti-police protests, the letter said this: “As public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States.”

The letter strongly implies—in fact, it states it outright—that one kind of protesting is not just morally superior, but actually less likely to spread the disease. This, of course, is junk science. COVID-19 is not sentient. It does not distinguish between activist causes. Its transmission is not dependent on the political agendas of the people it infects.

Equally bad, the letter also likened racism to a disease, drawing a confusing and totally false comparison with COVID-19.

“We continue to support demonstrators who are tackling the paramount public health problem of pervasive racism,” it concludes.

Racism as a disease is a fine metaphor in other contexts, but COVID-19 was not a metaphorical disease: It’s an actual virus! Public health experts knew a great deal about how to lessen its spread (though arguably less so than it seemed at the time), whereas their ideas about how to lessen the spread of racism were much less rigorous.

This is even more apparent with six years of hindsight. From the vantage point of 2026, it is not obvious that the Black Lives Matter protests have done more good than ill: If anything, they seem to have generated a massive backlash against the protesters. (Public perception of the police has remained mostly flat or improved somewhat since 2020.) The Black Lives Matter organization appears to be a giant grift.

It’s quite possible that even if they sincerely thought fighting racism was just as important as fighting COVID-19, the best thing would have been to tell the protesters to stay inside.

Now it’s true that the people who signed the open letter were not actually prominent government health advisors. But the actual leading coronavirus czars—Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, etc.—certainly did not go out of their way to contradict them. Social media being what it is, this NPR tweet became the assumed position of public health experts. And it was self-discrediting.

I don’t mean to overstate the momentousness of one really bad tweet, but this was a significant “redpilling” moment—what right-wing people describe as the public waking up to some uncomfortable (usually conservative-slanted) truth. When we speak of declining trust in experts, this is the sort of thing we’re talking about: Remember when scientists said protesting was OK but only if it was against racism?

I am joined by Amber Duke to discuss Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I–Vt.) latest idea to confiscate the wealth of AI companies, Jill Biden’s delusions about Joe Biden’s electability, and more.

Possibly of interest: I debated the streamer Destiny on Brad Polumbo’s YouTube show. I thought it was a good conversation, though a little unfair to Destiny since Brad and I share approximately 98 percent of the same opinions and presented a fairly united front on this one.