The Letter, a COVID-Era Public Health Infamy

Key Points

• Remember the acts of perfidy carried out under the COVID-19 lockdown regime five years ago.
• An open letter signed by 1,288 people claiming to be “public health professionals, infectious diseases professionals, and community stakeholders” promoted differential treatment of left-wing BLM protests and right-wing anti-lockdown protests.
• The defenses of that letter, and the government policies that resembled its recommendations that were put into practice, must be remembered.
• In the second Trump administration’s senior health appointments and Department of Government Efficiency efforts to choke off leftist ideological grants, a hint of justice is being done for these offenses.

Je me souviens / Que ne sous le lys / Je crois sous la rose.
(I remember / Though born under the lily / I grow under the rose.)

—Quebecois proverb

Five years ago this week, then-Minneapolis police officer Derrick Chauvin knelt upon the neck of arrestee George Floyd, an act from which Floyd died and for which Chauvin would later be convicted of murder. (There is some debate about the justice of that verdict, but I am not here to participate in that.) The result, as is well known, were widespread demonstrations and riots in major cities that propelled the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement to the forefront of culture, politics, and policy, leading to such ideological infamies as “Defund the Police.”

But one ideological infamy deserves to be better remembered. Floyd’s death and the mass demonstrations and riots that followed it occurred at the height of lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health officials had condemned and sought to prohibit mostly right-of-center demonstrations opposed to the lockdown regime. But when the radical Left enjoyed its greatest mass mobilization possibly ever, the condemnations fell silent. Instead, “1,288 public health professionals, infectious diseases professionals, and community stakeholders” issued an open letter, widely reported on in the liberal press as a letter of “public health experts” despite many signers lacking such credentials, affirming the right of BLM protesters to assemble and endorsing their campaign.

Suppressing the Lily, Endorsing the Rose

The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution reads (in part) as follows: “No state shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The letter’s authors give no concern to this, dismissing it outright in the name of leftist justice.

They affirm instead:

A public health response to these demonstrations is also warranted, but this message must be wholly different from the response to white protesters resisting stay-home orders. Infectious disease and public health narratives adjacent to demonstrations against racism must be consciously anti-racist, and infectious disease experts must be clear and consistent in prioritizing an anti-racist message.

In a sense, the letter was admirably honest. It did not pretend that its demands were anything other than the raw exercise of totalitarian power outside the minor constraints of the Constitution, like equal protection of the laws. Instead, citing the intersectional logic of Everything Leftism, the Left may assemble, but white (with specific, and likely sneeringly condescending, emphasis on that status) conservatives shall remain under house arrest. The letter, in arguing for the justice of unequal application of the laws, states:

This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives.

“Stay-home order” was one of the public health community’s and its Big Philanthropy backers’ preferred euphemisms for “lockdown,” as a de Beaumont Foundation research report by Republican messaging flack Frank Luntz unwittingly illustrated.

The Thorns of the Rose

Even the liberal media noticed the letter’s incongruous treatment of various public actions. In response, Laurene Powell Jobs’s The Atlantic, which earlier in the lockdown regime had denounced a partial de-lockdown by Georgia as “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice,” published an op-ed by pro-lockdown epidemiologists from Harvard and Yale declaring that “public health experts are not hypocrites” and declaring that “health is about more than simply remaining free of coronavirus infection.” (This was the literal argument of anti-lockdown activists like the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, but as has been proven, equal protection of the laws meant little to the COVID-era public health tyranny.)

Since the “public health” community defined rioting and demonstrating to defund the police, dismantle capitalism, and the like as pro-health, that was acceptable. Conversely, according to the public health community’s totalitarian and unreviewable decision, protests to demand that schools reopen, economic activity be permitted to resume, or individual rights be respected were anti-health. As such, they could and should be suppressed. Such acts of pretended legislation to demonstrate contempt for the citizens would be worthy of a regime of hostile occupation.

The mentality was more than rhetoric. Matt Shapiro, a commentator who wrote extensively on the COVID pandemic and the misdeeds of public health officials, noted that New York City officials treated the BLM demonstrations and other activities in a manner inconsistent with equal protection of the laws:

New York City had put together a system for contact tracing to try to identify activities and patterns of Covid spread in order to support and enforce quarantine and other mitigations. Contact tracers were instructed not to ask about whether or not infections were connected to the protests. There was obvious utility in understanding if the protests were driving Covid spread. This was important data to collect and reveal. The data was not to be gathered because the governing officials did not want to know and did not want to embarrass their ideological allies.

There was immediate unrest among those who had submitted themselves to these strict mitigations. It was clear that there were distinct classes when it came to the enforcement of Covid mitigations and these classes were politically demarcated. If your religion said you should socially gather together go to church or synagogue, you were in the disfavored class and you would be arrested.

A Field of the Lilies

Five years on, the letter is not defended in The Atlantic and instead exists as a vile memory in the dark recesses of the minds of those who saw the evolving COVID tyranny for what it was at the time, while Democratic politicians promise Democratic podcasts that they really would have done the COVID regime differently if they had the chance—they promise. Ironically, the BLM protests demonstrated by accident that the entire lockdown regime was a falsehood, as the demonstrations did not lead to obvious increases in infections.

By the end of 2021, defeats and near-misses for Democratic officials in blue-state lockdown strongholds like Long Island, Virginia, and New Jersey had reset “The Science,” and the regime began its terminal retreat. Teachers’ unions demanded continued mask mandates, and the Biden administration sued to save mask-and-lockdown powers blocked by courts, but the public had moved on. Even lockdown frontman Anthony Fauci retired from the government.

Some of the lockdown’s most notorious perpetrators survived the 2022 elections, and Big Philanthropy backed the WWII-Japanese-island-holdout faction of lockdown-ism, but Nemesis would not be denied. The second Trump administration has sowed a field of the lilies, placing strident lockdown critics into senior government positions, countering the anti-freedom groupthink of the “public health” bureaucracy and academia. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford Medical School professor and Hoover Institution fellow who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration in opposition to lockdowns was appointed to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH) where Fauci once worked. Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon who criticized vaccine mandates, was chosen to lead the Food and Drug Administration.

The Department of Government Efficiency has sought meanwhile to uproot the roses, slashing the slush-fund-style grantmaking budget of the NIH and similar federal entities. For years, the NIH and similar entities have treated their research grantmaking as pots to promote and develop left-wing ideological crusades from transgenderism to “harm reduction” for drug use. Now, a Trump administration with little concern for the fate of debased ancient institutions is content to snip the flow of taxpayer support.

It’s not justice. But it’s a start.