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| Clarence Tabb, Jr./Detroit News via AP |
For three weeks, Seattle officials allowed hundreds of protesters to take over a six-block area of Capitol Hill that included Cal Anderson Park, but Shella Sadovnik still isn’t allowed to take her child to the local playground.
“Apparently, my toddler is much more dangerous [than protesters],” said Ms. Sadovnik, a Seattle-based lawyer for the Freedom Foundation. “I guess all the law-abiding people have to be subject to all these restrictions, but if you’re protesting and looting and rioting, that’s OK, you don’t spread coronavirus.”
The mass protests after George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police have largely faded, but nobody’s forgotten how scores of mostly liberal governors and local officials cheered and even marched alongside demonstrators, often in defiance of social-distancing rules designed to slow the spread of the pandemic.
The result has been simmering public skepticism, particularly on the right, over the necessity of the lockdowns and other restrictions, or what Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, an associate professor at UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine, called the “the coronavirus credibility gap.”
“[P]olitical leaders and health officials have sown distrust by politicizing the pandemic response,” Dr. Ladapo said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Political leaders and health officials have often invoked ‘science’ to justify decisions manifestly guided by their personal preferences. That costs them credibility.”
Phil Kerpen, president of the free-market advocacy group American Commitment, pointed to the rapid-fire shift in focus by politicians and public health authorities from COVID-19 to the George Floyd protests and then back to COVID-19.
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“The same supposed so-called experts who tried every scare tactic in the world to say that if you take a step outside, you’re going to kill everybody’s grandparents, and all of these draconian restrictions are necessary — they then went and literally participated in protest events with massive, massive crowds of thousands of people,” Mr. Kerpen said.
Governors of states with some of the tightest restrictions, including Democrats Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, joined the protests in early June, wearing masks but not always social distancing, as shown in photos.
“With little social distancing, Whitmer marches with protesters,” said a June 4 headline in the Detroit News.Read the rest of the story HERE and follow links below to related stories and resources:
Mark Meadows says there will not be a ‘national mandate’ on wearing masks
USA TODAY: Coronavirus Updates
WSJ: Coronavirus Live Updates
YAHOO NEWS: Coronavirus Live Updates
NEW YORK POST: Coronavirus The Latest
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