Pandemic, Protest and Government Overreach

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

I wouldn’t call myself a libertarian but I worry that governments have used the opportunity of the coronavirus pandemic to grab too much power. And states rarely voluntarily give these up.

Income tax was originally brought in to cover extraordinary expenses during the First World War in Canada. By 1948 income tax was no longer considered temporary and was replaced with the Income Tax Act.

In an article published June 30 in the C2C Journal, Peter Shawn Taylor cautioned us against bureaucratic overreach.

Public health officials are hard-working and well-meaning, beyond a doubt. Still, writes Taylor, “we should be mindful that whatever accolades they deserve for their current performances are not turned into blank cheques for future innovations and interruptions of normal, daily life once the pandemic finally recedes.” 

These people are not infallible, nor should it be considered heresy to question them. Taylor reminds us that COVID-19 represents the first global quarantine of healthy populations in human history, and it was imposed in dozens of democracies almost entirely by decree, without political debate or formal legislation. 

In Canada, provinces shut themselves off as if they were sovereign jurisdictions. In the United States, though no one prevented Americans coming or going to other states, various personal freedoms were also infringed upon by governments. 

Typical were the remarks made in April by New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, who remarked that he “wasn’t thinking of the Bill of Rights” while implementing social-distancing measures and writing off any constitutional considerations. 

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom said that “science,” not “politics” – that is, voters and their representatives -- would dictate when the state would reopen.

Also that month, New York City’s Hasidic Orthodox Jews ended up at odds with Mayor Bill de Blasio. He personally joined in the dispersal of a crowd that had gathered at the funeral for a revered rabbi, and then tweeted that “my message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed.” His Parks Department shut public parks populated by Orthodox Jews.

When conservative anti-lockdown protesters gathered on state capitol steps in places like Columbus, Ohio, and Lansing, Michigan, in April and May, epidemiologists scolded them and forecast surging infections.

But after months of warnings by health officials about gatherings and social distancing, describing those who chafed at the restrictions as selfish fools, it all went out the window in the mass anti-racism protests that involved tens of thousands of marchers that began in late May after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis.

Suddenly, many public health officials decided social justice mattered more than social distance. “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist, tweeted in early June.

 “The injustice that’s evident to everyone right now needs to be addressed,” Abraar Karan, a doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, remarked, condoning the marches. 

More than 1,300 public health officials signed a May 30 letter of support, and many joined the protests. They urged Americans to adopt a “consciously anti-racist” stance and framed the difference between the anti-lockdown demonstrators and the protesters in moral, ideological and racial terms.

Others were conflicted. “Instinctively, many of us in public health feel a strong desire to act against accumulated generations of racial injustice,” Dr. Mark Lurie, a professor of epidemiology at Brown University, stated. “But we have to be honest: A few weeks before, we were criticizing protesters for arguing to open up the economy.”

The overnight change in views was indeed disorienting. Why should anyone take public health experts seriously, if it turns out their political convictions, no matter how well-meaning, trump their supposed fealty to science?

Meanwhile, Mayor de Blasio said on July 9 he is permitting Black Lives Matter protesters to continue marching through city streets while canceling all other events through September.  The mayor said the demonstrators' calls for social justice were too important to stop.

Anyhow, the rights of citizens in a liberal democracy are worthless if they can be suspended, or reintroduced, at a moment’s notice, depending on ideological convictions.