It is important to keep in mind that this is not about protesting just police brutality: police brutality is just one part of systemic inequality affecting POCs, especially black people, in the US.

With that in mind, it is important to put an understanding of public health data in context with systemic racism, and why the data looks like it how it does.

For instance, black Americans are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic itself. Protesting that “Black Lives Matter” during a pandemic that takes black lives seems self-defeating to me.

It's unjust that black people are more affected by Covid!

What are we going to do!?

Gather in large groups while screaming in close proximity to each other!

We've heard a lot from black people over the past week or two (and much longer, if you cared to listen) about what typical American policing is like for them. It's not good.

It's perfectly valid to see those issues as important but still not worth the risk of spreading COVID-19, but by boiling this down to a contest of how many people each Bad Thing killed in X amount of time, you miss a lot of the nuances in both issues and really preclude any reasonable, rational, productive discussion about the nature of the tradeoffs that are being made.

If you want to ignore all those things and walk away convinced that it's a political stunt, nobody can stop you.

I happen to agree: several hundred, or even several thousand more people dying as a result of COVID 19 is a worthwhile trade off for the progress and change these protests are enabling. If that’s your opinion, own it. But that’s a political opinion, not a scientific one. Scientists have no business trying to clothe that political value judgment in the garb of expert analysis.

The problem the public health sector has worked itself into is that it dismissed any attempts to analyze “trade offs” when we were talking about economic trade offs. So now they have to pretend like we’re not talking about trade offs at all. Hence the completely non-sensical premise that protests are okay because police brutality is a public health problem.

I don't really think this letter is trying to be anything other than an articulation of a value judgment made by people with a certain perspective that gives visibility not just into the effects of COVID-19, but other public health issues that disproportionately affect black people.

I'm also not super convinced that "the public health sector" was never receptive to questions about economic tradeoffs. We have a dysfunctional federal government and the same in many local jurisdictions, but where I live the local public health institutions have been working hand in glove with state and local governments to open as quickly as possible while staying abreast of the disease's spread.

There is no tradeoff in NZ or Australia. They eliminated the virus. We didn't so will have to continue shutting things down.

Scientists are no more qualified at discussing the trade-offs of economics and racial justice and policing than anyone else. By attempting to do so they politicize science and thereby reduce public trust in science.

My problem with their letter is that they made a judgment about these trade-offs and attempted to portray it as a scientific one, when it really wasn't. Based on the data alone, there is no way to reach their conclusion.

> White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19. Black people are twice as likely to be killed by police compared to white people, but the effects of racism are far more pervasive. Black people suffer from dramatic health disparities in life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, chronic medical conditions, and outcomes from acute illnesses like myocardial infarction and sepsis. Biological determinants are insufficient to explain these disparities. They result from long-standing systems of oppression and bias which have subjected people of color to discrimination in the healthcare setting, decreased access to medical care and healthy food, unsafe working conditions, mass incarceration, exposure to pollution and noise, and the toxic effects of stress. Black people are also more likely to develop COVID-19. Black people with COVID-19 are diagnosed later in the disease course and have a higher rate of hospitalization, mechanical ventilation, and death. COVID-19 among Black patients is yet another lethal manifestation of white supremacy. In addressing demonstrations against white supremacy, our first statement must be one of unwavering support for those who would dismantle, uproot, or reform racist institutions.

Is that all BS, then? No, I don't think so.

I wouldn't call it a "scientific conclusion", but the point that black people have poor health outcomes relative to other demographics has a lot of merit and honestly who else should be making it but medical professionals and scientists?

> I wouldn't call it a "scientific conclusion"

That's my point. If it's not scientific, then scientists should not have presented it as such.

Well, a point I've made elsewhere in this thread (possibly not here) is that I don't think they did claim it's an objectively truthful conclusion.

I can reason about moving a heavy object from my car to my house using the general knowledge that dropped objects fall downward and often break when they hit the ground; I don't need to whip out the graph paper and prove it.

A protest is a political stunt. That seems to be an essential part of what it means to have a protest.

And at risk of being too on topic and reading the article, the issue is that the gloom-and-doom arguments that a lockdown is necessary and correct have been well and truly rejected by the activist wings of politics, and implicitly by a large portion of the commenting-class of journalists. And business. And possibly the public at large. They clearly don't agree.

We usually try to keep it a bit more civil here.

I don’t have a particularly strong opinion here either way, but I think it’s worth pointing out that all medical advice is (or at least should be) sensitive to the broader context of a person’s life. Consider: is it safe to take morphine? If I’m a healthy 20-something looking for escape, absolutely not. On the other hand, if I’m an 85 year old hospice patient, anything harm morphine causes is vastly outweighed by the good it does.

It doesn’t seem an irresponsible or unprecedented extension of that principle to say that if your country is rocked by civil unrest, dealing with that is more important than preventing the spread of disease.

> is it safe to take morphine

it is safe for me if you take morphine; it is not safe for me if you spread an airborne pathogen. see the difference?

Worthy isnt the number of deaths involved, its the amount of justice it might achieve in response to.

Protesting the lockdown is not a just cause.

Saying "Well now anything doctors say is political!" does not show good intent or faith, but someone looking for a gotcha statement so they can say "See, they were political actors all along!"

Who decides? Reasonable people can believe that protesting orders that shut down people’s’ livelihoods is a just cause. Publix health officials sure as hell shouldn’t be making those judgment calls.

Public health officials can presumably take a non-political stance for lockdowns. This it seems to me that even given a neutral stance on BLM issues, there can be a non-political basis for discriminating between the value of the goals of the two different protest movements.

The entire point of protesting is people saying they believe something is unjust.

You can't decide what other people think is unjust. You would be negating the entire point of protests.

I think the quarantine of the healthy was unjust. You're going to tell me I can't protest against it?

Actually that's the point of opinion, you get to decide what you think of other people's causes.

Nobody said you cant protest to your heart's content, you can protest over anything. It's just calling out one of those protests is a mite's buzz of a complaint to a lion's roar of shame for the treatment of black people by America.

If anything, this simply lets regular people peek behind the curtain - it's mostly politics all the way down.

Science is a minor concern within a sphere of human influence.

When mathematicians of all people, reject prizes for making undeniable progress in their field [0], you can only imagine what happens in all the other fields that are inextricably tied to politics (economics anyone?)

Here's a depressing quote from Perelman's wiki: "It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens. It is people like me who are isolated."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman#:~:text=On%20....

Am I missing a double negative? Even if protesting police brutality has negative value, surely protesting lockdowns has even less than that. It would even be valid to say, "Protest anything you want except lockdowns" (assuming the speaker believes the virus is the greatest threat).

Policy prescriptions are always political. Science is a method of creating accurate predictions. It's a valuable tool to inform your decisions, but it fundamentally cannot tell you what you should do. Deciding which outcome is most desirable is a value judgement that has no scientific answer.