What new rules specifically? And what rules were not in place for the armed all-white protests in Michigan, for instance?

For example, countries permitting residents to "gather in groups of 12", or "protest in groups of up to 100".

For example, https://cchealth.org/press-releases/2020/0602-Businesses-Reo...

Why create specialized rules for protests that allow an order of magnitude more people to gather than those allowed in a "close cohort" gathering?

Because 12 people is not a threat of you are a politician

All such advice/regulations is weighing the benefit of imposing the restriction vs. the cost of imposing such restriction.

And, importantly, all this is not in the context of individual risk, but population risk. The distinction is tricky but important, and one that trips most people up. For any single individual, the personal risk from COVID19 tends to be small, often seemingly vanishingly small. However, since we don't have immunity, it will affect everyone and even a small individual risk multiplied by (almost) everyone is a large impact on the population in terms of overall deaths.

Anyway, how many political protests have you attended in the last 10 years? How many social gatherings?

For me, it is easily 1:100, if not more. Thus, the aggregate transmission risk from protests is much smaller, therefore we can be more permissive of them. And it is the aggregate risk that policymakers care about.

On the other hand, political protest is considered a very, very fundamental right of our democracies, restricting it something to be done only with the greatest reluctance.

The freedom to practice religion is also a very fundamental right of our democracies, yet it is still illegal in many places due to the lockdown such as California.

Yes, the frequency that people attend protests is on average much less, but the number of other people that one is exposed to is much greater hence why "larger gathering venues at a pace consistent with public health and safety, such as nightclubs, concert venues, and live audience sports" (which are often outdoors as well) are in the very final phase of California's reopening plan. If policy makers agree that protests have a low aggregate risk, why would they place things like concerts or sports events which happen mostly on the weekends in the final phase when there are now protests happening every day?

I do agree that political protest is a very fundamental right and rarely ever be restricted, but many who share your opinion were against the anti-lockdown protests which is contradictory if one believes BLM protests should not be restricted because they are political protest. People protesting the lockdown is also democracy in action, even if one believes the reason for protest is not as important. The democratic right to protest is not dependant on how important the issue is seen to be.

The lockdown policies inevitable have political component, because they are made by politicians and will be evaluated in a political framework. And for a politician it is always practical to err on the CYA side - one extra day of lockdown costs the politician very little, as the costs of it are not born by them personally and are largely very hard to quantify, they are distributed among the population and spread among many consequences, small and large. However, if the politician raises the lockdown prematurely, the blame - in a very quantifiable and ready-for-election-ad form of raising case numbers - would be directed personally at the politician. If the political power of those who suffer from the lockdown is not large enough and organized enough to exert significant pressure, the smart politician would extend the lockdown until there's no conceivable risk to be blamed if anything happens. Virus research, vaccine research, etc., is science, but decisions on what to do with it is always political. And thus those who want to influence it obviously make a political action.

With the current protest, the political situation changes. Opposing these protests is a political suicide. If you can't oppose them, the only way is to have some contrived argument where you are for lockdowns (because see above) but also for protests.

> health officials should not have their risk assessments swayed by political considerations.

You can publish raw information about risk - which is complex and uncertain, and step back, but then you will have little influence on political decisions that follow it. Or you can recommend a policy - and by that inevitably contaminate the scientific assessment with political stance and become invested in certain policy. I'd much like the former, but vast majority of the policy in the US lately completely rejects the idea that the population can be trusted with full information and making its own decisions about it.

The ruling paradigm is that the government should limit people's choices for their own good, and push them into actions that it thinks are beneficial for them. And most people expect that from politicians and blame those politicians which didn't limit their choices enough and allowed them to make choices which ultimately brought bad consequences. So, the politicians and people that want the political action to happen play the game that the public wants to be played.

> The lockdown policies inevitable have political component, because they are made by politicians and will be evaluated in a political framework

This is true for the policies, but absolutely not true for advice from public health officials. Globally the policies made in response to this pandemic have been justified almost entirely by appeals to the authority of health officials. The supposed basis of these policies was that those officials were providing expert and politically neutral advice on risk management. Having the expert health and safety advice show a readily apparent political motivation undermines all of it.