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.