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I hope this doesn't get labeled as a bad faith question. I'm genuinely curious what the rationale is for supporting the mass gatherings and protesting following the death of George Floyd, despite previously having supported the social distancing during the pandemic. While I understand these people feel strongly about racism and police brutality, they also felt strongly about the pandemic.

The same pandemic, mind you, which is still on-going, and the number of daily cases has started growing in the US again, after a long period of decline. This may or may not be due to the protests, but either way, the point is that social distancing seems to still be relevant.

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What are the reasons cited for this change in stance?

I am primarily interested in reasons offered by US-based politicians and institutions. Any person who fits this description and who went from supporting social distancing to supporting the protests, fits my criteria and their cited response will be a valid answer to my question. I however had not had much luck in finding such an explanation.

sak
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    Also: How many prominent politicians have “endorsed” the protests to the point of calling people to participate in them (as opposed to being broadly supportive of the cause, unwilling to condemn them, or simply arguing that using force to prevent them would be disproportionate or counterproductive)? – Relaxed Jun 21 '20 at 15:37
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    @Relaxed: Exactly. Before asking what arguments were advance by people who endorsed both, the OP might want to determine whether there actually are such people. Then when they've been identified, finding their arguments should be fairly easy :-) – jamesqf Jun 21 '20 at 15:44
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    @sak I am seeing precisely the opposite: Sanders is offering vague generic support and Biden didn't attend a protest but the site of a protest in an attempt not to be outflanked without even clearly coming out in favor of the protesters (“lead the conversation […] I will listen”). None of this amounts to a call to attend a protest. – Relaxed Jun 21 '20 at 21:27
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    On Erik's point and my other comment, the reality of mass protests is that crowds are rarely very dense (have you been to one before the pandemic?). Unless you're directly facing a police line (typically at the front of a rally) or make a point of actually holding hands, people typically stand some distance apart. That's especially true if they are marching. Here is a paper with some examples but there is a whole literature on this. – Relaxed Jun 21 '20 at 21:37
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    The question confuses me a little, by "endorsed social distancing" do you mean "not join protests against social distancing"? – Captain Man Jun 23 '20 at 21:37
  • @Relaxed Even if we assume that protesters stand far enough apart to respect social distancing (you sure? I've seen lots of photos that indicate they don't, at least some of the time), if there's going to be a "police line", then the police are presumably going to be very close to one another. Unless you are implying that COVID spreading among police doesn't matter, I do not see your point. – Allure Jun 24 '20 at 03:00
  • @Allure My point is that it's at most a limited number of people for a limited amount of time who stand close to each other (photos can be deceiving, see the link I provided) and for the most part wearing masks so in no way comparable to a mass gathering. I certainly hope the police is wearing protective gear and it's up to them how they handle a protest so they have a lot of options to manage the risk. It's very disingeneous to suggest I implied it doesn't matter. – Relaxed Jun 24 '20 at 12:45
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    I didn't respond to your other comment about the risk being > 0 because @divibsan already did and I didn't want to turn this into a chat room but it seems your observation stems from the same mistake. Risk is inherently quantitative, social distancing is not a simple absolute imperative, it's a sliding scale balancing physical distance, setting, duration of the contact, etc. on the one hand and the public interest in an activity on the other. You cannot make sense of it (or of my comments) if you keep thinking of it qualitatively as risk vs. no risk. – Relaxed Jun 24 '20 at 12:54
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    The question and many comments suggested several people here considered that a protest is an extremely dangerous activity during which people are in close bodily contact for extended period of times and that obviously contradicts social distancing guidelines. It isn't so. It's a moderately risky activity and contradicts some guidelines but not others. That's my point. – Relaxed Jun 24 '20 at 12:58
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    They endorsed social distancing to save lives. They are protesting to save lives. Its is like being in favor of water rationing during a drought, and then also being in favor of using water to put out a fire. It isn't hypocritical or illogical, even if it will make the drought worse. – Shane Jun 24 '20 at 19:53
  • @Relaxed I think we fundamentally disagree. From my point of view, consistency involves supporting all reasonable policies that reduce risk and opposing all those that increase it. If you agree that the protests increase risk, then I consider it inconsistent to support both social distancing and protests. Things like whether people are in close bodily contact for extended periods of time are not relevant - even if the increase in risk is small as long as it's greater than zero it's inconsistent. If I'm not mistaken, the FDA adopts similar policies w.r.t carcinogens. – Allure Jun 26 '20 at 00:28
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    @Relaxed even the pro-COVID-spread protest in Berlin last week was largely keeping distance. – Reasonably Against Genocide Aug 06 '21 at 11:41

7 Answers7

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The key difference is that as our understanding of COVID-19 has improved, two facts have become clear about its infectivity which reduce the danger of spread during large outdoor protests like the ones that have occured over the killing of George Floyd. This article from Wired provides a good summary of the evidence:

Masks are quite effective at reducing the spread.

Though [Professor Roger] Shapiro supports the protests, he was worried about their potential to seed new chains of infection. So why didn’t they? His hunch is that two things protected protesters against disease transmission more than some scientists expected: wearing masks and being outdoors. “I think we would have seen a very different situation with fewer masks and indoor events,” says Shapiro.

...[A]nalyses of patterns of spread in China and aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship have provided evidence that airborne transmission likely plays an important role.

In order for SARS-CoV-2 to establish an infection inside someone’s lungs, that person must breathe in a sufficient number of viral particles. This “minimum infectious dose” is still unknown for SARS-CoV-2, but researchers suspect it is low. ...

Masks work by reducing the number of infectious viral particles exhaled into the environment. They are not a substitute for social distancing and hand-washing, but the collective evidence makes a strong case for wearing them during a pandemic. Even homemade masks can have a significant effect

Transmission outdoors is vastly less dangerous than transmission indoors

Linsey Marr, a professor of environmental engineering at Virginia Tech and leading expert in the airborne transmission of viruses who has become a trusted advisor to the World Health Organization during the current crisis, says that though there is increasing evidence that masks help reduce the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the outdoor environment also likely plays a large role.

“Outdoors there is so much dilution in the atmosphere that it would be unusual for virus levels to build up in the air,” she wrote WIRED in an email.

And, indeed, due to their outdoor location and high rate of mask, infection rates have, at least so far, remained very low. In Seattle, for example, the positivity rate for tested protestors is only 1%.

Of course, one take away is that many people were likely overestimated the risks of outdoor activity in the early stages, and, in retrospect, things like beach and park closures were likely an overreaction, and perhaps counter-productive.

divibisan
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    Good answer, but this is more of a hindsight justification. At the time when the protests started, it was widely expected that infections will soon explode due to them. See Cuomo's plead for all protestors to get tested as proof. – JonathanReez Jun 24 '20 at 05:26
  • @JonathanReez Not quite. We've known about these effects for a long time and it's been clear that, if people take proper precautions, an outdoor protest can be done safely. It's not a contradiction to worry that people might not follow those precautions and to highlight the risks to encourage people to be more careful, or to test as part of a standard contact tracing program. – divibisan Jun 24 '20 at 14:31
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I don't know of any politician or institutions that has made an explicit justification, and I'm not certain any have seen a need to. One would only need to offer an explicit justification if one were trying to organize a protest: trying to convince people they should break quarantine and take to the streets. But these protests have largely been organic, spontaneous actions, meaning they were not preplanned over weeks or months, as some protests are. They arose as a group reaction, self-organizing through private and personal communication channels, growing out of a strong, in-common conviction that there is pervasive injustice in the system. No one needed to convince people to come out and protest Floyd's death; people were primed and ready to go. There was a more pressing need to convince them to be peaceful, civil, and to take proper precautions for their health, and politicians/institutions have mostly focussed on the latter issue.

That being said, almost every discussion of the protests and the COVID-19 restrictions carries a broadly understood and implicit justification. Social distancing is meant to curtail non-essential interactions, in order to slow the transmission of the disease to manageable levels. But political actors (with a few notable exceptions, such as our current president) know that protests are an essential part of the US political system. We tolerate protests for the same reasons we tolerate people gathering in hospitals, grocery stores, and polling places: people need to do those activities or things begin to fall apart. Even those who speak out against the protests are (again with exceptions) careful to do so in ways that do not question the fundamental right to assemble politically.

A few people have raised the issue that the protests following George Floyd's death (BLM) were received far better by political leaders than the anti-social-distancing (ASD) protests that had previously occurred around the nation. This is arguably true, but seems beside the point, for two reasons:

  1. No one tried to stop the ASD protests, except through disapproving words and counter-protests: no mayor deployed riot police with military hardware against them, no governor called out the national guard, the president did not threaten to send in military troops to 'dominate' them. Those protests went off peaceably and smoothly in large part because they met no opposition whatsoever. In that sense, the BLM protests were received far worse than the ASD protests.
  2. The moral justifications for the ASD protests were far weaker. The complaints that lay behind these protests were self-centered and scientifically illiterate, arguing that the coronavirus threat isn't 'real' and that social distancing is an unnecessary and intrusive inconvenience. This isn't to suggest it is invalid to voice these complaints, but such complaints are never going to generate sympathetic moral consensus, not on the same level as the complaint that an entire group is subject to systematic oppression by police.
V2Blast
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Ted Wrigley
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  • Comments deleted. Please remember that Politics Stack Exchange is not a place to advance opinions or debate. – Philipp Jun 22 '20 at 09:36
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  • you equate BLM riots with ASD protests, even though ASD is not even what this question is about. 2. You deny that there have been high-level justifications for the protests, for example by Fauci. 3. You make completely subjective (biased) judgements about what is morally justified and what is essential. You answer doesn't answer the question and includes a bunch of your opinoins on unrelated topics.
    • – user1721135 Aug 04 '20 at 16:47
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    @user1721135: 1. Whether or not this question is about ASD, the comparison is a response to (now-deleted) comments. 2. Fauci never made an explicit justification for the protests (he avoids politics as best he can); can you offer an example of him (or someone) explicitly justifying it? 3. It is not *my* assessment that public protests are an essential part of the democratic process; blame the Founding Fathers for that. There is no equivalent sense of the 'essentialness' of other public interactions. Sorry, but it seems as though you're the one expressing unsupported opinions here. – Ted Wrigley Aug 04 '20 at 16:58