It was obviously a scam from the start.

I just spotted the below tweet from sborg40, reminding us that in June 2020 CNN breathlessly reported a letter signed by over 1000 health professionals which advocated for:

• BLM protests to be allowed during “the pandemic”.

• Other gatherings should not be permitted though, especially protests against lockdowns.

• This was because “those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives”.

• “Protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.”

I feel sorry for writers of satire - do people have to pay for it any more, given the wealth of material available for free?

The CNN article Wesley Yang was quoting from is this:

These articles MUST be preserved for posterity, so here’s a cut and paste:

(Under this there’s another cracker - from Forbes.)

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CNN 

A group of health and medical colleagues has penned an open letter to express their concern that protests around the United States could be shut down under the guise of coronavirus health concerns.

The letter – which went on to draw more than 1,200 signatures – focuses on techniques to reduce harm to people protesting racial injustice.

“We created the letter in response to emerging narratives that seemed to malign demonstrations as risky for the public health because of Covid-19,” according to the letter writers, many of whom are part of the University of Washington’s Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“Instead, we wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to the public health, including the epidemic response. We believe that the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health, thereby addressing multiple public health crises.”

Demonstrators protest, Thursday, June 4, 2020, near the White House in Washington

The letter focuses on health guidance for protestors and law enforcement, such as wearing masks, advocating to not hold people who are arrested in close proximity and opposing the use of tear gas for health reasons.

“Staying at home, social distancing, and public masking are effective at minimizing the spread of COVID-19. To the extent possible, we support the application of these public health best practices during demonstrations that call attention to the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy,” the letter says.

“However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from demonstrators’ ability to gather and demand change. This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders.”

Demonstrators march across Brooklyn Bridge on June 4, 2020

The letter writers said they are concerned about health implications of protests, including how tear gas or smoke might cause people to cough, which can spread the coronavirus, and that people may be spending a lot of time together and not able to stay 6 feet apart.

“Prepare for an increased number of infections in the days following a protest,” the letter says. “Provide increased access to testing and care for people in the affected communities, especially when they or their family members put themselves at risk by attending protests.”

In a show of peace and solidarity, law enforcement officials with riot shields take a knee in front of protesters on Monday, June 1, 2020, in Atlanta

Dr. Abby Hussein, an infectious disease fellow at the University of Washington, noted that for black Americans this was truly a “life or death matter” and that protestors weren’t taking actions lightly.

“While everyone is concerned about the risk of Covid, there are risks with just being black in this country that almost outweigh that sometimes. And the sad part is the group that is protesting for their rights are the same people who are already disproportionately affected by the disease,” Hussein told CNN. “It’s something they’re doing because if they don’t fight for this now, they may never be able to fight for it in the future, because while Covid is right now, and we don’t know how long it’s going to last, white supremacy and oppression has been a long way longer, and we can guarantee that it’s going to continue if people don’t do anything about it now.”

The letter received more than 1,200 signatures of support before the authors closed the letter to signatures.

READ THE FULL LETTER:

Open letter advocating for an anti-racist public health response to demonstrations against systemic injustice occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic

On April 30, heavily armed and predominantly white protesters entered the State Capitol building in Lansing, Michigan, protesting stay-home orders and calls for widespread public masking to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Infectious disease physicians and public health officials publicly condemned these actions and privately mourned the widening rift between leaders in science and a subset of the communities that they serve. As of May 30, we are witnessing continuing demonstrations in response to ongoing, pervasive, and lethal institutional racism set off by the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among many other Black lives taken by police. A public health response to these demonstrations is also warranted, but this message must be wholly different from the response to white protesters resisting stay-home orders. Infectious disease and public health narratives adjacent to demonstrations against racism must be consciously anti-racist, and infectious disease experts must be clear and consistent in prioritizing an anti-racist message.

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.

Staying at home, social distancing, and public masking are effective at minimizing the spread of COVID-19. To the extent possible, we support the application of these public health best practices during demonstrations that call attention to the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy. However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from demonstrators’ ability to gather and demand change. This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives. Protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.

Therefore, we propose the following guidance to support public health:

● Support local and state governments in upholding the right to protest and allow protesters to gather.

● Do not disband protests under the guise of maintaining public health for COVID-19 restrictions.

● Advocate that protesters not be arrested or held in confined spaces, including jails or police vans, which are some of the highest-risk areas for COVID-19 transmission.

● Oppose any use of tear gas, smoke, or other respiratory irritants, which could increase risk for COVID- 19 by making the respiratory tract more susceptible to infection, exacerbating existing inflammation, and inducing coughing.

● Demand that law enforcement officials also respect infection prevention recommendations by maintaining distance from protesters and wearing masks.

● Reject messaging that face coverings are motivated by concealment and instead celebrate face coverings as protective of the public’s health in the context of COVID-19.

● Prepare for an increased number of infections in the days following a protest. Provide increased access to testing and care for people in the affected communities, especially when they or their family members put themselves at risk by attending protests.

● Support the health of protesters by encouraging the following:

○ Use of face coverings.

○ Distance of at least 6 feet between protesters, where possible.

○ Demonstrating consistently alongside close contacts and moving together as a group, rather than extensively intermingling with multiple groups.

○ Staying at home when sick, and using other platforms to oppose racism for high-risk individuals, and those unable or uncomfortable to attend in person.

● Encourage allies who may wish to facilitate safe demonstrations through the following:

○ Providing masks, hand-washing stations, or hand sanitizer to demonstrators.

○ Providing eye protection, such as face shields or goggles, for protection against COVID-19 and chemical irritants used to disperse crowds.

○ Bringing wrapped, single-serving food or beverages to sustain people protesting.

○ Providing chalk markings or other designations to encourage appropriate distancing between protesters.

○ Supplying ropes, which can be knotted at 6-foot intervals, to allow people to march together while maintaining spacing.

○ Donating to bail funds for protesters

● Listen, and prioritize the needs of Black people as expressed by Black voices.

These are strategies for harm reduction. It is our sincere hope that all participants will be able to follow these suggestions for safer public demonstrations, assisted by allies where possible and necessary, but we recognize that this may not always be the case. Even so, we continue to support demonstrators who are tackling the paramount public health problem of pervasive racism. We express solidarity and gratitude toward demonstrators who have already taken on enormous personal risk to advocate for their own health, the health of their communities, and the public health of the United States. We pledge our services as allies who share this goal.

This letter is signed by 1,288 public health professionals, infectious diseases professionals, and community stakeholders.

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Forbes joins in.

So as not to be outdone, Forbes magazine promoted the letter with this article:

In this piece, the author interviews and then cites multiple epidemiologists. Reading the resulting article is like visiting a salad bar at a cheap chain restaurant: a huge pile of unmemorable and indigestible (word) salad you regret choosing.

Here’s the text:

Today is Juneteenth, the anniversary of the day that slaves in Texas learned they were free. It’s also just over three weeks since George Floyd’s homicide galvanized waves of protests across the nation against police brutality and structural racism in the U.S. When the protests began, various people on social media asked whether cases of Covid-19 would increase as a result of the protests. Despite those concerns, the public health community has generally supported the protests.

In fact, more than 1,200 epidemiologists, infectious disease doctors, and other public health professionals and community stakeholders signed an open letter calling for an “anti-racist public health response to demonstrations against systemic injustice occurring during the Covid-19 pandemic.” They described the public health threat of systemic racism and described ways protesters could reduce their risk of transmitting Covid-19. Early data suggest those risk reduction strategies may have prevented an uptick in coronavirus infections, but it comes only from a handful of cities.

For many observers, this support from public health experts is contradictory, or even hypocritical: How could so many of these experts support the current protests after months of telling people to stay home, or after not supporting the protests against lockdowns? How can public health experts keep their credibility when they suggest marching in the streets is “okay” when going to church isn’t? 

National Journal politics editor Josh Kraushaar, for example, tweeted that the letters reveals “how elites / ‘experts’ lose credibility. All the warnings about spreading coronavirus now immaterial — if you support the right cause.” 

Author Thomas Chatterton Williams echoed others’ concerns when he tweeted, “Does social distancing matter, or doesn't it? If not, why not–and since when? And why did 40 million disproportionately non-white people go on unemployment? And if there’s a second wave sparked by all this and Black people are disproportionately affected, how do we weigh that?”

The concerns about transmission are justified, said Jewel Mullen, MD, the associate dean for health equity and an associate professor of public health at the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School, particularly given the increased risks of Covid-19 to the African-American population. She called it a “cruel irony” that the majority of protesters, particularly early on, largely came from the same “Black and brown communities that have been most traumatized by Covid in the first place.” 

Then how do public health experts themselves wrangle with this dilemma? A big part of it is recognizing how systemic racism itself is also a major public health problem that contributes to poorer health and poorer Covid outcomes among Black people. “I describe it as people’s willingness to risk their lives to try to save their lives,” Mullen said. 

I spoke to multiple epidemiologists and public health experts, both Black and non-Black, to better understand how the issues of racism and Covid are entwined, the importance of Black Lives Matter during the pandemic, and why so many public health proponents support the protests despite the potential risks. 

Public health advice hasn’t actually changed

Every expert I spoke to reiterated that staying home, wearing masks in public, and practicing social distancing remain important, particularly in areas with active transmission. 

“The advice is still to stay home as much as is possible unless engaging in essential activities,” said Ellie Murray, ScD, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health. “Protesting police violence and structural inequalities is an essential activity for a lot of people.” 

But then, so is faith worship for many people. How can protesting be okay when going to church, synagogue, temple or a mosque isn’t? Murray acknowledged that the choice of what’s “essential” isn’t a scientific one—“it’s always going to be driven by our ideals,” she said. The key is to focus on reducing risk. 

“Public health and public health messaging has always been about how to minimize harm. Harm reduction is the core of public health,” Murray said. With faith services, “the question is, what part of the activity of church is the essential activity for you, and how do we help you do that as safely as possible?” For some, online services meet people’s needs. For others who need more of the community interaction, volunteering outside, while social distancing, may provide it. Dominique Heinke, ScD, a postdoctoral epidemiologist in Boston, also pointed out the big difference between worship services held indoors, where risk of transmission is far higher, and any activity outdoors, where it’s easier to spread out and the air disperses the virus more quickly. 

Then why didn’t public health experts support lockdown protesting? 

If outdoor activities such as protests carry less risk, wouldn’t that mean the lockdown protests were okay too? No, Murray said, not from a public health perspective. 

“It’s not my place as a scientist to say this is a bad or good reason to protest,” Murray said. “That said, the lockdowns were an attempt at solving a public health problem. Police violence is the cause of a public health problem. From a public health perspective, it makes sense to protest something that is causing a public health problem but not something that is trying to solve one.” 

One could try to argue that police violence alone won’t kill as many people as Covid-19 will. But that’s a short-sighted conclusion, especially since the protesters are protesting more than just the killing of George Floyd, said Zinzi Bailey, ScD, an assistant scientist at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine’s Jay Weiss Institute for Health Equity at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. If the coronavirus pandemic follows a similar trajectory as the 1918 flu pandemic, it should eventually settle down or reach herd immunity, whether through infection or a vaccine, even if it never fully goes away. But without action, Black people will continue to die from the deaths they have already been dying due to racism. 

“If we don’t fight systemic racism now, that epidemic is going to last generations, and we’ve already had 400 years of doing this,” Bailey said. “We are marching in the streets for not only ourselves and our prosperity, but for our children, our grandchildren, our great grandchildren. This is a dire situation where we are at risk of death by Covid, but we are also at risk of death by police. And I’m actually not sure, as an epidemiologist, which one would have the highest level of detriment in our current situation.” 

Systemic racism itself is a public health emergency

What many of those pointing out the “contradiction” in public health advice have failed to recognize is how serious a public health problem systemic racism is. First it’s important to understand the difference between structural or systemic racism and interpersonal racism, the type most people are familiar with. Interpersonal racism involves interaction between specific individuals, whether it’s name-calling or bullying, directly discriminating against someone based on race, or even violence directed against someone because of their race. 

Systemic racism is more complex: it doesn’t have a name-able perpetrator in the way interpersonal racism does. It’s baked in our entire social system. Systemic racism occurs when “public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work” to reinforce and perpetuate racial inequality, as The Aspen Institute puts it. “Structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice,” the institute states, and indeed, many people aren’t aware of it even when it’s all around them. “Instead it has been a feature of the social, economic, and political systems in which we all exist.” In plainer language: All aspects of our social, cultural, government, and business systems are set up in such a way that Black people and other minorities are at a disadvantage. 

The idea of systemic racism as a public health problem isn’t new. A whole area of research that focuses on inequality and social determinants of health has shown the impact of racism on health for years, explained Naomi Thyden, MPH, a PhD student in epidemiology at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Thyden pointed to infant mortality rates as a major example since these rates are common indicators of population health. Black babies are more than twice as likely to die before their first birthday as white babies in the U.S. That’s just one of many inequalities that result directly from systemic racism.

“People think it’s not about race, that it’s about class and poverty,” Thyden said. But that doesn’t explain why the infant mortality rate is higher even among Black women with college degrees compared to white women with high school degrees. Maternal mortality statistics for Black women are similar. “Once you get into the data, it’s kind of hard to ignore that it’s due to racism,” Thyden said. 

Systemic racism is inextricably linked to worse Covid-19 disease

Here’s that cruel irony Mullen referred to: the reason the Black population has been hit so hard by the coronavirus pandemic is the same reason they suffer so many other illnesses and the police brutality these protests address. 

“As a society, we have a choice to either watch the health and safety of Black Americans get worse and worse as this pandemic progresses, or we have the choice to say we’re not going to tolerate it anymore,” Thyden said. “This country’s response to Covid-19 was already really hurting Black and brown communities, and I think George Floyd’s murder was the tipping point of that.” 

Bailey described it as a “syndemic,” where two epidemics interact to produce worse outcomes than either individually would, and her most recent research focuses precisely on this intersection.

“I don’t think you can disentangle the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 from the things that we are fighting for on the streets,” Bailey said. “The underlying root of both is the same, which is the structural racism that has existed in this country for decades, centuries.” 

The very underlying conditions that occur more often in the Black population and make Covid-19 more dangerous have resulted from racist policies, such as “residential discrimination where Blacks have been relegated to certain parts of the city with higher exposure to poor environmental conditions,” Bailey said. High blood pressure and asthma are linked to air pollution from highways built through or near Black neighborhoods “to benefit white people fleeing into suburbs,” she said. Black people are also more likely to live near toxic waste, and certainly not by choice. Black neighborhoods tend to have less access to a variety of healthy foods, and an excess of advertising for sugary or salty foods, both of which contribute to obesity and diabetes rates. 

The Deep South has the highest proportion of Black people, Bailey said. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s also the place with the highest prevalence of underlying chronic conditions and a strong history rooted in the legacy of racism and Jim Crow,” she said. “The fight against police brutality is the fight against systemic racism that produces disproportionate comorbidities that increase the risk of dying from Covid-19.” 

Further, social inequalities have forced more Black people to have jobs that put them at greater risk of exposure to Covid-19, with less access to health insurance or quality healthcare, she pointed out. People of color, especially women of color, hold many of the high-risk positions with low wages that are most dangerous in a pandemic. “The fight in the streets is also a fight for equal rights and appropriate compensation and benefits for people of color, especially women,” Bailey said. 

Protesters are taking a calculated risk—and taking the virus seriously 

 Several experts also pointed out that protesters aren’t pretending the coronavirus pandemic doesn’t exist (as many of the lockdown protesters did). They’re weighing the risk of protesting with the risk of not protesting and maintaining a status quo that also threatens Black lives. And they’re aware of the inherent risks of protesting on its own, even not during a pandemic. 

“Given the amount of violence we see in many protests, we know that people who choose to protest have already made a decision to take some risks,” Mullen said. “You have the health risks [of Covid-19] superimposed on the health risks associated with bodily injury.”

That’s why protesters are following many of the risk reduction strategies that experts like Murray tweeted out—something that every expert I interviewed pointed out. 

“All the protests I have seen being organized, especially from experienced organizers, are emphasizing the use of masks, trying to stay socially distant when they can, not necessarily yelling as much through masks, and using things like drums and signs to spread a message,” Bailey said. 

Murray said she was concerned early on about transmission during the protests but agreed that the images she’s seeing suggest “protesters are being as safe as they can.” She noted the trend of sit-in or lying-down protests where each person has their own space and isn’t moving around. “I think those are really positive signs that protesters are taking the risk of Covid seriously and weighing the risk and benefits to themselves of what to do in terms of action.” 

Thyden also noted that protests have generally been outdoors with social distancing and mask-wearing, all of which reduce transmission risk. “The protests on their own could be low risk,” she said, “but police are making them high risk.” 

Law enforcement response is increasing risk of Covid-19 transmission

Another theme nearly every expert noted was how the behavior of police and other law enforcement groups responding to the protests are increasing risk of disease transmission. Officers are not wearing face masks (though some have worn face shields or gas masks), they’re not wearing gloves, and they’re crowding individuals into groups so they can surround and arrest them, Murray said. 

“They’re using tear gas and other respiratory irritants which can cause people to cough,” she said, and it’s an open scientific question whether such irritants might increase susceptibility to infection too. “When people are injured in protests, others gather around them to help flush out their eyes from tear gas or bandage them up from rubber bullets, and all of those things are increasing the amount of contact people have.” 

Worst of all is putting protesters into buses and jails, which are higher risk environments, both Thyden and Murray said. 

“You’re taking a group of people who were potentially spread out in an open outdoor space and putting them all in a small enclosed space [in a bus] close to each other and then putting them in jail cells,” Murray said. Those actions are problematic in multiple ways, she said, but especially when it comes to transmission of a contagious disease. 

Pew Trusts also highlighted how arrests and tear gas are likely greater concerns than the protests themselves when it comes to Covid-19.

“Police have not hesitated to make things worse,” Thyden said. “The onus is a lot more on the police to be creating a healthy environment or at least not making it worse.” 

Actionable change in racist policies could reduce risk too, suggested Helen Jenkins, PhD, an assistant professor of biostatistics at Boston University School of Public Health. “If the people in power in this country actually cared about transmission, they could end this now with proposals for serious changes to the laws and addressing the corruption in the police force,” she said. “But they don’t.” Jenkins told me this before the two bills addressing police violence were introduced in Congress, but the question remains whether those bills are adequate either. 

Blaming protesters is blaming the victim

What happens if cases do increase after the protests? Several states are seeing rapidly rising Covid-19 cases right now, three weeks after protests began. Mark D. Levine, Chair of New York City Council health committee and an outspoken public health advocate, said racism is to blame for that too: “Let's be clear about something,” he tweeted. “If there is a spike in coronavirus cases in the next two weeks, don't blame the protesters. Blame racism.” 

Putting the responsibility for transmission of Covid-19 on protesters is bypassing the real issue, Mullen suggested. 

“If we look at subsets of Black and brown people, the vulnerable populations who get sick, and say it’s because they protested, then we have once again found a way to minimize the contribution of inequality to what’s underlying this whole mix of infectious disease and social disease,” she said. 

Mullen also pointed out that many states had just begun opening up businesses around the same time the protests began, making it all but impossible to determine what factors might be contributing to increased cases. Indeed, states seeing the highest peaks, such as Texas, Arizona, Florida, Nevada, and Oregon, are the states who began opening their economies first. 

Mullen warned against drawing “spurious conclusions” about causes of cases and focusing instead on solutions: “Let’s be as protective as possible of all these people who are out there standing up for justice and see public health systems continuing to build the capacity that we still haven’t reached to fully address and respond to this pandemic that we know is not about to end,” she said. 

Trevor Bedford, PhD, an associate professor of public health and infectious disease at Fred Hutch in Seattle, echoed many of the same points on Twitter, noting that “protests and potential to transmit virus are on a background of general societal opening. It feels as though we've largely given up on controlling the epidemic and have resigned ourselves to living alongside it.” 

So then, why must the protests happen now—in the middle of a pandemic?

Even if people agree with the need for policies to address police brutality and systemic racism, the “Why now?” question persists. Bailey suggested that Covid may have allowed people to be more reflective, with so much of the nation’s attention focused on the pandemic and so many people unable to go out for work or leisure activities. 

“The everyday elements of life and getting work done distract us from the injustice in the world and from taking action,” Bailey said. Then, smack in the middle of this ennui, “someone who has a smirk on their face murders someone while people watched, and that is pretty much a lynching,” she said. “We are at a very specific point where people are paying attention, and we have to do something—there is an urgency.” 

The stark, obvious wrongness of George Floyd’s killing has motivated and mobilized people on a scale not seen in decades. 

“Police violence and structural racism have been huge public health issues for a long, long time, but right now we have the added benefit of momentum and attention to the problem,” Murray said. “Why do they have to be doing this now? Now is the moment because now there is attention, there is momentum, and there are changes we can make.” 

It requires momentum and sustained attention for change to happen, and that means the protests have the potential to improve Black Americans’ lives in the long run if they lead to change, Thyden said. She also questioned the sincerity of people claiming to worry about the health of Black people protesting. 

“White people have generally not been concerned about racial health disparities and haven’t really tried to fix them,” Thyden said. “So it feels a little hollow when suddenly people say they are concerned about the increased risk of protesting.”

And of course, there are never “convenient” times to protest, especially for problems that have grown from centuries of injustice. 

“Black folks are forever being told, ‘Now is not the time’ or ‘We’d like to listen but you’re saying it wrong,’ and, to me, ‘But the pandemic’ is a variation on those kinds of dismissals,” Heinke said. “Let’s be honest: the white people in power have been refusing to address rampant police violence since emancipation, so why exactly should they trust that same process to work this time? Even during the pandemic, police violence is clearly still a mortal threat. That’s why the protests are a necessity.” 

Still, isn’t support for protests politicizing public health recommendations?  

Even those who understand the seriousness of racism as a public health problem have raised questions about the optics of public health support for the protests. Author and religion/philosophy professor Alan Levinovitz, for example, expressed concern that “reasonable non-Twitter non-media public, especially in the political center, will conclude that health messaging/expertise is partisan, which is tremendously dangerous in short and long term” if “public health officials don’t express serious concern about protests’ potential health effects downstream.” 

But that’s a red herring, Murray said.

“There has been no point since the first public awareness of Covid that I haven’t been having to respond to people claiming that I’m making some kind of politically motivated statements,” Murray said. “Public health is always political. There’s no way around that.” 

And this pandemic in particular has been heavily politicized from the start, as articles from the Wall Street Journal to New York Magazine have pointed out. Plenty of other serious public health issues, from gun violence to obesity, have not avoided politicization either. 

“As a public health leader, I have always felt as though I live at the intersection of public health policy, health policy, and politics,” Mullen said. “To me, they’re inextricable. Concerns about politicization are almost inevitable because somebody is always going to see it that way.” But when people want to conclude an issue is only about politics, “then it’s harder for any of us to have confidence that the social and health policies are evolving with people’s wellbeing at the forefront,” she said. That argument just further divides people instead of focusing on solutions.  

I want to help, but I can’t risk protesting in person

While protesting in the streets gets more media attention, it’s not the only way to support the movement demanding anti-racist policies and improved conditions for people of color in the U.S., Bailey said. She noted several ways people can help without marching in the streets, such as dropping off snacks and water to protesters, donating to bail funds, addressing everyday racism in their work place, and putting pressure on local, state, and federal legislators to address systemic racism. 

Bailey also provided a list of anti-racism resources:

—Anti-Racism Resources for White People

—Social Change: Everyone Has a Role to Play

—Research-based solutions to stop police violence

—My Role in the Social Change Ecosystem

—Public Health Calls for Solidarity, Not Warfare

—How Racial Health Disparities Will Play Out in the Pandemic

—No Going Back: A Covid-19 Cultural Strategy Activation Guide for Artists and Activists (pdf)

Follow me on Twitter. 

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