American Guinea Pigs

Thank you America for volunteering your citizens as coronavirus guineapigs. To be more specific, thank you President Trump and the governors of Florida,Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Minnesota, Vermont, Ohio, Idaho, NorthDakota, Montana, New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. 

They have decided that the first duty of government is the protection ofthe almighty dollar rather than the protection of human life. Dan Patrick,Lieutenant Governor of Texas, has gone further and proposed that elderlyAmericans should offer to die to protect the economy. 

Because public health and safety is the responsibility of stategovernments, anti-lockdown measures vary from state to state. New York, NewJersey and Connecticut have been the hardest hit and are trying to ease backtowards normality with a suck and see approach. 

Georgia is more dramatic. The governor still advocates social distancingbut is reopening restaurants, hair salons, bowling alleys and—my personalfavourite—cinemas. Just how hormonal teenagers will manage back row gropeswhile sitting six feet apart is a mystery waiting to be solved.  

South Carolina is reopening its beaches and non-essential retail outletsand Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee has more or less said to hell with it andopened everything.

Meanwhile the anti-lockdown protests continue, spurred on bycommentators such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity dubbing coronavirus a“pandumbic.” The first and biggest demonstration was in Wisconsin. An estimated2,500 people, many of them wielding guns and pro-Trump banners, gatheredoutside the governor’s mansion in Lansing. The Democratic Governor, GretchenWhitmer, had angered them by imposing a strict state-wide lockdown.  OnThursday it was announced that seven of the demonstrators had been diagnosedwith coronavirus. 

The anti-lockdown protesters are loud. And with weapons slung over theirshoulders, dangerous. But they are a minority. A poll by the Pew ResearchCentre revealed that 66 percent of Americans support the lockdown. However,they can’t  demonstrate because they are self-isolating, thus leaving thestreets to be noisily occupied by the minority. 

The anti-lockdown movement is based on three beliefs 1- that thelockdown breaches the First Amendment which guarantees “freedom of assembly”along with free speech and freedom of religion. 2- That the economic damageoutweighs the threat to human life and 3- the pandemic is a politicallyinspired hoax created by liberals and Democrats in league with the Chinese andother nasty foreigners to undermine their presidential hero Donald Trump. 

On the first point, the freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment areconstrained by law. For instance, freedom of assembly is guaranteed by theconstitution, but an assembly of people who lynch a person are guilty ofmurder. It can be argued that an assembly of people who flout the lockdown andas a result infect people with a deadly virus from which they subsequently dieare also guilty of a serious crime.  The second point is a politicaldecision. Personally, I would not want to live in a country that puts financesbefore the sanctity of human life. As for the third point, that indicates analmost unrivalled blinkered stupidity. 

But who knows, maybe the scientists are the stupidones. After all, Trump had an uncle who taught  at MIT. We will knowwithin a matter of weeks if the anti-lockdown brigade are right as over a dozenUS governors turn their states into human laboratories. If they are, the restof the world can breathe easier. If they are wrong, then there will be a lotmore dead and dying two-legged American guinea pigs. 

Tom Arms is a regular contributor