Of rodeos and protests

Vincent J. Curtis

4 May 21

The first clue was the George Floyd riots last year.  Scores of thousands of maskless people in dozens of cities around the world rioted, looted, burned, shouted, and chanted – and none of these turned out to be “super-spreader” events.  Here was empirical evidence that outdoor gatherings were safe, no matter how large.

Last month came an MIT modelling study on the indoor transmission of the virus.  It was based on the observation that an uninfected person needed to inhale a certain amount of virus for them to become infected.  But the virus can’t accumulate outdoors; transmission was only possible outdoors if an infected person sneezed rudely into the face of an uninfected person.

The theory and the empirical evidence are that outdoors gatherings, no matter how large, aren’t spreader events.  That’s the state of the science, and if anybody disputes these findings, they need to produce findings of their own.  Opinions and handwaving to the contrary doesn’t cut it.  But that’s all the medical authorities and other assorted tyrants in Canada and the U.S. have to go on.  Then, it’s not “follow the science” but “obey the law.” i.e. our police enforced arbitrary orders.

It is said that Jason Kenney is royally annoyed at the protest-rodeo in Bowden, AB, last weekend.  Instead of asking his health authorities to prove the event caused spreading, he’s looking to punish cowboys who weren’t blindly obeying anymore.

If your authority is founded upon “the science,” you’ve got to follow it wherever it leads.

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