This reckless, credibility-destroying hypocrisy has been articulated many times before by woke experts but I don’t know if it’s ever been made as brazenly as it is here. The clip actually starts off with a condemnation of the gathering at the White House last night — which is appropriate, as that should be condemned.

But then it segues into a discussion of the much larger gathering happening in Washington today and suddenly the rules of pandemic management magically shift. Sure, there might be infections, Dr. Rob Davidson allows. But that’s okay, because the pandemic that’s brought the country to its knees, landed it in a years-long recession, killed 170,000 people and counting, and inflicted unquantifiable psychological misery on literally billions of people worldwide is a less urgent public-health crisis than racism. An issue which isn’t going to be solved or, in all likelihood, even marginally reduced by this big demonstration in D.C.

Abortion is a public-health crisis too. Suicide, alcoholism, domestic violence — all of which are destined to surge amid mass lockdowns — are public-health crises. Not one of these woke A-holes would have the slightest reservation condemning mass anti-abortion or anti-lockdown rallies right now for irresponsibly risking an outbreak by holding a mass gathering. They’re carving out a special exemption for the March on Washington because they agree with its politics. As one of the Twitter replies to the clip below said, the logic here purely and simply is “it’s okay when we do it.”

CNN could have at least informed its viewers that this tool is a former Democratic candidate for Congress instead of playing him off as a fair-and-balanced MD. By not doing that, they’re inviting viewers to attribute his hypocrisy to doctors generally instead of to a particular doctor with a partisan axe to grind.

CNN guest Dr. Rob Davidson says that social distancing isn't as big of a concern at the March on Washington as it was last night at President Trump's speech because "this is a public health crisis they are marching against. Systemic racism has taken so many lives in this country" pic.twitter.com/OlrY3yMmin

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 28, 2020

It’s especially irresponsible to condone mass gatherings on a day when we’re discovering that not only can people be reinfected by coronavirus, they can develop severe symptoms from that reinfection. You’re not guaranteed to have a mild case next time if you’ve beaten the disease and developed some degree of immunity once before. How many people at today’s rally have beaten COVID once already and are operating mistakenly in the assumption that they’re safe now?

I was hard on Trump in this morning’s COVID post so in fairness (and in annoyance at Davidson) let me note something positive he’s involved in. The COVID antigen test that America’s been waiting for is finally here:

A COVID-19 test that takes 15 minutes and can be run without lab equipment was just granted emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration. It will cost $5, and runs on a simple card that uses the same technology as a pregnancy test…

The company said in a press release that it plans to produce 50 million tests per month by October.

The process is no more complicated than swabbing the nasal passage and inserting it into a slot on the “card.” If you’re positive, an indicator appears a la a home pregnancy test. It can be given at doctor’s offices, in schools, even at home — if the FDA approves that — and Abbott claims it’s accurate 97 percent of the time. If they had the manufacturing capacity to supply every American with, say, a two-month supply, the feds would find it much more cost-effective to scrap the next round of stimulus and simply foot the bill for that. At five bucks a test, it would cost a shade under $100 billion, a song relative to the multi-trillion-dollar package that’s in the works. With every American testing themselves each morning and quarantining if they test positive, we’d have a stranglehold on community spread within weeks. Some scientists are advocating precisely that approach to squash the pandemic.

Unfortunately, neither Abbott nor anyone else can make that many tests. But we can get their cheap tests to the people who need them most, which is exactly what Trump and his team intend to do. The feds are set to purchase 150 million tests from Abbott and distribute them to “nursing homes, schools and other areas with populations at high risk.” Detecting outbreaks early at school could have an outsized impact on reducing community spread. Detecting outbreaks early at nursing homes and other at-risk populations could have an outsized impact on the death toll. We’ll have better tools soon to manage the second wave this fall, no thanks to outbreak cheerleaders like Davidson.