Is the new CDC quarantine guidance based on science or is it just an accommodation of the fact that sticking to the earlier rules no longer seems very practical? As Allahpundit pointed out yesterday and today, it’s pretty clearly the latter. Pronouncements about the science have suddenly included a fudge factor meant to make allowances for what people are willing or likely to tolerate.

But it’s worth remembering that this is not the first time the science stopped being the determining factor in public health pronouncements. In fact, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out yesterday, you can go all the way back to last summer and see this same phenomenon in action.

That episode single-handedly destroyed trust in public health officials, proving they'd politicize their expertise when convenient.

Corporate media celebrated a douchebag-lawyer shaming families at deserted beaches, then — overnight! — cheered densely packed street protests. pic.twitter.com/DvOzIr5JX8

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 28, 2021

As usual, elite institutions — media, government, public health authorities — love to whine about the refusal of the public to trust their pronouncements, complaining people turn to other less credentialed and worthy sources.

But they *never* ask what they did to cause this.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 28, 2021

Just to highlight a few of these examples, here’s a bit of Politico’s story from June 4, 2020. This is the point where a lot of realized exhortations to follow the science were just another partisan game of Calvinball. [emphasis added]

“The injustice that’s evident to everyone right now needs to be addressed,” Abraar Karan, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital physician who’s exhorted coronavirus experts to amplify the protests’ anti-racist message, told me. “While I have voiced concerns that protests risk creating more outbreaks, the status quo wasn’t going to stop #covid19 either,” he wrote on Twitter this week.

It’s a message echoed by media outlets and some of the most prominent public health experts in America, like former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden, who loudly warned against efforts to rush reopening but is now supportive of mass protests. Their claim: If we don’t address racial inequality, it’ll be that much harder to fight Covid-19. There’s also evidence that the virus doesn’t spread easily outdoors, especially if people wear masks.

The experts maintain that their messages are consistent—that they were always flexible on Americans going outside, that they want protesters to take precautions and that they’re prioritizing public health by demanding an urgent fix to systemic racism.

But their messages are also confounding to many who spent the spring strictly isolated on the advice of health officials, only to hear that the need might not be so absolute after all. It’s particularly nettlesome to conservative skeptics of the all-or-nothing approach to lockdown, who point out that many of those same public health experts—a group that tends to skew liberal—widely criticized activists who held largely outdoor protests against lockdowns in April and May, accusing demonstrators of posing a public health danger. Conservatives, who felt their own concerns about long-term economic damage or even mental health costs of lockdown were brushed aside just days or weeks ago, are increasingly asking whether these public health experts are letting their politics sway their health care recommendations.

How bad does the hypocrisy have to be for Politico to take conservative complaints seriously? Answer: Very bad indeed. Drew Holden did a whole thread at the time on some of the people who’d lashed out at anyone refusing to follow lockdown guidance who then did an about face when it came to BLM marches. Here’s a sample.

Conservatives aren’t mad because there are protests.

We’re mad because ALL OF YOU said we were evil for suggesting mere weeks ago that some things are too important to keep locked down.

Don’t remember? Well, lucky for you, Twitter is free and the internet is forever.

THREAD.

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) June 3, 2020

Is leaving your home still selfish @GovMurphy? pic.twitter.com/QISTxmn1fc

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) June 3, 2020

Ditto for @juliaioffe, who apparently doesn’t think going out and breaking social distancing guidelines or crowd size restrictions is selfish. pic.twitter.com/le8PEU8yek

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) June 3, 2020

The Obama bros don’t seem to have these same misgivings about a lack of social distancing. @jonfavs & @TVietor08 pic.twitter.com/OYoTSNk2tc

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) June 3, 2020

There’s more but you get the idea. A significant portion of the very online left was ready to verbally crush anyone who refused to follow lockdown orders, especially those who protested those orders. And then the George Floyd protests started and they forgot all of that overnight and became protest supporters.

Today, Tom “the expert” Nichols made essentially the same point.

Brutal. But a good reminder that a lot of people who are now just *shocked* that there is an argument for policy tradeoffs didn't mind making *this* tradeoff. https://t.co/ANetQsNo2O

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 29, 2021

The fact that people here who are *still* trying to justify the "restrictions for all, but not on BLM marches in 2020" is amazing, and I would even call it something that rhymes with schmirtue-bignaling, but that would make people mad.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 29, 2021

"My violations of restrictions during the early, pre-vaccine pandemic were okay, because they were full of good people who did things right." https://t.co/639nHjNjYy

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 29, 2021

yes, it was thrilling

just the word I thought of while my brother was in cold storage and we couldn't bury him because it was too dangerous https://t.co/0DtSA8s27R

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 29, 2021

And for those of you, inexplicably, still posting "look at all those masked folks back during the marches!" pictures, here's one of a zillion pics I could pull up; this one's from a right-wing site called … "Slate", June 2020.

Wonder if that old lady in the front is okay. pic.twitter.com/wPHRjR1oLs

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 29, 2021

They changed the rules and then covered for behavior that only weeks before they’d been spitting mad about.

Okay. Here's the mayor of LA, June 2020. (LA County hits 200,000 cases something like two months later.) pic.twitter.com/b0a3sbfCMe

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 29, 2021

Yep. If you can admit that keeping everyone else in lockdown while supporting mass BLM gatherings was hypocrisy, fine. We're all human and we all have made rationalizations.
If you're still defending it, you lack intellectual integrity. https://t.co/Y0yb9pJ6BT

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 29, 2021

He even does the “Imagine…” think where we put the shoe on the other foot so dopey progressives can remember how they felt about this.

Imagine if in mid 2020 anti-abortion ppl in NYC, DC, and LA each said: "we're going to have a peaceful march and we'll all wear masks and sanitize."

And imagine the reaction if a thousand doctors said "Yes, this is acceptable, there are lives at stake and this is worth it." https://t.co/9F7iOVQSRe

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 29, 2021

It’s a bit painful to say but he’s right. It was last June when it became pretty clear to anyone paying attention that the rules of this particular game were subject to change, not because of the science but because of politics.

Frankly, it was clear in plenty of other ways at the time. The fact that Gov. Cuomo was treated by the media as the hero of the pandemic was always absurd and unjustifiable. And the fact that so many progressives, including Joe Biden, were insistent that President Trump was responsible for every individual death was equally absurd. That standard has also conveniently been abandoned with a Democrat now in office. So there’s nothing new about pandemic guidance being adjusted to suit the left’s needs of the moment. This is exactly how things have gone for at least the past 18 months.