MSNBC's Morning Joe demonstrated the public-health double standard on coronavirus and political activities. On Friday's Morning Joe, co-host Willie Geist asked NBC medical expert Dr. Vin Gupta "Obviously the country has averted its eyes to another issue for the last couple of weeks, rightly so, but you as a doctor, as a public health expert, have not been averting your eyes, you're watching exactly what's going on with coronavirus, what continues to happen. So where are we right now?"
But when he asked about testing, Gupta let his political sense take over, and said "we need to ban political rallies."
Dr. VIN GUPTA: I don't think this is ever going to happen at this point. We need the president and the vice president to not undermine the adversaries of the public health world. We have the president about to have a super-spreader event in Tulsa. The fact he's asking for informed consent of his supporters before a rally where there's no social distancing or masking is egregious. That's what I do before I do a procedure in the ICU because there might be potential harm but there's benefit. What’s the benefit to these supporters? Other that giving applause to the president. It makes no sense. We need to stop that. We need to ban political rallies. We need to encourage masking, frankly making it mandatory, I’ve been saying that for weeks.
But on Monday afternoon, Dr. Vin had a different take. He had been out in the streets of Seattle in protests, and this was somehow not a crazy "super-spreader event." Nudged by Nicolle Wallace on Deadline White House, he said "I was out with other physicians and nurses in Seattle over the weekend, where we had a Doctors for Justice March. And what were we doing? We were passing out masks. We were making sure if you didn't have a mask, you had a megaphone, you were protected. Some of my colleagues were handing out Purell. We want as much as anything for social justice to take center stage, because poverty, racism, they have actually [been] bigger killers than coronavirus by the statistics, so this is the right thing to do, but to do it safely."
Gupta offered a similar left-wing sound back on May 19, when he told Morning Joe, "my message to Americans is [Republicans] do not have your best interest at heart. They’re trying to win an election." This doctor even tried to pin the worsening situation in Brazil on Trump: "here's the thing, we're having one authoritarian leader here in the United States inform the practices of other authoritarian leaders globally."
