Your doctor tells you if you don’t stop smoking you will die of lung cancer, so you stop smoking and don’t die and then you accuse the doctor of falsely blaming smoking for causing lung cancer and unnecessarily hurting the tobacco industry.
Q: did social distancing work or not? https://twitter.com/revrrlewis/status/1249676952295944193

2/ I have no idea how long social distancing should continue and we absolutely have to get this economy going again. At some point we’re going to have to say “We have 20K-40K flu deaths every year, we can’t save everyone.” I get that. But, that’s different from doing nothing.

3/ Q in March wasn’t whether 60K deaths in a bad flu season was acceptable, but whether we let a very contagious/deadly respiratory virus wash over country with no vaccine and destroy our public health system, 1-2M lives, and wreck our economy anyway. We have short memories.

4/ All that said, the stated purpose of shutting country down for 6 wks was to build massive capacity to test, treat, trace, and isolate so the rest of us, with precautions, could go back to work/life until we get vaccine. How’s that going? What are the metrics? How close are we?

5/ So, huge Q Americans, Media, Politicians should be asking w/ 17-20 days of this phase of shutdown to go, is how well is GOVT doing to surge capacity to test, treat, trace, and isolate? Manufacturing supplies? PPE? Vaccine dev? That matters now as much as flattening the curve.

6/ I want to get economy going ASAP. 17M lost jobs in a month is horrendous. Lives and livelihoods are on the line. But, what are metrics to reopen? How do we do it? What’s the plan? It’s more than looking at the growth rate of cases/death b/c that was mitigated by the lockdown.

7/ So, my prayer is that cases/deaths will fall AND that a good, comprehensive plan will be developed allowing us to to safely reopen our economy in a moral fashion valuing human life and recognizing that the economy is about more than money, but it’s about human flourishing.

8/ And, to do all this, a reestablishment of the value of truth is needed. Truth in the public square is a required virtue that is needed in the functioning of a democratic republic and a moral economy. Sadly, Bill Bennett isn’t helping promote that virtue w/ these comments.