By Matt Rooney
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The Atilis Gym story doesn’t require much background if you follow New Jersey politics with even a casual level of interest. The Murphy Administration says it isn’t safe to work out in a gym. Many gym owners and patrons fervently disagree. The Bellmawr-based Atilis Gym’s owners are leading the charge for the latter opinion, opening their facility for members in recent weeks in the face of a contempt order, the revocation of their business license, and the threat of massive additional fines.
Unfortunately, our governor is a pompous tyrant who isn’t interested in working with the private sector to save thousands of fitness-related Garden State jobs. If he wasn’t? I have an easy solution to the conflict.
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Atilis Gym shouldn’t be treated as the enemy. The rebellious facility is actually a giant, as-of-yet untapped scientific case study which a GOOD FAITH government could use to evaluate the efficacy and necessity of COVID-19 restrictions.
Dozens (maybe hundreds?) of members appear to have continued to use the gym in recent months. Most gyms track their members every time they arrive, and I’m sure Atilis is no different. The owners’ attorney declared last week that no one had yet contracted the virus at the gym. Huge! If true, but we don’t need to take the owners’ lawyer’s word for it. Phil Murphy’s army of contact tracers should be able to verify that, and I suspect the patrons – if prompted by the owners – would be willing to cooperate to prove the gym’ point about its safety record.
Keep in mind: Atilis didn’t simply open its doors and throw caution to the wind. They’ve been operating at 20% capacity. The areas around machines were tapped off to prevent members from working out on top of one another. Masks are required when someone isn’t actively using weights. Temperatures were taken at the door.
Murphy claims to love science. If it’s true NO Atilis Gym members have fallen ill? Wow. That’s a scientific gem with GLOBAL implications.
We could reopen not just New Jersey fitness centers but other shuttered businesses with similar precautions in place.
What do we get instead? A governor who manipulates data and encourages his experts to find facts that fit his preordained conclusions. Also last week, Murphy trotted out a Chinese study from a SINGLE restaurant, involving a handful of individuals, to justify his decision to keep indoor dining off of the menu. Never mind that the experts later pointed out that crappy chinese technology and design was the culprit, not indoor dining by itself. That caveat doesn’t fit the narrative.
You may think the gym’s owners are heroes.
You may think they’re something less than heroic.
That’s not the point at this juncture. The bridge is crossed, and they’ve accepted the legal consequences for their civil disobediance. What matters it that we have a potential data gold mine capable of settling this debate once and for all. Millions of jobs and thousands of businesses could be impacted by what that data says.
Direct your experts to study the Atilis experience in good faith, Phil, if you’re brave enough to live by the results. If half of its members and their immediate families ended up in the hospital, something that hasn’t been seen in state like PA where gyms are open? You may have a point.
If not? Stop pretending you give a damn about science. We all know better at this point. Your hyper-ideological arrogant worldview is sandbagging our state’s economy and hurting far more people than most infectious diseases currently in circulation ever could.
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Save Jersey’s Founder and Blogger-in-Chief, MATT ROONEY is a nationally-noted and respected New Jersey political commentator. When he’s not on-line, radio or television advocating for conservative reform and challenging N.J. power-brokers, Matt is a practicing attorney at the law firm of DeMichele & DeMichele in Haddon Heights (Camden County).
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