Note: I wrote most of this article when COVID-19 mitigation mandates were still prevalent throughout the U.S. The fact that those mandates have been loosened should only put us on higher alert though, because the tyrants may just be waiting for us to lower our guard before they strike again.
Jesus gave up his life for humanity, and in doing so he demonstrated the most important quality of leadership: sacrifice. He didn't just preach sacrifice, he practiced what he preached and led by example. One could say he couldn't do any less, because he is the truth and if he didn't practice what he preached he'd be living a lie.
Before dying on the cross, he said to Pontius Pilate, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:11). St. Thomas Aquinas subsequently taught that all authority should derive from God, who is truth, but just because it should derive from God doesn't mean it always does. St. Thomas states, “Authority may fail to derive from God for two reasons: either because of the way in which authority has been obtained, or in consequence of the use which is made of it.”
The second reason is what concerns me today. When authorities use their power to achieve their own motives and abandon the truth in the process, their authority becomes null. We can abandon the Truth not only by lying, but also by refusing to act logically. The truth is a person, and outright lying is not the only way to offend him. Sadly though, leaders and influencers today--mostly politicians and media giants--depend on our ignorance and simply avoid telling us the truth, and get away with it because their words do not exactly lie. When truth is abandoned, abuse of power is not far behind.
Pope John Paul II stated: “[T]otalitarianism arises out of a denial of truth in the objective sense. If there is no transcendent truth, in obedience to which man achieves his full identity, then there is no sure principle for guaranteeing just relations between people.... If one does not acknowledge transcendent truth, then the force of power takes over (Centesimus Annus, 44).
In the Bible, over and over again the Israelites turned from the God who is truth, and as a result their enemies conquered them. This axiom ought to be a portent for all societies. When we abandon God’s direction, which is to say--in a sense--when we abandon logic (logos, the Word, Jesus), the consequences are dire. It makes no sense to assume the basic logistics of the universe would work differently when dealing with the coronavirus, and yet many authorities still think they could twist the truth to suit their agenda--while the elephant in the room, reality, stares them in the face and refutes their decrees. In a similar way, Pilate looked Christ in the face and asked, “What is truth?” (John 18:38).
Here's one way our society's leaders and influencers have abandoned God’s direction: they are not following Scripture’s basic guidelines for dealing with diseases. When explaining how to mitigate the spread of leprosy in Leviticus, God’s instructions are to isolate only the infected, not everyone. The leper “shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean; he shall dwell alone in a habitation outside the camp” (Leviticus 13:46).
Isolating the sick is supposed to help not only the rest of the population but also the sick person who is more vulnerable due to the virus. This approach has been called “focused protection” by over 45,000 medical practitioners, medical scientists and public health scientists who oppose COVID-19 lockdowns, and who have signed The Great Barrington Declaration to support this more logical approach to mitigating the virus.
Over 45,000 medical experts support focused protection because they know, when isolated and treated properly, even patients with comorbidities can defeat the coronavirus. That is why it is incredibly suspicious when early-stage COVID-19 patients die after being isolated in hospitals, especially when we already know COVID-19 is treatable with Ivermectin, remdesivir, budesonide, hydroxychloroquine and certain antibodies when given in the early stages of the virus. In fact, the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance has been campaigning for the use of Ivermectin to fight COVID-19 for months, and it’s still not being widely used. Why, with all of these ways to defeat the virus, are people still dying in its early stages?
Why did a priest in Argentina, who was diagnosed with COVID-19 in late December and was responding well to treatment in the local field hospital, die suddenly Jan. 5? Why did a bishop in Zambia who was diagnosed with COVID-19 die in a hospital after he said that he was in “stable condition” with good oxygen levels, and that he was “calm and confident” that he would recover?
Without making any undue implications, it's still relevant to note that euthanasia is becoming more and more legal around the world. From Spain to Tasmania there are bills being pushed to legalize it. While it is unfair to accuse any specific hospital or nursing home for following protocol, there needs to be culpability somewhere for the nonsensical deaths supposedly caused by COVID, because a virus with an over 99.7 percent survival rate often fails to be a logical culprit. It's only fair to start making some connections between COVID-19 and euthanasia. I don't want to accuse anyone of anything, but I do want to bring the possibility to people's attention, if they haven't noticed it already. Especially when we consider the fact that the elderly are the most vulnerable to COVID-19, it's only fair for us to ask if the virus is just another excuse to euthanize patients.
The virus’ survival rate alone should be cause for suspicion because with one so high we should be asking why we even need a vaccine; and the vaccines themselves raise some questions as well.
For instance, why were nine elderly Dominican Sisters in Adrian, Michigan given a COVID vaccine when they were already weakened by the virus? You don't have to be a virologist to know that vaccines are not supposed to cure someone of a virus, but to prevent them from getting it. Oh, but wait. COVID vaccines aren't even supposed to prevent someone from getting the virus. They're just supposed to prevent us from getting a deadly strand of it. Add to that the fact that people have still died after getting vaccinated, we can confidently say that the vaccines turn a virus with a 0.3 percent death rate into one with a 0.2 percent death rate.
Excess deaths and lockdowns
Someone might say it is clearly true that COVID-19 is a serious problem, because it caused excess deaths in 2020. When reported deaths in the U.S. hit 3 million last year, mainstream media inundated the internet with the news. Perhaps there were many more deaths than expected in 2020, but it’ll be at least a year before we really know if the cause was the virus itself or the extreme mitigation measures we took to curtail it. In fact, regarding death statistics, the CDC says, “Final data takes time to ensure accuracy and completeness…. it can take varying lengths of time (often between six months and a year, or sometimes longer) for CDC to collect and review different sets of data.”
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, highlights the negative effects lockdowns are having, effects so bad that they may account for the excess in deaths this past year, if there truly has been an excess. He said, quoting the U.N., that an estimated “130 million additional people will starve this year as a result of the economic damage from the lockdowns” (Imprimis, October 2020, Volume 49, Number 10). According to NPR, nine million people die of starvation each year on average, and that number could double as a result of the “pandemic”, but it really should have said as a result of the lockdowns. COVID-19 doesn’t cause starvation. Lockdowns do.
In addition to casualties due to starvation, we have the number of people who didn’t receive chemotherapy because they were too afraid to come to the hospital for it. They were more afraid of COVID than they were of cancer, Dr. Bhattacharya said.
In his message for the 29th World Day of the Sick, released on Jan. 12, Pope Francis said that vulnerable people in general, not just those who had COVID-19, were unable to gain access to treatment amid the lockdowns. This could have contributed to an increase in deaths this year as well.
The lockdowns are likely causing not just more deaths but more abuse as well. When a lockdown was imposed on March 30 in Nigeria, more than 3,600 cases of rape had been reported within a few months, along with significant increases in homicides and other acts of brutality.
We could look deeper into causes of death worldwide, but let's simplify things a little and just focus on the U.S. In the CDC chart shown here, April and December 2020 were by far the worst months of the year in the U.S. with 322,000 deaths, tens of thousands more than the next worst month listed. These just happened to be the months when the first and second mitigation mandates were most widely implemented.
Evidence supports the possibility that these excess deaths were caused by our panic, not the pandemic. When doctors put patients on respirators too soon, and governors ordered infected patients back into nursing homes, they were creating a crisis that could have been averted with better bedside manner, clear-headed thinking and the calm decision to just use drugs that had proved to be effective in curing people from COVID.
Also, if there is an overall increase in deaths nationwide, increases in drug overdose, suicide, and other depression or poverty-related issues could be contributing factors. For example, this chart shows an increase in the suicide rate from 2009 to 2018 going from 11.8 people per 1,000 to 14.2 per 1,000.
Suicide rates in the U.S.
The rate increased to 14.8 per 1,000 in 2020, despite claims from the New York Times that the rate decreased.
The data on all of these factors is usually brushed aside by mainstream media, but at least this Los Angeles Times article considered the possibility that factors such as suicide, drug overdose, depression, and poverty may have contributed to the increase in deaths this past year.
The deeper one digs the more the numbers don’t line up. For example, in this chart from USAFacts.com showing the top causes of death in the U.S. in 2020, conspicuously missing are deaths from accidents, kidney failure, and suicide, which are always among the leading causes of death, and when added up would easily amount to the reported deaths from COVID-19 on the chart, if we are comparing the number of deaths from those causes to other years, like 2018.
Dr. Bhattacharya added that 82 seroprevalence studies from around the world, when taking the median rate from all of them, showed that the virus has a fatality rate of 0.2 percent. If you look at common statistics about the coronavirus, you will see a fatality rate of closer to 2 percent, but that’s only because the sources are going by the number of cases and deaths, not the number of infections and deaths. We can’t really know how many people have been infected with COVID-19 unless we test everyone; but we can take samples of populations, which is what those 82 seroprevalence tests did. If there were excess deaths in 2020, and if those seroprevalence tests show such a low fatality rate for the coronavirus, we need to at least consider the possibility that the lockdowns--not the virus--were the more likely cause of excess deaths in 2020--or at least significantly contributed to excess deaths--especially when given the evidence above.
A retracted study
Let’s take a closer look at the number of deaths “due to COVID-19”. Genevieve Briand, assistant program director of the Applied Economics master’s degree program at Johns Hopkins University, shared the chart below in the university’s newsletter to demonstrate simple arithmetic: the number of deaths from other causes decreased in the weeks shown as the number of deaths caused by COVID-19 increased. These weeks are significant because they were the worst weeks of the epidemic in the U.S., supposedly. Briand’s source is the CDC’s data on reported deaths over the past five years.
Briand discovered that:
The CDC classified all deaths that are related to COVID-19 simply as COVID-19 deaths. Even patients dying from other underlying diseases but are infected with COVID-19 count as COVID-19 deaths. This is likely the main explanation as to why COVID-19 deaths drastically increased while deaths by all other diseases experienced a significant decrease.
The article on the study, published last November, has been retracted due to claims that it was misleading. Well, let’s determine that for ourselves.
Dr. Briand’s study is significant because it takes into account data from before the virus. When her article was retracted, fact-checkers provided data compiled in 2020 in an attempt to refute her study. Such data is untrustworthy for at least two reasons, though. First, (as mentioned in the CDC link above) it takes at least a year for all sources and statistics to be verified when counting deaths in a given time period. Second, studies done during COVID-19 could be influenced by the popular narrative surrounding the virus, and researchers may go into the study with a bias in favor of that narrative. Data from before the “pandemic”, on the other hand, is not going to be influenced by it.
Basing her analysis on the latter, Briand concluded that there was “no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths.” (After Dr. Briand’s article was retracted, the discussion about it did not end. An informative discussion about it can be found on her LinkedIn page here.)
Panic and the placebo effect
There could be many reasons for why there is such a storm of misinformation out there about COVID-19. Panic surrounding the virus could just be an excessive concern for safety. This kind of concern over a virus would have precedent. In 2007, in the absence of data, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center took extreme precautions when there seemed to be a whooping cough epidemic in the hospital. Everyone got tested. The New York Times reported in the article, “Faith in Quick Tests Leads to Epidemic that Wasn’t” that in the end the whooping cough epidemic was just a false alarm.
Could we be dealing with a similar kind of panic on a much larger scale with this coronavirus? Could our excessive concern for health actually make things worse?
Masks
Just as important as death counts and death rates to COVID-19 alarmists are claims that the virus spreads asymptomatically, unseen and unknown to us, thus requiring even people who aren’t sick to wear masks.
However, a study from China on the prevalence of infection after a lockdown found no transmission of COVID-19 among people who were in close contact with asymptomatic patients, contradicting the current narrative that asymptomatic transmission plays a major role in spreading the virus.
A study from nature.com concluded:
In summary, the detection rate of asymptomatic positive cases in the post-lockdown Wuhan was very low (0.303/10,000), and there was no evidence that the identified asymptomatic positive cases were infectious. These findings enabled decision makers to adjust prevention and control strategies in the post-lockdown period.
Additional studies, such as the popular Danish study from just last year and six others completed before COVID-19, all show how masks are not effective in preventing the spread of the virus or other respiratory illnesses. Mask mandates are irrational because masks don’t work. A nationwide study discovered that, when comparing states with no mask-wearing mandate to those that did have a mandate, the number of COVID-19 cases were 17 per 1,000 people for the no-mask-mandate states and 27 per 1,000 for the mask-mandate states. So, if anything, wearing masks may even spread the virus more than wearing no masks. We can also listen to the words of Dr. Anthony Fauci, saying masks may stop one droplet of the virus, and there’s no need for people to walk around with masks on because they only help people feel safer.
Compare the real-life-observation studies and testimonies above to the study referenced by those who say mask effectiveness has been proven, a study using manikins in a lab. So many studies are coming out proving the ineffectiveness of masks it’s hard to keep up with them all, but this chart from the bold doctors at Evergreen Family Medicine captures the gist of it:
Furthermore, COVID-19 supposedly was worse in winter 2021 than it was before everyone was told to wear masks in 2020. “It is also clear that masks serve symbolic roles,” says The New England Journal of Medicine. “Masks are not only tools, they are also talismans that may help increase health care workers’ perceived sense of safety, well-being, and trust in their hospitals. Although such reactions may not be strictly logical, we are all subject to fear and anxiety, especially during times of crisis.”
Truth is a person
Jesus said “the truth shall set you free” (John 8:32), and that he came into the world “to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice” (John 18:37). He also said, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27). When you’re getting to know someone, you grow familiar with his or her voice and character traits. It’s such that, at times, when you hear rumors about something the person did, you can say, “That doesn’t sound like something he would do.”
The voice of truth is the voice of the person Jesus Christ, and it has cunning clarity. Recognizing it is like bumping into an old friend on the street. Truth resonates with familiarity because it easily connects with other realities we know and experience every day. The more light you shine upon it the clearer it becomes. The truth is also intrusive, daring, and specific. So, understandably, it’s tough to align ourselves with it when doing so will expose some things that are hard to swallow. But when we do, we see that it is indeed a very clear and right and straight path.
The news surrounding COVID-19 misses the mark in that regard. COVID-19 news dissolves the more light one shines upon it, just as the virus itself dies in the sunlight. Lies are twisted and blurry and confusing, just like the often-contradicting information about the coronavirus.
It has come to the point where leaders in all walks of life, including head doctors, can tell us to do whatever fits their whims and blame COVID for their decision instead of taking the responsibility themselves. The virus has become the perfect scapegoat for tyrants' insatiable lust for power, because the virus can't speak up and say it's not to blame. The vaccine is just another example of how far they are willing to go to regulate their tyranny.
In 2013, Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston said “It is much harder to preach the Gospel in a culture that seems to be vaccinated against the Faith.” A culture vaccinated against the Faith has turned their backs on God and therefore has no choice but to rely on the baseless authority of men alone, who are prone to error and corruption. We’re not being protected against a pandemic in the respiratory system. We’re being conditioned to accept a pandemic of the mind. This is not about getting vaccinated against COVID-19. It’s about getting vaccinated against logic and truth.
Just because I think tyrants have orchestrated the whole narrative surrounding COVID-19 does not mean I think it's all a worldwide conspiracy. It doesn't take a worldwide conspiracy for human nature to creep in and take over our human institutions. It just takes the expulsion of God and truth in exchange for our own human understandings and humanist worldview. For thousands of years, humans fell back on primal instincts to explain phenomena. When we abandon the truth, those primal instincts, like panic, return. We've allowed the zeitgeist of relativism to take over our society, causing there to be confusion about what the truth is. When the common person does not have the tuth abide in them, they depend on the authorities to tell it to them. In this case, the authorities are the doctors. This superstitious behavior is similar to a primitive tribe or ancient Egyptians going to their medicine man or magicians for answers and a cure.
When the majority of authorities agree, they are not automatically right. We can thank the prophets of the Bible and St. Athanasius’ prevalence over the Arian heresy for proving that. Doctors are human too and subject to the same human nature as all of us. The only way to figure out the truth is by getting to know him.
Truth warrants that we judge each source by its own merits, not by some weight of authority the source claims to have. Truth has a substantially deep veracity to it, so it can be observed and scrutinized from various angles and still hold up as trustworthy. Truth makes sense. It is good, beautiful, just, life-giving, loving, faithful, and hopeful. God is the great “I am” because truth is what is, not what other people say it is.
Truth seekers question the answers. They search for more solid verification than someone’s words, and question everything they hear. They acknowledge that even their own eyes can deceive them.
Truth, in a word, doesn’t just have to be found. He needs to be met. He needs to be pursued in the face of all those who try to downplay and discredit him. He needs to be reached out for like the woman or man you want to dance with, but need to wiggle through a crowd just to get to him or her. He is the pearl of great price the diver dives down deep to retrieve, swimming past the schools of mockery, empty criticism, smoke screens, white lies, optics, and all other kinds of fishy deception.
This whole COVID-19 “pandemic” may not seem like an issue that proves the need for evangelization, but it clearly is. A great number of people are caught up in all of the pandemonium about the virus because so many of us don’t know the truth. So many of us don’t know Jesus. If we did, we’d be able to point out the lies just like Jesus exposed those of the Pharisees and Sadducees who tried to frame him. This time, liars are not trying to frame him, but they are trying to steal his identity. Those who abide in him will not be fooled. We can slip out of the crowd unscathed. As the blind continue to lead the blind, “Let them alone” (Matthew 15:14). But for those of us who have chosen to follow Christ, "we have come out of the shallows and the dry places to the one deep well; and the Truth is at the bottom of it" (G.K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows).
David Kilby is a freelance writer from New Jersey and managing editor of Catholic World Report.
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