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They will also sometimes quote 1 Corinthians 11:4, an odd choice
given that it is immediately followed by, "But every woman who prays
or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head..."
(1 Corinthians 11:5). According to Paul,
one half of humanity ought to wear a head covering while prophesying
in church. How to derive a general rule outlawing any face covering from this is
obscure. As a rule, these complaining churches simply do not observe 1 Corinthians 11:5.
Advice which sounds pious but leaves needless deaths in its wake
is bad advice. Pastors should give good advice, even if, of
necessity, it is the same as advice the state is coercively
mandating, contrary to constitutional norms. Could there come
a time when the hireling pastors who gave bad advice
during this pandemic will be sued for the harm they caused to individuals
and families? Under U.S. constitutional law, a church cannot be sued for
harm caused by specifically religious claims, because the
government is incompetent to decide the truth or falsity of
religious claims.
But the advice Douglas Wilson and his like-minded colleagues
are giving is entirely secular: it's just wrong! They are doing
epidemiology, they are just doing it badly and incompetently, and
harming people in the process. People walking in to a church during this
crisis are entitled to see face masks and social distancing. If
these are absent, and especially if they are absent because the
pastor preaches conspiracy theories and pseudo-science, the public
has been wronged. While in charismatic churches these matters
intersect with bona-fide religious doctrine, gung-ho Calvinist churches, like Douglas
Wilson's or John MacArthur's megachurch, are anti-charismatic. They are
cessationists! Their opposition to these measures is not founded on doctrine, but on
make-believe science. Incidentally, Douglas Wilson was offering his own
made-up medical advice on AIDS and HIV long before this new disease
came along. Evidently doing non-evidence-based 'medicine' is a hard
habit to break.
Some of the good advice is indeed reminiscent of Muslim practice,
as the critics point out. Could there an historical reason for this? When the Muslim Arabs
inherited a blasted and degraded earth, at the close of the period
of classical antiquity, it was in part because they had the skills
to survive in what used to be a garden, but had been made a desert.
The ancients used to cut down trees and drain swamps and wetlands
like there was no tomorrow, with the net result that they created a
minimalist 'Mediterranean landscape.' Arabs, the children of the
desert, could survive there. People of olden times could tell of a land
of milk and honey, which no longer was.
Disease was rampant; the plague of
Justinian killed millions. Although disease prevention is not the
reason the Muslims adopted the women's veil,— they borrowed that like
they borrowed so much else, from the Greeks and others,— that custom, along with their habit of
imposing a 'safer at home' order on one half of humanity, probably
did contribute to differential survival rates for Muslims in very
sick places, like Mesopotamia, and thus contributed to their success.
From having been an out-of-the-way, backward population group, they
became world rulers. You've got to do what works in time of
plague, and face masks work. Other odd historical wardrobe choices may
have a similar pedigree. The Elizabethan ruff reminds the viewer of
our pets' cone of shame, and likely catches more than a few Flugge droplets of
their way out and down. Those who wore this garment would not have
had means of determining this, but they might have noticed that
places which happened to pioneer this fashion were healthier than
the norm, and consequently perceived the style as
clean and wholesome.
Specific arguments offered by Wilson's Moscow, Idaho church
against face masks include the familiar 'mosquito in front of a
chain link fence' meme. Viruses are very small, that much of the
analogy is on target. But unlike mosquitos, who identify obstacles
and take evasive action, viruses surfing the air currents on their
little galleon of spit are not trying to get anywhere nor trying to
avoid anything. Some will splatter on the chain link fence,
especially if there are multiple chain link fences stacked against
each other. Viruses are very small, but there is no natural process that
ejects bare, naked virus particles from the body. If there were,
would a completely desiccated virus even be infective? They are
ejected in gobs of spit, some of them so large as to be visible to
the naked eye. Not to deny many incoming particles make it through the
mask; but according to an article in the New York Times, these
escapees are less likely to be the very small aerosols, which follow
a zig-zag path reminiscent of Brownian movement, because their small
mass leaves them prey to random natural forces at the very small-scale
level. These crash into
fabric tendrils. Medium-sized particles stand the best chance of
going with the flow and making it through.
The quality of home-made cloth masks varies from all but
worthless to very good; I understand the blue shop cloths sold at
auto supply stores make very efficient filters. If people are
concerned about the low quality of some home-made face masks, why
not produce better ones, or purchase a box of the blue disposable
ones, which have been available for some time? Some doctors point out
that, when there is universal masking as on the French aircraft
carrier Charles DeGaulle, infection still occurs, but with a very
high ratio of asymptomatic cases: it may be that masks, by reducing
the viral dose considerably but not down to zero, are a cheap,
make-shift vaccine. In any case, there can be no doubt they have a
positive effect. Besides their concern about the chain-link fence,
the anti-maskers quote anti-mask statements made by people working for
the government when they were discouraging mask use, before they were encouraging it. If
you will recall, these statements, which were frequent enough at the
time, revolved around the idea that, 'face masks are totally
useless, and if the nurses cannot get them, they will all die!'
Face masks do not prevent infection, in either direction, to the tune of
100 percent. Does that mean there is no point in wearing them? There's an unfortunate tendency for the best to become an enemy
to the good. Some people reason, 'Wearing a seat belt will not protect
you if an eighteen-wheeler crosses the center line and rams you
head-on at 70 miles an hour.' This is certainly true, you will be
squished like a bug. It's also certain that seat belts save many
lives.
Demanding 100 percent protection, and settling for zero
percent, is a fool's bargain. Let's say a sadistic pasha held you
prisoner, but promised to release you if you agreed to play Russian
roulette. The alternative is continued torture to the point of
death. You are presented with two guns, one of which, you ascertain,
contains one bullet and the other two. Which gun do you choose? If
you're like some internet savants, you exclaim, 'Aha! You won't fool
me! A revolver with only one round in the chamber can kill you just
as dead as the revolver with two!' This is true, but beside the
point; you double your chances of surviving by picking up one rather
than the other.
If you could have the best protection against dangerous elements in the
environment possible,— let's say, if you could be done up like a seventeenth
century plague doctor, with his long leather beak stuffed with filtering leaves,
or if you could carry around one of those inflatable suits they use
in the Level 4 virus labs,— that would be nice.
Certainly N-99 masks for all would be ideal. But if the
best is not available, even an improvised barrier, like a
tightly-woven scarf wrapped around several times, is better than
nothing. When this all started, I used to be the only person done up that way in my
very occasional forays to the grocery store. I wondered, don't those people know
there's a pandemic on? This is no longer the case, praise God! But
somehow it has gotten all jumbled up with concerns about government
overreach and politics.
Lately Douglas Wilson's 'kirk,' as he so preciously phrases it,
Christ Church of Moscow, Idaho, has taken to conducting hymn sings
in the public streets, craving video of unmasked congregants being
hauled off by the police for failure to practice social distancing
(Moscow, Idaho has a mask ordinance). Worshipping God should be an
end in itself, not a means; if singing psalms becomes a way to stick
an extended middle finger in the face of municipal authorities
disliked by church leadership, the project has gone off the rails.
They are endangering the public to no good purpose. If the
sidewalk-traversing public of Moscow, Idaho has not consented to
breathe in their poisoned breath, it is not super-abundantly ethical
to force them to do so. Political rallies held in the open air are
better than ones held indoors, but disease transmission can still
take place.
An anti-government protest held on August 15th, the 75th
anniversary of the end of colonial rule, in Seoul, South Korea, led
to disease transmission: "The demonstration may have been a
'catalyst' for the nationwide outbreak, as churchgoers chartered
buses to the capital from their homes across the country. . .Sixty
infections, including 33 from the church, have been linked to the
anti-government rallies in Seoul, which drew thousands of people."
(New York Post, August 20, 2020, 'South Korea
COVID-19 infections 'in full swing ' after protest outbreak.')
Certainly outdoor demonstrations are better than indoor rallies, and
churches generally might do well to take a second look at the old
'brush arbor' model of church service, but transmission is still
possible. And what about singing? The example of the Skagit Valley community chorale, whose
choir practice in Washington state was attended by 61 persons, of
whom 52 were infected and two, tragically, died, shows that singing
is not necessarily a community-friendly activity. According to the
CDC, "Transmission was likely facilitated by close proximity (within
6 feet) during practice and augmented by the act of singing."
(CDC, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, May
15, 2020, Lea Hamner et al). Deliberately creating a worst-case
scenario on the streets is not being a good neighbor.
No doubt the church has discovered empirically, by meeting without
mask wearing or social distancing without consequence, that Russian
Roulette can not hurt you, but it could be that the law of averages
will catch up with them in the end. Why God would intervene
miraculously to protect a cult that disrespects its neighbors and
teaches bad doctrine about antebellum slavery is not obvious to the
objective onlooker. To be sure, the public health authorities are hypocrites
when they teach that right-wing rallies transmit disease, while
left-wing ones cannot ever do so. And they did start by urging the
public not to wear face masks: but didn't it invite suspicion when
they said, 'Face masks are useless, and if you do not back away from
the warehouse filled with useless face masks for our personal use,
the guard will level his Uzi at you and blow your legs off.' Just as soon as
I heard the government advising people not to wear face masks, I
hopped on the internet and purchased an N99, though you never really
know what you're getting when you buy things off the internet.
While I'm by no means opposed to learning from
experience, it could be that experience is a bad teacher when it
comes to evaluating the likelihood of harm from low-incidence
events. When the volcano Mt. Pelee buried the town of St. Pierre,
Martinque, cremating 30,000 inhabitants, the authorities, who had
counselled calm, could quite honestly say, 'that never happened
before.' As the nuclear submarine Thresher imploded, can it be that the
crew's final thoughts were, 'perhaps there is a better way to test
maximum depth than to try it and see what happens.' When the
Challenger shuttle took off in cold weather, its frozen O-rings too
rigid to block hot gases, the ground crew might console themselves
with, 'at least now we know how cold is too cold.' All you need is
one infected person showing up at these events to have a
super-spreader event, and the chance of that is not zero. They
should reconsider and look for ways to protect the public health,
not endanger it. The disease does not have human perceptions or emotions,
but if it did, would it look at those counties in the U.S., and they
are many, which have had few cases as places covered by a protective
bubble, from which its entry is barred, or as a bonanza? Like the mosquito
said at the nudist colony, 'so much to be done, and so little time.'
There is no inherent link between the utility of face masks and
the effectiveness of the vaccines which have so wonderfully been
rolled out in recent months, giving hope for a speedy end to all
this unpleasantness. It might be that face masks are worthless, but
the vaccines are excellent; or it might be that face masks work very
well, whereas vaccines are indeed, as some people say, the means by
which Bill Gates intends to kill us all. Yet you'll generally find
the same people who are anti-maskers are, by and large, also
anti-vaxxers. There is no rationality to this. The newspaper-reader
is familiar with virus denialism from the recent experience of the
Third World; there are many people in Africa who deny that Ebola is
a real disease, or HIV/AIDs. As a consequence, they refuse to take
the recommended precautions. The ingredients for this phenomenon
seem to be an ingrained distrust of government plus a lack of
familiarity with the methods of modern science. Many Third World
governments deserve to be mistrusted, their functionaries always
having their hand out for a bribe. But modern medicine employs
fairly reliable methods of quality control. Do they not know this? It's
one thing for a country like Tanzania to have a COVID-denialist for
president, who, incidentally, died of the disease himself. But this
is the country that put a man on the moon! What can they be
thinking?
As noted, virus denialism has a long and distressing history in
the third world. Tragically, for this disease cycle, virus denialism hit the United States
big-time. One might have suspected that an industrialized, First
World economic powerhouse like the U.S. would be stony ground for
transplanting virus denialism, but it seems as though a segment of
the church was waiting for it. This view ranges from the extreme of
denialists like Denis Rancourt of Canada, who denies there is any
such thing as COVID-19, to pandemic-denialists ('no worse than the
flu'), to anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, who deny the safety or
efficacy of those measures. It is fervently to be hoped that this
viewpoint does not prevail, because it will mean that COVID-19 will
never go away, it will simply become naturalized into the disease
biome and come back every fall. Hopefully the vaccines may give us a tool capable
of vanquishing the disease and driving it out, if only they are
used. Denying that there is a problem is not a step on the road to
solving it.
For the Other Side
Naysayers like John MacArthur say that government science cannot
be trusted. John MacArthur famously stood before a crowd of people
and announced "there is no pandemic." What is his thinking based on?
According to the Grace Community website, there is some amount of
thought that went into this, incompetent as it may be:
"The death rate from COVID is nowhere near the original dire predictions. In early 2020, most policy makers were citing predictions from a researcher named Neil Ferguson, a professor at Imperial College London. Ferguson confidently predicted that more than 2.2 million people in the United States would die from COVID within three months’ time. Even though that prediction quickly proved to be grossly overblown, government officials continued to cite the Ferguson model as justification for prolonging the lockdowns. Rather than acknowledging that COVID-19 is not the doomsday pandemic so many had foretold, they claimed the diminished numbers were proof that the lockdowns were working.
"To put the facts in perspective: Ferguson’s model predicted that more than 81 percent of Americans would be infected with the virus, and at least 1 percent of those infected would die. It was a colossal overestimate of the virus’s severity. More than eighteen months later, cumulative statistics for the state of California showed that fewer than 12 percent had tested positive for the virus, and the death rate among infected people was only about one-tenth of what Ferguson’s model predicted."
(GraceChurch.org, "Facing COVID-19 Without
Fear").
As Yogi Berra said, "It's tough to make predictions, espcially
about the future." Is this purportedly blown prediction an instance
of that general rule? Not really, because they do not even state the prediction
accurately. The 2.2 million death figure was the figure for
the United States if no mitigation was attempted by the government
and populace — no contact tracing, no quarantining the sick,
no social distancing, no school closures, etc. And of course no
vaccine was in view. This estimate assumes the virus is allowed to
barrel through and exits as quickly as it came. The case under
consideration is the 'do-nothing' case. It was not the
'come-hell-or-high-water' case, as is being misleadingly
represented.
But this is, of course, not what happened, nor what the authors
anticipated would happen. Up to this date, 1.1 million Americans
have died of COVID-19. This early prediction strictly speaking is
not falsifiable: the state of affairs it envisions, that no
mitigation efforts would be attempted, does not obtain. It is a
conditional contrary to fact. The study authors proceed to run
through the predicted effects of adding in various mitigation
efforts, reducing the anticipated casualty count for the UK quite
dramatically with these additions. One can argue about whether these
particular mitigation efforts were in fact as successful as
advertised; but the authors plainly anticipate that they will be,
and if it is the study authors' prediction which is under review, not a
joint compromise project between the epidemiologists and their
critics.
1.1 million is not an order of
magnitude less than 2.2 million in the first place. Nor is the
Imperial College estimate, one of many made at the time, a wild
over-estimate for the ultimate casualty figures for a COVID
pandemic. With mitigation efforts in place, as in fact happened, the
authors anticipated a much lower total than 2.2 million. It's not even a blown
prediction, much less does it set the scene for their ominous
conspiracy scenarios. The death rate for COVID-19 is not one-tenth
of one percent, as suggested here, and as of this date substantially
more than 12% of the population already have been infected. Yet this
particular piece of misinformation has gotten 'fossilized' into the
COVID-denialists' account, and they repeat it over and over. Meanwhile
it's their conception of a mild, almost harmless, outbreak,— 'it's
just a cold,'— which has no grounding in reality.
At no time has the government of the United States represented
COVID-19 as a doomsday disease which is likely to kill most of those
who contract it. In March of 202, the World Health Organization gave
an estimate of this new illness's case fatality rate, CFR, of 3.4%,
higher than the 2.3% previously believed. China, where the disease
originally appeared, early adopted a very restrictive definition of
the disease, such that a patient had to show the ground-glass
opacity in the lungs in order to be diagnosed with the condition.
Since you had to already be in serious medical trouble to get a
diagnosis, it is no wonder the CFR was at first reported somewhat
high. Even accepting this high of a number leaves the overwhelming majority of those who contract
the disease recovering from it.
It was widely stated at the time
that the infection fatality rate, IFR, must be much lower,
especially given that many cases of COVID-19 are asymptomatic. Do you
know who denied that some cases of COVID-19 are asymptomatic? The
COVID-denialists, like James White, who said that never happens.
Because the CDC bungled the roll-out of the diagnostic test, tests
were initially in short supply, and had, of course, to be reserved
for the sickest people, so that the test results could guide
treatment. It was understood the case fatality rate would decline as
more and more people were tested, and it did. As the immunity wall
was constructed by vaccination, it declined further, and as
treatments improved as well, until at this point it is very low. It
has never been as low as these people represent it, though. Do the
math: if 1.1 million Americans have already died of this disease,
that's 1.1 mllion out of a population of 330 million. 1,100,000
divided by 330,000,000 times 100 equals 0.33%. A higher proportion
of the entire population has already died than they claim is the
case fatality rate!
Meanwhile, what did John MacArthur tell the people who attend his
church was the infection fatality rate for COVID-19? His estimates
are not imperfect, as arguably are those of others, but well to the
south side of absurd. He explained that your chance of dying of
COVID-19, if you live in the state of California, are 1 in 19.1
million:
"Look, Todd, here's the latest statistic. This came out
in court Friday. If you're living in California, here's the chance
you're going to die from COVID. This was presented to the court. One
chance in 19.1 million. That's the chance you're going to die from
COVID in California currently." (John MacArthur on the Todd Starnes show, 9/21/20,
also at Protestia).
If they are selling such totally bogus, made-up numbers to the
suckers who sit in the pews, one wonders why don't they also sell
them fictitious insurance, which will serve just fine until you
submit a claim, or underwater real estate. They must think these
people are utter fools. As they seem to be, given their willingness
to sit there are listen to made-up numbers.
Another of their appeals is 'We have something better.' What is
the miracle cure? According to Alex Jones, it's colloidal silver,
which he was selling on his website as a cure for COVID-19 until the
government made him stop. According to these people, it's
hydroxychloroquine and horse de-wormer:
"Large pharmaceutical companies, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the World Health organization (WHO), and various influencers in government and media have actively tried to suppress discussion about the usefulness of drugs like Ivermectin, chloroquine, and hydroxychloroquine as early treatments for COVID-19—even though many physicians report using those compounds successfully. It is widely understood that the debate over these medications (more precisely: the lack of any open exchange of information about them) is largely driven by economic and political concerns, not scientific studies. In fact, the WHO halted their studies of hydroxychloroquine, and the FDA revoked their Emergency Use Authorization for the drug just days after President Trump announced it had been successfully used to treat him for COVID."
('Facing COVID-19 Without Fear,' Grace
Community Church website).
It's true that the economics of the pharmaceutical industry incentivizes development of new
and expensive medicines over cheap existing ones. It would be
helpful if the suggested cheap existing medicines actually
worked, as these do not.
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The
law of Moses encapsulates a great deal of useful information about
how to control contagious diseases, some of which was successfully
decoded by the rabbis, some not so much. They did share our modern
liking for a stay-at-home policy in time of pandemic, though hopefully
without the ham-handed coercion of our modern governors:
