The Wrath Of Germs Or Of God?. . . If We Don’t Agree On Defining Disease, How Do We Overcome It?
By DEXTER DUGGAN
Yes, even amid a pandemic, there’s little to no agreement on what are facts, or should be accepted as facts, and what is political advantage-seeking. There’s a political way to get a flu shot or a tooth filling?
Conservative talk host and writer Dennis Prager observed on March 31, “If there is one thing on which you’d think left and right could agree, it would be the proper response to the present coronavirus. After all, COVID-19 doesn’t distinguish between left and right: Conservatives and liberals are just as likely to contract and even die from it.”
Yet on the left, Prager added, the general conviction is that in order to avoid mass death, the world’s economy must be shut down, while the right “asks more questions about whether the cure may be worse than the disease.”
That is, whether a continued intentional global lockdown would cause more destruction to nations’ and their people’s survival than the unintended visits of serious disease. Is the current march of COVID-19 an unprecedented danger, or a germ that science, with research, can deal with, as science has done before?
To restore the economy, no one is asking, after all, for people to be deliberately executed by flu and pneumonia by the tens or hundreds of thousands. We’re not asking to burn people on pagan altars to appease a cruel deity.
On the other hand, to appease The New York Times, worldwide intentional abortion deaths to preborn infants were around 56 million each year between 2010 and 2014, according to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute — figures that the pro-life abort73.com site describes as “speculative and unverifiable.”
Exposing another peril in the left-wing mindset, New York City’s local Gothamist news site and far-left Mayor Bill de Blasio knitted their brows over news that the evangelical Christian Samaritan’s Purse aid group set up a field hospital in Central Park to help with respiratory care.
Gothamist claimed there were “growing fears that some New Yorkers could face discrimination and substandard care from the religious organization,” which, horrors, had traditional Christian moral values.
De Blasio “said the city will keep a close eye” on this “Christian fundamentalist group,” Gothamist said — apparently ungrateful that these medical workers put their lives on the line by coming to Gomorrah, er, Gotham when they could have stayed safely in North Carolina and hurled anathemas from afar at de Blasio’s herd of like-minded “progressive” Dems.
The evangelicals likely wouldn’t be asking sick people in New York to kiss little wooden crosses before receiving care, nor would the evangelicals, if sick themselves someday, likely refuse medicine from a Catholic or Muslim physician.
Speaking of medical techniques, you don’t deal with patients by sucking out their brains or injecting poison into their hearts — unless they’re preborn babies. Then you’re supposedly enforcing constitutional rights by doing exactly this, as well as yanking off the legs of a trustfully sleeping little girl in the womb, thus proving that you’re not a benighted evangelical but a credulous reader of Gothamist.
If the coronavirus actually is God’s long-delayed but unavoidable punishment for wicked lifestyles among some although not all people, then there’s no escaping disaster, if not soon, then not much longer. Is there?
But how could the left countenance the idea that disaster is a certainty — if the reason for the reckoning is the wickedness that the left itself imposed through judicial and political revolution?
In the meantime, a Democrat Party that had quailed at having to campaign in 2020 against President Trump’s roaring economy hoped for an advantage with Wall Street’s unexpected shrinkage. And the astigmatic prognosticators who asserted deeply corrupt Dem Hillary Clinton’s certain presidential victory in 2016 were seeing feeble bad Catholic Dementia Joe Biden as a strong foe now against Trump.
However, if God’s delayed wrath is descending, neither a booming Wall Street nor a dominant left-wing media will stave off His justice.
Biden, who sort of comically was making broadcasts from his Delaware basement, was in danger of being hoist with his own petard of identity politics and left-wing political correctness. Or maybe not.
The word was going around that the wan-looking Biden, as the presumed Dem presidential nominee, needed forceful New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo as his vice-presidential teammate. But, goodness gracious, Biden already promised second fiddle to an unspecified female.
Oh, hallelujah, here’s the answer. Cuomo can have a sex-change operation and fulfill Biden’s pledge for a woman while locking up support from the transgendered and every sort of polyamory persuasion. Now that’s how to win a big bite of the nation’s electorate.
Meanwhile, in a bit of unintended levity, an April 5 Washington Examiner report on Pope Francis’ Palm Sunday Mass, which necessarily lacked a congregation, referred to “Italy, where the Vatican is located.” That’s both a basic fact and a wrong one. Did anyone believe the Vatican might be in Canada? However, the Vatican is not located in Italy at all but is a separate city-state surrounded by Rome.
Difficult To Change
The Wanderer asked some sources for their reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard said on April 7: “It was an oppressive leftist Communist regime in China that allowed the world to be overrun by this virus, yet the American far left is eager to cover that up and use the chaos to try to advance their agenda. No one should be surprised in the least.
“Leftists see this as an opportunity to take control of people’s lives in exchange for protection and security — that same old scam they have run in country after country — but from what I’m seeing, people are not liking their first taste of being told where they can go, where they can’t go, how they may gather in public or not, where they can shop or not, etc.,” Querard said.
“The fact is that people often like the sound of oppressive socialism, but no one actually likes living under it,” he said.
Northern California conservative commentator Barbara Simpson observed on April 8 that as people become more used to being restricted because of COVID-19, “it will be more difficult to change when the danger is over,” especially if they’ve bought into all-powerful government.
Noting that an openly declared socialist who campaigned for the Democrat Party crown had just exited the presidential race, Simpson said, “Bernie Sanders’ candidacy promised all the goodies that liberals believe government should provide. Then he dropped out of the race, but that’s not the end of the socialist push. It will continue with the final Democrat platform.
“Liberals are empowered with their support from the media and look forward not only to destroy the Trump administration but our whole economic system,” Simpson said. “Look at some of their proposals: forced vaccinations for all, government subsidies for workers, free tuition, default euthanasia for the elderly, abortion on demand, destruction of abortion survivors, forced removal of virus victims from their homes, and more.
“As we become more used to the restrictions of our freedoms because of the virus, it will be more difficult to change when the danger is over,” Simpson said. “At that point, the liberals will have won — government doesn’t give up power easily.”
Michael Hichborn, president of the orthodox Catholic research body The Lepanto Institute, told The Wanderer: “No one that I know of denies that COVID-19 is highly contagious. What most people are frustrated over is the fact that the entire world has practically shut down over an illness that, while contagious, has a relatively low rate of serious cases.
“Globally, the ratio of those who have contracted COVID to deaths associated with it is around five percent. In the U.S., that rate is much lower, at around two percent,” Hichborn said.
With the pneumonia death rate at around 15 percent, he said, “no one ever shut down the world because of a bad season of pneumonia.
“It would be an error to say that COVID is more or less contagious than pneumonia,” he said, “because pneumonia is a condition caused by a variety of different viruses and bacteria (including COVID), so the comparison of contagion would have to be on those underlying causes, not the pneumonia itself. Various strains of the flu, for instance, lead to pneumonia and are highly contagious.”
Hichborn said he wanted to emphasize that he wasn’t “suggesting that we should not take reasonable measures to ensure that we aren’t unintentionally spreading a highly communicable disease. . . . What is being disputed is the rationality of forcibly closing down society and stripping away the sacraments from the faithful when the statistical numbers in no way warrant it.”
He pointed to a post by Johns Hopkins Medicine that as of April 8 for COVID-19, there were “approximately 1,446,557 cases worldwide; 399,929 cases in the U.S.,” while per year for the flu, an “estimated 1 billion cases worldwide; 9.3 million to 45 million cases in the U.S.”
As for deaths by COVID-19 as of April 8, Johns Hopkins Medicine said, “Approximately 83,149 deaths reported worldwide; 12,911 deaths in the U.S.,” while for the flu per year, “291,000 to 646,000 deaths worldwide; 12,000 to 61,000 deaths in the U.S.”
An Unthinkable Development
An article posted April 6 at the National Review site said: “It turns out that, while you need proof beyond a reasonable doubt to convict a person of theft and throw them in jail, you don’t need any actual evidence (much less proof) to put millions of people into a highly invasive and burdensome lockdown with no end in sight and nothing to prevent the lockdown from being reimposed at the whim of public-health officials. Is this rational?”
With current restrictions, students from elementary school to post-graduate education can continue their academic progress with distance learning, but small businesses can’t get by for too long by selling only take-out meals or volume gasoline when people’s driving is drastically cut. Farms and meat processors were among the many enterprises wondering how they’d cope with an extended lockdown.
On the other hand, even if potential electrical blackouts somehow were to occur, people would only be at the same level of existence that humans had had for most of recorded history, with oil lamps of some sort and wood for fires. Except that humans in the thirteenth century weren’t living, and weren’t able to, in 100-story structures amid megalopolises of 15 million people.
What just about everyone in the U.S. is used to now was beyond everyone just back in 1900. Our treasure troves of electronics mean far more than an electric bulb. And even light bulbs could be rarities in rural reaches in great-great-grandma’s time. Noting that rural electrification was done less than a century ago, one study said:
“Without access to electricity, daily life on American farms was somewhat primitive, with little improvement being made over decades. In comparison with their urban neighbors, farmers’ lives were ‘in the dark,’ and they continued to contend with inconsistent lighting, outdated methods for food preservation, hand pumps for water, and fire or gas stoves for cooking.”
The study noted a remark from rural Iowa that electricity was a good fairy waving her magic wand to create a charmed life.
In 2020 we could use an unthinkable development, too. It’s not a salvific new invention but something as old as the Bible. It’s called sincere repentance, and it has prevented wrath falling from the skies.
