Over the Christmas period, we both had Covid. We didn’t die or go to a hospital, despite not being in the first flush of youth. It was a flu/cold by any other name, and we both got fully better within a few weeks without much more than vitamin C, vitamin D and a salt pipe with iodine.
It being Christmas, we were both fascinated during our convalescence to witness two wildly different interpretations from clergymen about the pandemic and what Jesus might have made of it all.
First, there was none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who managed, in one extended ITV News soundbite, to suggest both that those who refuse to get jabbed were “immoral” and that he was taking his cue about whether to get a vaccine from Jesus.
Jesus would have gotten his own booster shot, implied Welby. “It’s not about me and my right to choose. It’s about how I love my neighbor.
“Go and get boosted, get vaccinated. It’s how we love our neighbor. Loving our neighbor is what Jesus told us to do. It’s Christmas: do what he said.”
Then there was a Catholic priest from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma called Father Daniel Nolan. Nolan, a former marine who served in Iraq and has a degree in engineering from the US Naval Academy, is one of The Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, a band of some 300 priests who perform the mass and all sacraments in traditional Latin.
From such a strict constructionist, we get a very different view of Jesus on Covid and what he might have thought of it. Father Nolan, for instance, calls it: “One of the world’s greatest human rights violations of human history.”
In one 20-minute fiery sermon, he enumerates the “untruths and contradictions” we’ve been told: first we’re told that masks won’t help, then we’re told they will; first we’re told that millions will die, but then we find out they didn’t; thousands of cases labeled as Covid deaths were from some other cause; doctors in America are financially incentivized to pronounce deaths from other causes as solely Covid-related; the vaccine side-effects are being hushed up, and more.
To Welby’s idea that we have a “moral obligation” to get vaccinated, Father Nolan simply says, “Our moral obligation is to resist participating in a delusional version of reality. People are being denied medical treatment for not being vaccinated. How is that about health? That is about power.”
Father Nolan sees the pandemic as providing corporate and political elites with an opening not unlike that recognized by former Vice President Dick Cheney, as depicted in the movie Vice, while in the White House situation room with other government officials on 9/11, waiting for updates about the planes that had just hit the Twin Towers:
“By all accounts what people saw in that room in that terrible day, there was confusion, fear, uncertainty. But Dick Cheney saw something else that no one else did. He saw an opportunity.”
I’m always uncomfortable when people say they know what someone who lived more than 2,000 years ago would do nowadays, particularly as records about his life were written decades after his death and underwent multiple translations.
But the emerging evidence is on the side of Father Nolan.
Although the US Food and Drug Administration is resisting Freedom of Information requests for the 329,000 of pages of documents used to approve Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine, the 91 pages that have been released have shown that Pfizer ignored the 42,086 reports of side-effects, including 1,223 deaths, that occurred in just the first two and a half months after its release.
To put this in some sort of context, when the swine flu vaccine was rolled out in the US in the mid-1970s, it was withdrawn after causing just 25 deaths.
And when a research scientist named Spiro Pantazatos at Columbia University Medical Center studied data from 21 European countries collected by the European Mortality Monitoring database, he concluded that the vaccine fatality rate is 10 times greater than estimated, or 0.04 percent.
New statistics also offer a few other inconvenient truths. When Italy’s Higher Institute of Health studied the supposed 130,468 deaths caused by Covid, they concluded that only 2,783 of them had been directly caused by Covid. Virtually all the rest of the people who died had comorbidities, such as arterial hypertension, irregular heartbeat and heart failure. Many had more than one condition.
Some of the latest evidence demonstrates that the vaccine doesn’t prevent you from passing on the virus. In Massachusetts in July, for instance, 469 new Covid-19 cases were identified. Of those cases, 346, or 74 percent, were either fully or partially vaxxed, and 274 of the vaccinated cases (79 percent) were symptomatic.
And in Germany, 55.4 percent of symptomatic Covid-19 cases among people 60 years old and older have occurred in fully vaccinated individuals—a proportion that is increasing with every passing week.
I’m always uncomfortable when people say they know what someone who lived more than 2,000 years ago would have done about a modern situation had he lived today.
But I think we’re on safe ground with one idea. Like us, it’s clear that Jesus lived in a time of corrupt power brokers.
And one thing he might have insisted on is just this single point: the people in power should finally start telling us the truth.
