Coronavirus And Fear
I was going to write something else today but I felt it was important to talk about this, even though it’s a sensitive and politically charged topic and I risk offending some people. We need to see the big picture of what’s happening. I don’t want to appear insensitive to anybody who has lost someone to coronavirus by sharing my perspective. However, I am also seeing the human cost of the draconian responses to the situation, including many people who are currently going hungry.
Having lived for eight years in a third-world country and seen busses set on fire, tanks rolling down the street, terrified people fleeing gunfire, shortages of gasoline, fruits, and vegetables, maybe the human costs of fear and shutdowns are a bit more prominent in my mind. I hope my perspective will help shine light on how to pray and respond to the current situation. This article focuses on how the spirit of fear and of deception have been working hand-in-hand to cause destruction. I will work on quickly getting another article out after this one about how we respond to the current situation.
Questionable Data And The Principality Of Fear
Early on in the shutdowns, our friend Reinhard Hirtler sent a word to our Revival Brazil WhatsApp group. He was in prayer and not even thinking about the coronavirus, and the Lord gave him a vision. He saw the demon behind the coronavirus in a vision, and it was weak and puny. But then he saw a principality of fear begin to take a hold of the airwaves (TV, radio, etc.) and cause great destruction.
His word confirmed what I was already feeling. I soon heard others share similar visions. The fear was causing a lot more harm than the virus. Before even hearing this word, I had been researching the situation and it seemed to be blown out of proportion. I saw that the CDC estimates there are 291,000 to 646,000 yearly influenza deaths worldwide and we had 80,000 influenza deaths in the US alone in 2018. In fact, we already had a shortage of ventilators before the coronavirus news!
I saw the CDC data on confirmed flu cases deaths for this season, which at that time (a few weeks ago) was about 222,000 confirmed flu cases and 22,000 deaths. I realized that if we figured the case mortality rate of the flu in the same way as they were figuring most of the case mortality rates of the coronavirus, the case mortality rate of the flu would look like nearly 10%! Of course, the real rate is much lower. The vast majority of flu cases are not officially “confirmed” with a test. Likewise, many coronavirus cases are completely asymptomatic. Maybe far more than half of them, as the population on the Diamond Princess was the only group where everybody was tested whether or not they had symptoms, and in spite of the aging population only about half of the people who tested positive for coronavirus had symptoms. Even more have mild symptoms, and large numbers of people who got coronavirus were never tested and actually confirmed…which makes the real case mortality rate much lower. (Update: Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya did another interview a month after the first one with the Hoover Institute. They did antibody testing in Santa Clara County, California and determined that for every person who they had known to have coronavirus, there were 50-85 people who’d gotten it without ever knowing. That makes the case mortality rate for COVID-19 the same or slightly higher than that of the flu.)
Of course, I questioned and tested my own conclusions. But I learned that many experts were asking the same questions I just couldn’t avoid. A renowned scientist wrote an open letter to Angela Merkel about the problems with the way the situation was being presented, and Sweden did not close their country because they didn’t trust the science behind the current narrative! I also soon learned that Italy concluded only 12% of their “coronavirus deaths” were deaths directly caused by coronavirus. And the average age of people there dying from it was around 80, almost all having other health conditions. No wonder their case mortality rate looked so much higher than in many other places.
I saw predictions of 40-60% of Americans getting the virus, and talking as if it would all happen at the same time and we would only have one ventilator for every 50 people needing one. So I thought: South Korea tested and tracked people, quarentining the sick, but they didn’t close their country. And they had been over the peak number of cases for a month. So I looked up their population and figured the percentage of them who had been confirmed to have coronavirus so far. It was less than one-fifth of a percent! The 40% to 60% number was 200-300 times the percentage of South Korean’s who’d gotten the virus as of one month after their peak!
To be clear, I never concluded that the virus was nothing, and I’ve been in favor of preparing the health system and trying to slow the spread the whole time. Yes, it has been a nasty bug and fatal for some who’ve gotten it. Quarantining the sick and at risk, as South Korea did, is in order. But not shutting down everything and taking draconian measures that have far-reaching consequences and are causing greater human suffering! Why didn’t we do that in the 2018 flu season? Or why don’t we close roads and ban cars due to deaths in traffic? Doing so would, overall, cause more human suffering than it would prevent and send us back in time!
We have to understand, we were having a very bad flu season before the coronavirus was a big thing, and some health systems were already at capacity or overwhelmed with just that. It’s not that there was no real cause for concern. But why isn’t the media giving the same attention to the flu as to the coronavirus?
See the following links for more:
12 Experts Questioning The Mainstream Coronavirus Narrative
Coronavirus Data Doesn’t Match Doomsday Predictions
We Are Making Decisions Without Reliable Data: “Reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.”:
Sweden Keeps Their Country Open As Scientists Question The Mainstream Narrative
So far, the way things are playing out falls far short of the predictions that sparked international shutdown. In fact, it falls far short of even radically downgraded predictions that came later. Hospitals in many parts of the country are empty and thousands of healthcare workers are being laid off. In spite of the situation looking nothing like what was predicted, the same people who wanted to shut down everything now want to keep it shut down for 18 months!
Intentional Misrepresentation Of The Current
Situation
Many of those who are exaggerating the situation more recently were the same ones who downplayed it before. For example, the World Health Organization originally said the virus did not spread person to person and criticized Trump’s closing of travel with China. Some of the politicians who have pushed for the most extreme controls now were just weeks earlier encouraging people to get together, party, and hug Chinese people to show you’re not a racist!
Yes, people are dying of coronavirus. But imagine if in 2018, when we had 80,000 flu deaths in the US, the media reported on it nonstop, filming the worse cases, filming only the hospitals that are overwhelmed, showing footage of the graves in NYC. Italy’s socialized healthcare system has been overwhelmed before. We have a few hundred thousand people die worldwide from the flu every year. Imagine if in 2018 we had a worldwide heat map reporting numbers of deaths and cases in each country. I bet it would have looked worse than this does!
There is a lot of deception going on right now in an attempt to create a narrative that’s not based on reality. CBS was caught using footage from an overwhelmed Italian hospital and representing it as NYC. Although they apologized and called it an editing mistake, the presenter on the Highwire video above noted he previously worked for CBS and there was no way a video of footage from Italy could have just mistakenly passed for NYC footage. It would have had to go through about seven people and is labeled with the location. Citizen reporters are showing empty hospitals everywhere, including in places that seem to be overwhelmed when you watch the news. A New York Times article showed two people on one ventilator. Anybody who didn’t read to the very end of the article would have thought it was showing a shortage of ventilators so that they needed to use one of them for two people. But at the end of the article, it noted it was just an experiment in case things got to that point. There were still plenty of ventilators and beds!
Remember that in Italy, coronavirus was only actually the direct cause of death in 12% of their cases? The CDC in the US is actively encouraging doctors to assume the cause of death was coronavirus. By dying with a virus doesn’t equate to dying of it. Even medical doctors in the US are now speaking up and pointing out that this is dishonest. All of the sudden, deaths caused by pneumonia, heart attacks, and other issues are looking way lower than normal, because if someone has a heart attack or other issue and tests positive for coronavirus, coronavirus is being listed as the cause of death in many cases. They may even have been asymptomatic for coronavirus!
Dr. Annie Bukacek is one of my Facebook friends and is on the health boards of her county and her state, Montana. She is highly qualified and has 30 years of experience filling out death certificates. She shares here about how the books are being cooked on numbers of deaths from Coronavirus. This Louisiana doctor is furious about the misrepresentation, saying that if someone runs into a theater and yells “fire” and there is none, they go to jail. He is especially angry over the claim a one-year-old child died of coronavirus when in reality it was a baby born 22 weeks premature that died of complications yet tested positive for the virus. (Video contains profanity and strong language) Minnesota Senator and Medical doctor Scott Jenson says what they’re doing with the numbers is “ridiculous.” He goes into more detail here, explains how the CDC is coaching doctors to fill out death certificates, and also talks a little about some of the public health implications of keeping everyone home. Likewise, Candace Owens uncovered another lie about an infant’s death. Yes, the child tested positive for coronavirus, but died in a terrible suffocation accident, not of coronavirus!
This girl shared how she had cold symptoms and the doctor wrote she was positive for coronavirus without even testing her! (Angry video with profanity.) Many similar reports are surfacing, which explain why the death rates for several other diseases are looking much lower than normal. Many deaths are being attributed to Coronavirus instead, even though it was not the primary cause of death. In the United States, hospitals are getting paid more if they list patients as COVID-19, and even more if they put them on ventilators. So there is plenty of temptation to be loose with facts and go ahead with the CDC instructions to say coronavirus caused the death even if you’re just guessing. The same inflation of death numbers has been noted internationally as well.
(Update: NYC just added nearly 4,000 people to the death count who were not tested or confirmed to have coronavirus and could easily be a part of the hundreds of thousands who die worldwide from the flu. This increased the reported US death toll by 17%. I am still seeing more reports of healthcare workers who are upset over-inflating the numbers, like this hospice worker being pressured to report all the deaths as coronavirus deaths. It’s been confirmed that the CDC has also added the measure of giving instructions to report deaths of people who were not confirmed to have the novel coronavirus as “COVID-19) So much deception is going on that we are hearing false reports of deaths being uncovered, like this mother found a Facebook ad claiming her family had died of coronavirus!)
(Update: it looks like the Facebook post I shared below has been removed. It was about a hospice worker who was angry that they were being pressured to report all deaths as coronavirus, and a family that was angry because their relative was falsely reported as dying of coronavirus. Such reports are coming out of the woodwork. I have personally seen more reports on social media from people saying their family member died of a heart attack, cancer, or car accident and it was falsely reported as a coronavirus death, than I have seen of people who said they actually did lose someone to the coronavirus. Some families, angered that the deaths were falsely reported, have tried to get the death certificates changed and were unable to.)
(Update: Two California emergency medical doctors shared their perspective and their data showing the coronavirus pandemic has about the same mortality as the flu. They have been receiving death threats and their video has been widely censored by social media and taken down by Youtube. A group of physicians in Alabama have put up one of the best websites I’ve seen with the truths and lies about coronavirus. They argue that it is significantly less contagious than the flu.)
Pushing Fear And Crisis
Where fear has a stronghold people are open to deception. It has become clear that some are intentionally pushing fear for the sake of their agendas. In spite of strong evidence that hydroxychloroquine is highly effective for treating coronavirus patients and safe for this use, studies done in other countries showing promising results, and doctors using it more than any other drugs, certain people are highly opposed to it yet want to close entire countries for 18 months until the can develop a vaccine. Recently, Peter Navarro confronted Dr. Fauci on the claim that the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine was “unproven.” Navarro said what he has is proof, remarking “I have a PhD, and I understand how to read statistical studies, whether it’s in medicine, the law, economics or whatever.”
Reports are coming out of the woodwork of coronavirus patients recovering quickly after receiving hydroxychloroquine, and a famed European epidemiologist has found it to have 93% efficacy. In spite of that, much of the mainstream media is now announcing that hydroxychloroquine is ineffective and even dangerous, based on a sham study that seems to have been done with the express intention of disproving its efficacy. We won’t go into the ulterior motives and special interests behind wanting to prolong a crisis…
(Update: I’ve heard reported that several of the states with the most stringent lockdown measures, including New York, are forcing nursing homes to take back patients still recovering from the coronavirus, thus infecting and killing others. By doing so, are they essentially quarantining the strong and healthy and conglomerating those at risk? Is this an intentional effort to further increase the death count and keep the crisis going?)
Thousands of doctors agree hydroxychloroquine is best treatment for coronavirus patients
International studies showing remarkable success rates of Chloroquine treating coronavirus cases
Doctor Vladimir Zelenko treated 300 Covid 19 case with the drug the media hates. (An other, more recent video says it’s now 699, with shortness of breath gone in 4 to 6 hours and 0 patients requiring intubation, or respirators.)
Dr. Smith sharing the remarkable success, saying no person who has received this drug regimen has been intubated (Needed a ventilator.) Many other doctors are sharing similar reports.
The Human Costs Of Shutdown
How are lives lost due to the measures taken to prevent the spread of the virus? In many ways, including increased suicide rates and increased violent crime. But the most common causes of death, including cancer, heart disease, and stroke highly correlate with stress, and loss of employment is one of the most stressful situations many people go through. I’ve seen the stress the media’s exaggeration has caused my aging father-in-law. He told me he lived through World War 2 and this is worse than that was! (Of course, he wasn’t on the frontlines of WW2 but at home in Brazil.)
Make no mistake: social distancing is also going to cost a lot of livesWealth Inequality as a predicter of subjective health, happiness, and life satisfaction among Nepalese women
Yale study says rising unemployment equals higher mortality
Conclusions from microdata on unemployment and mortality
The Alleged Cure is worse than the disease
Many Measures Being Taken Are Counterproductive
Police are making sunbathers go home in many places. Most Sunbathers are socially distanced and sunbathing provides crucial vitamin D for strong immune system function and lowers blood pressure, reducing risk of heart attack and stroke. Sun also kills pathogens on surfaces. In the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, sunbathing was used in outdoor hospitals as a treatment for the sick, and some scientists today believe it reduced the mortality rate in that epidemic. Exercise also raises immunity. Draconian measures preventing people from going outside, exercising, and getting sun are totally counterproductive.
In many places, shutdowns have actually had the effect of cramming people more closely together! You can see that in the video above of the first day of shutdown in South Africa. Yet it’s true in first-world countries too! How many times have scenes like toilet paper rush below occurred in the panic that’s been spread about the coronavirus? (Update: Sweden has fared far better than many countries that did lockdowns, and Professor Wilfred Riley did the math and found that a state’s lockdown strategy had virtually no effect on how severe the outbreak of coronavirus was.)
Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel of Tel Aviv university plotted the rates of new coronavirus infections in several western countries. Whether the country closed like Israel of stayed open like Sweden, the virus peaked and subsided in exactly the same way!
Here Dr. Knut Wittkowski, Ph.D., the former chief biostatistician and epidemiologist at Rockefeller University Hospital, shares why our response to coronavirus will put the elderly and vulnerable at greater risk. Social distancing measures slow the spread of the virus, not stop it, and they prevent the healthy population from developing herd immunity which protects those at risk.
Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai has multiple PhDs from MIT university, including a degree in biological engineering. He speaks about immune health all over the world. He talks about the CDC cooking the books on coronavirus numbers in the United States and he comments that putting people on ventilators is like giving them a death sentence. (I’ve read several other articles explaining that some doctors are questioning them and ventilators are damaging people’s lungs. Those who are put on ventilators have a very high mortality rate.) He also comments about the immune system’s need for vitamin D, which was one of the first things I thought of when I saw police making sunbathers go home.
Then as the interview continues, Dr. Ayyadurai makes some of his most potent statements. He refers to a landmark study showing that isolating people has worse health implications than obesity, smoking, or heart disease. It causes upregulation of inflammatory compounds in the body and downregulation of antiviral compounds!
Facebook sent me an article trying to “debunk” Dr. Ayyadurai but regardless of if he invented email, his statement about the effects of isolation on health refers to well-researched and proven facts. Listen to Dr. Phil talk about the same on Laura Ingraham’s show. I’ve personally heard reports of elderly people rapidly declining and dying, not because of the coronavirus, but because they stopped living when they were isolated!
Listen to the interview with Dr. Ayyadurai here.
Radical Agendas And Violation Of Constitutional/Human Rights
Many are using the coronavirus to spread radical agendas. In many countries they are using it to push a police state, GPS tracking of citizens, encouraging communist-style snitching on your neighbors, and more. The coronavirus is not a valid reason to remove people’s constitutional rights.
A pastor in our revival Brazil WhatsApp group sent us a police report of five family members being arrested for praying together in their home, because religious services are suspended due to coronavirus. Remember, Brazil is a western country where religious freedom is supposed to be one of our greatest values. The Mayor of NYC threatened to shut down churches permanently if they didn’t fully comply with restrictions. Rodney Howard-Brown, a pastor who has been behind several revivals in the United States, was arrested for holding church. While many Christians joined with the media in criticizing him, there is another side of the story. His church took more stringent measures to prevent coronavirus transmission than many businesses did which were allowed to stay open. And the police told him just a few days before that he could go ahead with the service! Read his statement after arrest and the article on COVID19-Restrictions and Freedom of Religion.
People in Greenville, Mississipi were fined $500 each for attending a drive-in, stay in your car parking lot service. Then we have the World Health Organization, which wants to raid homes and remove sick family members. The virus is being used as an excuse to quell dissent around the globe. Some people are joking that the US has gotten a taste of what real socialism is like: empty shelves in the markets and a police State. In Germany, Easter celebrations were canceled for Christians yet few seemed to be concerned about going ahead with a 5,000 person Ramadan celebration.
How Should We Respond?
Amen, brother. Agree with this post so much – both Holy Spirit discerned and more and more obvious in the natural what is going on and why. Lord God, wake Your people up, this nation, and the nations. What a “coincidence” that this virus has peaked in “2020” and Gates’ handy dandy ID2020 is being pushed by the wicked as well as mail in voting. Oh so conevenient. Have eyes to see and ears to hear His people, this nation, and the nations. O God shine Your light on every darkness involved and make it plain before ALL peoples. We break the spirit of fear, confusion, and deception over our leaders, this nation and the nations in Jesus’ name, amen.
“Violation Of Constitutional/Human Rights…”
Sorry Jonathan, I’ve enjoyed your articles to this point: but when have “human rights” been a valid priority of those preaching the gospel?
Did Jesus ever tell HIs followers to pursue politically enforced “human rights”?
I see the expectation of man’s political ideals joining force with God’s Kingdom is not only a vain hope, it is a dangerous hope – the same kind of thing that led to the disempowerment of the church a couple of centuries after the NT accounts.
I’d recommend a different approach rather than giving credence to conspiracies about the current virus, which has clearly had a deadly affect around the western world.
As believers we should NOT be in fear, but neither should we become careless with the truth.
This season of isolation is the perfect opportunity for individual believers and families to see the Lord – to search the scriptures for themselves, and to make more time available for prayer, away from other influences.
It is a very good time to make sure of the soundness of what we believe, just trusting in the Holy Spirit rather than relying on man’s teachings.
Man’s doctrines and practices, across the whole spectrum of Christian belief, have compromised our Christian witness for far too long. Now is the opportunity for those who love the Lord to break free of those things and genuinely discover HIS word and HIS ways.
Bless you Tim
Hi Tim,
I’m convinced that God does care quite a bit about freedom and the fall of the iron curtain was a great work of the Holy Spirit brought about by believing prayer. We are not trying to attempt to politically “enforce the kingdom of heaven,” but we certainly do want God’s invisible kingdom to influence politics, as the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our God.
As to conspiracies, there have been many conspiracies throughout history and human nature apart from God has not changed! Scripture talks about the nations scheming and conspiring, but God frustrates their plans. (Psalm 33) Yes, the coronavirus has certainly caused suffering and overwhelmed some health systems. But there has clearly been some level of conspiracy in misrepresenting and politically using the situation, starting with China trying to hide it. Medical doctors and healthcare workers are speaking out and saying it’s crazy that they are cooking the numbers to make it worse than it is like this.
Those who are for God’s kingdom are always for the truth. The truth is not dismissing the situation but neither is it accepting dishonest attempts to exaggerate the situation. Seeing the truth also includes seeing the effects the shutdown has on human lives-the people going hungry, people needing medical care and not getting it while hospitals are empty, and more. Scripture teaches us to pray for those in authority, and that includes praying and declaring the truth prevail in our country and praying that God gives our leaders wisdom. Prophets in scripture also often spoke to political leaders. Paul discussed justice with a king in the book of Acts to the point that it made him uncomfortable! An extended shutdown, especially 18 months, will cause a lot of human suffering. God cares about that. Even the shutdowns we have had so far were based on an extremely dubious model which was not open source, which many scientists questioned, and which turned out to be the most extreme of exaggerations. That is not acting on a foundation of truth.
I knew this post would be controversial to some, but I felt that I should write it to help people recognize what is happening so as to know how to pray. Year ago, God sent supernatural rain in my house as a sign that reminded me to take seriously the fact that Elijah was a man like us…yet with believing prayer he led a nation to reject the false prophets and turn to God.
Yes they certainly will – when the King returns, after the seventh (the last) trumpet of Revelation.
Until then we act as ambassadors for His kingdom, facilitating migration from the kingdoms of the world to the Kingdom of God.