Tag / Covid

by Jack Wilkie

How Covid revealed the blind guides of society and Christendom

During my college years my parents held two season tickets to Colorado Avalanche hockey games. I lost count of how many games I was lucky enough to attend in those years, but it had to be in the range of about 50.

On one particular occasion, after years of sitting in the exact same seats, a man came strolling down the stairs in the middle of the play and stopped at our row.

“You’re in my seat,” he said flatly.
“Um, I don’t think so,” I said as diplomatically as I could. “What seat number do you have?”
“Row 13, 1 and 2. That’s my seat.”
I produced my ticket and showed him where I, too, had one that showed row 13, seat 1.
“Are you sure that’s what yours says?”
We went back and forth a couple more times, me not moving and him insisting I was in the wrong place, seemingly at an impasse. The people around us grew annoyed as he stood in the aisle and blocked their view of the ongoing hockey game.

Eventually his wife sheepishly got his attention and pointed back to the signage at the top of the section. He was at the right row and seat number, alright, but he was in the wrong section. Problem solved.

It was at this point he turned to me and said, “You can stay there.”

Not “My bad, man, I had the wrong spot,” or “Oops, my mistake.” The assuredness with which he had told me I was in the wrong seat remained unwavering despite his mixup. In his mind, he somehow remained the authority in the situation and ever so graciously granted me the right to stay in my seat. The one that was mine all along.

It was such a weird interaction that I still vividly remember it, even though it was a decade ago. Who goes through life like that?

Then Covid came to town, and I realized that he’s not an anomaly. No, it’s how the majority of people operate.

After two years of nearly every single covid narrative being proven wrong – “lockdowns work,” “masks work,” “shots protect the people around you,” “if we act right we can make a coronavirus disappear,” “you’re a racist conspiracy theorist if you think it came from a lab,” “natural immunity must not be factored into response,” etc. etc. – the government and media carry on without a single mea culpa. People were banned from social media for saying things that were proven indisputably true, things that even government officials now acknowledge. No apologies are forthcoming.

Vaccine Passports are being retracted all over. Mask mandates are being repealed in some places and flaunted by the people who instituted them in others (hello, LA Super Bowl). Washington Post boldly floats a headline that “Mask mandates didn’t do much.” They have the gall to say the science changed. They have to, because to admit otherwise would be to admit it was all done in vain. It did not change, though.


With all the bravado of the man in the wrong section at a hockey game, they inform you you can take your mask off, aren’t required to get a shot to enter a building, can see people again, can go back to church, and so on. Stop trusting them. Stop letting them tell you what to care about, what to be afraid of, and who to hate.

Further, the religious leaders who lambasted their fellow Christians who have now been proven right in nearly every way have yet to acknowledge this. They called their brethren conspiracy theorists. Labeled us as unreasonable. Said they were embarrassed of those who kept going to church. Ironically, they threw around the accusation that we’re “anti-science.”

Now that the dust has settled, those who threw around such accusations are not acknowledging their missteps and taking those words back.

No, they will continue to carry themselves as authorities and lecture others. As my hockey-watching challenger said “You can stay in that seat,” they say “You can get back to the work of the church” and “You can take that mask off.”

I’m all for everybody getting on the side of truth together. But you don’t get to lead a horde of people in the wrong direction for 2 years, realize you’re wrong, and sprint back to be the head of the pack in the other direction. It’s time to take a step back and figure out what just happened and reflect on those mistakes so you don’t turn on the brethren again.

by Jack Wilkie

The Tyranny of the Uninformed

“Did you hear Governor Abbott just said they’re lifting the state’s mask mandate?” I asked the lady behind the counter at my neighborhood coffee stop last week, just minutes after the news broke.

“No, I didn’t. That’s interesting,” she replied.

“Leave it to Texas to be the first!” piped up the guy in line behind me.

“Well, actually Florida and some others have…” I started to say, before being interrupted by the lady at the back of the line – 

“Yeah, and everybody in Florida is sick!”

As brief as this exchange was, it speaks volumes about our national COVID conversation. 

The fact of the matter is, they were both wrong. Texas was not first, and Florida (and the states that opened long before it) is not overrun with sickness any more than moderate states like Texas or hard lockdown states such as California. In truth, they’re really not much different than anywhere else. And yet my fellow customers both confidently asserted these falsehoods with the implication that Texas is going on a suicide mission by throwing caution to the wind and lifting the mask mandate.

It’s been like this from the beginning. The mainstream opinion loudly shouts down any dissent, and here we are a year later having learned almost nothing. We ignore the fact that the effects of the virus are heavily scaled to age. We ignore any statistics that say areas with mask mandates have shown little difference in results from areas without them. We can’t have a conversation because the “moral” response was decided long before the facts had a chance to be debated.

Take, for instance, the early refrain that anyone who even mildly opposed state measures “Wanted to kill grandma.” The argument is presented as if they’re saying, “Such a position could be dangerous and potentially fatal to the elderly.” That’s not the same thing, though. “You’re going to kill grandma” does not leave room for discussion. It presents the discussion as settled, but by emotion rather than fact. Since emotion can’t be argued with, and since the conclusion has been assumed, the debate over the facts can’t happen. Rather than discussing ways to keep grandma safe, your business has to go under, your mental health has to plummet, and your children’s development has to be stunted. Period. Any objection makes you a grandma-killer.

Because emotion rules, facts won’t see the light. One can comfortably feel superior to scores of one’s fellow citizens just by accepting what is presented as fact, because to hold the majority, mainstream opinion, there is almost no research required whatsoever. We are all baptized in that viewpoint daily. It’s almost a feat to not know that side’s arguments. If you are going to believe something else, you have to go looking for it. 

This does not mean that everyone who holds the majority opinion is uninformed. It also does not mean that the minority opinion is always correct, or that its adherents are all smarter, better people. Plenty of people far smarter than me disagree with me. It means nothing more than this: the minority opinion, by nature, will always be made up of a more informed collection of individuals. We who hold minority opinions already know what you in the majority think, because we’re shown that point of view (and pressured to believe it) every single day. We don’t even have to go looking for it. For you to know our opinions, however, you will have to have the willingness to look in places you have been told are morally unsavory. Because most don’t do that, most won’t be informed on both sides.

Why then, does the majority opinion hold such a superiority complex over the minority opinion? How did the two people in the coffee shop – who clearly had not done the research necessary to make their claims – have such boldness to proclaim their incorrect understandings as settled, unarguable fact? They were wrong and yet the discussion framed me as the backwards one for merely pointing it out. How does that happen? Because the majority does not fight fair. To the majority, might makes right. Again, emotion rules the day.

This L.A. Times story gives us yet another example of this bold confidence without any self-awareness or research.

High schools (and their foreign equivalents) have opened all around the world, many of them months ago. We don’t have to sit around and wonder if it’s safe. We have more data than we could ever need. And yet here they are presenting this as some kind of mystery. They’re so far behind the documented facts on this, it’s little different than saying “Guys, we just saw somebody drink milk that came from a cow. Maybe it’s safe for human consumption!” Further, the model they’re citing includes testing students for covid every single morning. “If you want to open your campus, you have to do this,” says the presumed exemplary principal. Except high schools have opened literally around the planet, safely, without such measures. You don’t have to do this. 

What we’re dealing with in Texas is another case of the exact same problem. We don’t have to wonder what removing the mask mandate will do. We’ve already seen populous, elderly, unhealthy states take such measures. By the same token, we’ve had rather lax lockdown measures for many months with regard to things like restaurant capacity and gathering limits, and other states are looking at us as crazy or suicidal.

Can we please stop pretending we’re walking blindfolded on the edge of a canyon when there are people who have already crossed the bridge?

This has been the hallmark of this whole matter – readily available knowledge gets either treated with skepticism, ignored outright, or morally condemned. If it doesn’t line up with the morally right view, it isn’t permitted a spot at the table. As long as that remains the case, we remain hopeless. Until facts can win the day – honestly, until facts are even allowed to be discussed – we will continue to be vulnerable to very bad people and very bad ideas. 

If you want to go down the rabbit hole of the alternative view, start with Tom Woods’ free eBook that breaks down misleading Covid charts. Check out The Great Barrington Declaration, an anti-lockdown paper written by 3 Ph.D.s in the field and signed by over 50,000 scientists and medical professionals. And, scroll through Covid Clarity and other related Twitter accounts who have been digging up data since the beginning.

My Covid archives:

Can You Please Just Let Me Be Wrong?

Fear of Death is not a Christian Virtue

Fear is the Name of the Game. Stop Playing.

The Day the Lockdown Should’ve Ended

One Year into Covid, I was Horribly Wrong

by Jack Wilkie

Fear of death is not a Christian virtue

I’m going to start right up front with the disclaimer that this is 1) not a claim to speak for the Forney church of Christ or Focus Press, for whom I preach and write – thus why I’m writing on this website, under my own name and 2) a personal opinion on what the Bible teaches on this matter, yet one of which I hope to persuade you.

The point of this article is not to debate the risk level of the coronavirus, or really to discuss the virus at all. My point in this article is not dependent on the dangerousness of the virus. On the contrary, my point is that the danger of the virus is irrelevant in the face of Biblical commandments.

I’m writing to posit two Biblical truths and apply them to our situation.

First, Christians are not to fear death.

Paul wrote in Philippians 1:21, “For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” While I’m here, I am to try to follow Christ’s footsteps, but death, whenever and however it comes, is to be viewed as gain. Do we believe that? Do we act like we believe it?

In a letter to a sickly woman named Mary Willis Shelburne, C.S. Lewis shared these thoughts on the matter of death for those in Christ:

“Pain is terrible, but surely you need not have fear as well. Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you… What is there to be afraid of? You have long attempted (and none of us does more) a Christian life. Your sins are confessed and absolved. Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.” (Emp. added.)

One of the most beautiful blessings about Christianity is the knowledge that death is not the end. I suspect the cause of our confusion on this issue is that we have neglected to ground ourselves in faith that we will be far better off on the other side.

I am not running toward death – I wear my seatbelt, drive the speed limit (or… thereabouts, you know), work out and try to eat reasonably, etc. I would very much like to see my children grow, and care for them and my wife, serving God all the way. But neither am I going to live my life in fear. To die is gain.

Arguing from a different angle, James wrote that our planning for the future must be done with an important fact in mind: “You do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away” (James 4:14). While we put off religious duty and wait for the virus to disappear, or a vaccine to eradicate it, or whatever else may save the day, we aren’t guaranteed that we’ll be here to see the other side.

Aside from the COVID deaths themselves, over 2 million Americans have died of other causes this year while waiting on life to return to normal. You aren’t guaranteed that you will be able to fellowship and share the body and blood of the Lord with God’s children a year from now. But you can this Sunday. Jesus told us not to worry about tomorrow, but instead to seek first the kingdom of God (Matthew 6:33-34).

Fear of death is antithetical to our faith. We are a religion founded on resurrection, practiced by millions who cower in fear of death. This should not be.

Second, we have work to do.

It was wrong of us to determine our course of action based on risk rather than on Biblical command. If God told us to do something, we are to do it and let Him work out the details. Preaching the Gospel has routinely gotten people killed throughout church history. No, persecution is not a direct equivalent, but it establishes for us that obedience – even in the face of great risk – is required. Even when Paul escaped Damascus in a basket to avoid persecution (Acts 9:25) he did so to go somewhere else and preach, not to go home and hide and wait for favorable conditions.

While we wait for our favorable conditions, the work remains waiting for us. Christian service cannot be accomplished in a setting in which we are not seeing each other face to face. When’s the last time any of us obeyed 1 Peter 4:9 – “Be hospitable to one another without complaining”? How long are we going to be okay with blowing off Acts 2’s example of gathering together, praying together, learning together, and serving each other together? Were we “loving our neighbors” by isolating them into depression and possible suicide?

The reason it was so easy for most of us to accept “virtual church” and continue on without the assembly is that our concept of church is so small and powerless. (Somebody should write a book about that.) Other than the preacher or a select ministry team, just about everybody else is interchangeable in many cases. You come to them and get what they’ve provided for you.

What happened when the lockdowns began? The preachers went to the buildings and recorded their sermons, and everybody else stayed home. If we had a biblical view of church, in which we need each and every member growing to maturity in Christ to strengthen each other (Ephesians 4), the idea of everyone doing “church at home” would have been a complete oxymoron. There’s no such thing as church at home.

Biblically we’re supposed to be evangelizing, discipling, praying together, being hospitable to each other, serving each other, and the list goes on. Very little of that can be done over a phone call or a Zoom, particularly for 9+ months.

So, to be clear, I’m not just arguing about getting back to Sunday worship. I’m arguing for going far beyond that, to practicing community as a Christian family. And while many (if not most) have continued to see their biological families through these months, we accepted isolation from our spiritual, eternal family indefinitely. Do we mean it when we call our church family our “family” or not?

God gave us work to do (Ephesians 2:10), and it’s my contention that we need to keep on doing it. You are free to disagree, but the burden of proof is then on you to show where we have the authorization to abandon that work, and how long we’re allowed to go without doing it.

Anticipating a few commonly raised objections:

“‘Love your neighbor’ means not exposing them to risk.” Yes, I know that “love your neighbor” was trotted out, as always, as the old reliable argument we can bend to mean whatever we want (sexual liberation, doctrinal compromise, political point scoring, and whatever else the moment needs). The Bible itself defines what loving one another looks like, though, and there is no sense in which all of us avoiding one another for a year fits into that definition.

It was one thing to accept “15 days to slow the spread” in the name of loving our neighbor. But if at that time it had been pitched to us as “staying home and abandoning Christian fellowship for months with no defined end point to slow the spread,” I suspect we would have been far more reluctant to view it as a loving gesture.

“If it saves just one life, it’s worth it.” If one life is the standard, we can never meet again. Every single year we have the potential to inadvertently spread the flu to an elderly, immunocompromised member. Every single week we all take the risk of getting into a car to drive to worship. Staying home would eventually save one life in both of these cases. Are these equivalent to COVID? Of course not. But I’m not the one who came up with the “one life” standard, I’m merely arguing according to its logic.

“People stay home to keep from spreading germs all the time.” You are fully capable of discerning the difference between one sick person isolating (typically for a short, defined period) and everybody – sick or not – isolating indefinitely, and have no need for me to explain why the two aren’t equivalent. The same goes for staying home for a Sunday when the weather makes assembling dangerous.

You can see the frustration in my tone, I’m sure. Week after week of bare minimum Christianity can have that effect. We simply are not being the church if we are not making disciples and fellowshipping with one another. Our response has robbed us of our identity and told the world that we’re just as focused on this life and afraid of death as they are.

With a knowledge of how beautiful and horrific eternity can be, a world at risk should motivate us to far greater activity, not lesser. Worship is too important. Fellowship is too important. Evangelism is too important. Disciple making is too important. Service is too important. It’s time to get back to work.

A quick postscript:

While everything thus far has been in the realm of opinion, this is not: if you’ve gone to restaurants, traveled, and/or gone into other people’s homes yet still are holding out on the Sunday assembly or other church gatherings, repent and get yourself in there. What that says is that you’re willing to accept at least some level of social risk, but being with the church is not high enough on the priority list to be worth that risk.

And, if that logic tracks with you, I’ll leave it to you to weigh up the same arguments as they pertain to going to the grocery store.

by Jack Wilkie

Fear is the name of the game. Stop playing.

The year was 2001. When we hear that number, our mind automatically goes to 9/11. However, in the 8 full months preceding 9/11 there were a number of major news stories from the year that have been largely forgotten.

You may remember, though, how that summer featured a constant stream of shark attack reports. I have memories of watching story after story on shark bites, typically accompanied by helicopter footage of evacuated beaches. It was a major talking point that had a tangible impact on the livelihood of coastal businesses that rely on tourism. Government agencies scrambled to distribute information on the slim likelihood of shark attacks, and how to take steps to avoid them. Summer 2001 was and is widely referred to as “The Summer of the Shark” as a panic swept the nation.

The truth of the matter was, there was nothing unusual about shark attacks in 2001. The numbers of attacks and deaths were actually lower than the year before, when little attention was given to the matter. But out of nowhere, and for seemingly no reason, the power of the media led America to believe we were experiencing an unprecedented string of shark attacks. It was wildly irresponsible, with real life affects on real people, but they did it anyway.

I led with that because in order to rightly observe the world, you need to understand things like this happen. Many people don’t realize they happen. Others refuse to believe it when they do. Others know it happens and still fall for the trick from time to time (guilty – JW). But it’s simply a fact that the media can and does drive fear whenever they want. They’ve done it over and over again this year.

Since the start of the outbreak, we’ve had fear-inducing headlines like:

And if the virus fears weren’t enough, we can throw on:

In reading that list, you might have thought “Oh yeah, I forgot about that” with regard to a couple of the entries. They come so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. But are you seeing the pattern here? These kinds of stories get rushed to print/post immediately because they drive all kinds of interest, and yet the corrections and retractions get a fraction of the coverage. With many of these, it’s pure speculation rather than actual reporting.

The other tactic at play in these stories may be the more nefarious of the two. To quote a Michael Malice catchphrase, they are factual, not truthful. For example, it was factual to say that sharks were attacking people in 2001. But it wasn’t truthful to report in such a way to imply that we were facing a never-before-seen spike in shark attacks. It is factual to say there is another swine flu strain in existence, but it’s not truthful to run that as a headline and lead people to believe we’re in danger of it.

The media’s gross misconduct is only half of the issue, though, because without our tendencies to overreact, to talk down to our neighbor, and to want to be the first of our friends to post the latest news, their headlines would do little to spread panic. If we weren’t lapping it up and running to Facebook and Twitter to lecture other people about paying attention to the latest headline, these things wouldn’t spread. In our hurry, though, fact-checking and waiting for confirmation are left totally in the dust. Our critical thinking skills are often the first casualty of panic. Take, for example, this fabrication that was shared far and wide on social media.

No photo description available.

To start with, the first line is wrong. The death rate is well below 1%. But it gets worse from there. For example, there’s statistically no chance that every person in America is going to get the virus. The idea that 1 out of every 5 Americans will come out of this with permanent heart damage should have gotten this person laughed off the internet. With wildly exaggerated claims like this we’ve stopped just short of having Andy Dwyer declare “THE VIRUS IS SHOOTING AT US!”

Yes, the coronavirus is very real. I am not saying it isn’t, and I’m not saying we should throw caution to the wind. I’m not saying any of those things. But one can acknowledge both the reality of the danger and the reality that the constant attempts to drive fear are out of control (unless one is a binary thinker, of course). Yes, it is dangerous – but we know who to protect, we know what is safe and what isn’t, and we know the hierarchy of risk by age and health status. Just making up scary claims out of thin air or running with the first hint that things might possibly get worse is irresponsible and dishonest. Why do they do it, then?

Why was Neil Ferguson’s model that predicted 2.2 million American deaths the only one reported at the start of the outbreak when the man has a track record so bad he should have been banished from the industry years ago?

Why is Sweden being condemned but New York being commended?Isn’t the place with the lower death rate and the intact economy the one who was right?

Why did major outlets run a headline telling us not to celebrate a lower death rate? Shouldn’t we be happy that fewer infected people are dying?

Because fear sells, and apologizing for being wrong about the fear is out of the question.

So, knowing those two principles, we can know for certain how we should act going forward.

#1. Stop giving them attention, and stop spreading the panic on social media. Turn the TV off, and ignore the headlines to the best of your ability. Thankfully they’ve played their hand too far and many are beginning to do just this.

#2. When you know the tactics, notice when they are being used. When you see the next shock headline (because total disengagement is almost impossible), take it with a gigantic grain of salt. Don’t post the speculatory articles, but rather wait for the actual research behind the speculation to surface.

#3. Learn to comb through the mounds of garbage, gather the information you need, and walk away. Use your critical thinking to sniff out those stories that seem too perfect to be true.

When you save all that time by shutting off the TV and staying off of news sites and social media, you’ll find extra time to spend in prayer, Bible study, exercise, reading old books, and connecting with friends via phone call or video chat. Which option do you think will leave you better off?

by Jack Wilkie

The Day The Lockdown Should’ve Ended

April 16. That’s the day every lockdown order in America should have ended. Not because the virus was eradicated that day (it obviously was not), and not because of economic concerns. No, the lockdowns should have ended because every quarantine talking point got overturned by the top coronavirus authority in the land.

In an interview on a Snapchat show, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the doctor who has served as our national COVID-19 spokesman was asked about how people should navigate their use of dating apps during quarantine. Here was his answer:

You know, that’s tough. Because it’s what’s called relative risk. If you really feel that you don’t want to have any part of this virus, will you maintain six feet away, wear a mask, do all the things that we talk about in the guidelines? If you’re willing to take a risk—and you know, everybody has their own tolerance for risks—you could figure out if you want to meet somebody. And it depends on the level of the interaction that you want to have. If you’re looking for a friend, sit in a room and put a mask on, and you know, chat a bit. If you want to go a little bit more intimate, well, then that’s your choice regarding a risk.

“If you’re willing to take a risk…”

“Everybody has their own tolerance for risks…”

“That’s your choice regarding a risk…”

By saying these things, Dr. Fauci revealed two principles that undermine the entire narrative the actions of the last 2 months have been built on. First, he believes people should be free to choose their own risk. Essentially, the advice above boils down to this: calculate your own risk and make your own decisions based on what you’re comfortable with. If you’re willing to risk catching the virus and the other person is too, you’re free to make that choice. You may think that’s a great idea, and you may think that’s a terrible idea. Regardless of our feelings, it’s the officially endorsed position by the face of our national coronavirus task force.

The question, then, is obvious – Why hasn’t that been the official recommendation across the board? Why haven’t we been allowed that kind of self-governance with regard to supporting mom and pop shops? Eating at restaurants? Going to the library? Opening businesses? Assembling in a church building? Playing basketball in a park?

Dr. Fauci endorsed the idea of choosing your activity level based on your own comfort and sense of risk with regard to only one thing – meeting up and having sex with strangers. Every guideline goes out the window in that situation. It’s the quickest, most efficient way to violate every social distancing, germ-free recommendation. But, “if you want to take the risk, go for it.” He even made sure to add that people shouldn’t do so under illusion that they’re healthy, because in his view the virus can be spread even if both parties are totally asymptomatic. That means he made this proclamation knowing full well it could further the transmission of the virus, and that the choice is yours as to whether possibly getting coronavirus is a worthwhile tradeoff for having a date.

Flattening the curve, #StayHomeSaveLives, all those slogans we’ve been trained to recite… Fauci brushed them aside as irrelevant in this case. In his view, the entire premise of government dictating our actions to stop the spread of the virus –  the premise this whole thing was built on – goes out the window the minute a person decides they need some casual sex. You can’t choose to sit 10′ from someone in a church pew in some states, but you can find somebody on the internet, go to their apartment, get physically intimate, and share their bed. You’re not allowed to choose the former because it’s too risky, but the latter is left up to you at your own discretion.

The second principle Dr. Fauci endorsed is this: there are some things in life more important and necessary than avoiding all risks. The doctor thinks Tinder dates fall into that category, and though I disagree on that specific point, many of us agree that some activities are worth it. There are things we don’t want to give up indefinitely in the name of personal safety, and we should be able to associate with people who have come to the same conclusion. Other concerns have to be weighed, too, like paying bills, preserving mental health, seeing family members, etc. Doing some of those things might involve a health risk. But why can’t we calculate it for ourselves? Apparently that’s a luxury only afforded to people who need a date.

Yes, protect the vulnerable. Yes, take precautions. Yes, allow people the choice to stay in should they so choose or should they need to for health reasons. Yes, encourage hospitals and nursing homes to take extra precautions. But the minute dating app hookups got the thumbs up as a matter of personal choice should have been the minute mandatory lockdowns ended as a matter of principle.