“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” (source unknown)
“Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; Put away the evil of your doings from before My eyes. Cease to do evil, Learn to do good; Seek justice, Rebuke the oppressor; Defend the fatherless, Plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1:16-17).
The stories and pleas for help come in every day. There are hundreds of them. People fired from all manner of employment because of their decision not to take the vaccine. It’s not just government employees either. A lawyer, fired by her law firm. A sales rep for Kubota Canada Ltd. Day-care workers, restaurant workers, school bus drivers. So many careers arbitrarily ended. Canadian judges are putting pastors in jail for asserting the freedom of religion of their churches with no real chance at a defense or procedural fairness and no interest whatsoever in religious liberty arguments. Governments are toying with the idea of requiring vaccines to even go to the grocery store. Across the pond, we have seen full-scale indefinite house-arrest of the unvaccinated. Fear is an ugly thing and it leads people to do ugly things.
Where is the Seventh-day Adventist General Conference and Religious Liberty department in all this? Not standing with the oppressed and pushing back against vaccine mandates and the outsized fear that is behind all of this immoral behaviour. No, the church has planted its standard firmly on the hill of endorsing all government measures. The calls to get vaccinated from the church has been loud and clear with two official statements from our Health Ministries Department. The calls for freedom of conscience and civil liberty? Almost completely absent. The same church whose lawyers filed an amicus brief to the US Supreme Court supporting the right to choose abortion as a religious freedom, can’t see any moral problems with the state forcibly injecting people. What a disgrace!
At the early stages of the pandemic, the debate about compliance vs non-compliance occurred on the level of externals. How essential is congregational singing to our church services? How essential is uncovering our faces to smile at each other and people being comfortable around each other? How essential is celebrating communion with fresh bread and grape-juice and letting the Holy Spirit lead out in our foot washing instead of washing feet within our “bubble?” Looking at the issues in such a granular fashion, in the face of what was understood at the time as an unprecedented public health crisis, objections to these small compromises seemed strained, inflexible, legalistic even.
It is time to wake up to the fact that the debate is not about masks vs no-masks, handshake or no handshake, good grape juice vs gross grape juice. The debate is much deeper than that. The debate is about fear vs no fear; lies vs truth; control vs freedom. Does outsized, propaganda-driven, paranoid fear have a place in the Seventh-day Adventist church? Are we too nice to tell those suffering from mass psychosis that they are wrong to be so afraid?
The fact is that the fear at this point is largely unjustified. The overwhelming majority of those who suffer hospitalization or death from Covid-19 are the institutionalized elderly. And it’s ok to say that old people dying is not something to lose our minds about. On this earth unfortunately, dying is what old people do and if it is not Covid, it will be something else. According to Statistic Canada, 90% of Covid-related deaths in Canada were people with either dementia, cancer, pneumonia, kidney failure, Alzheimer’s disease and other similar serious conditions.[2] 94% of Covid-19 related deaths were people aged 65 or older.[3] Most of these people were literally on death’s door. It’s ok to say that their deaths from Covid were not a tragedy. Attend a funeral for a 20-year-old and a funeral for an 80-year-old and you will understand the difference between a tragedy and a timely death. What we have done as a society is artificially extended the lives of the elderly and then when a virus comes along to reassert the more traditional human lifespan, we moan and cry over our defeated attempts at playing God. It is not unlike the disappointment of the Babel builders thinking they could cheat death with their schemes, only to be disappointed.
Go to a senior care home and actually talk to the seniors and you will find that most are far more concerned with their current quality of life than they are with how many years or months they can add to their lifespan. It is often the families that have more trouble letting go.
And while it is true that there is more to Covid than just dying; that some get sick and suffer a significant loss to their quality of life without dying, these are still, statistically speaking, not huge risks and they are risks similar to other background risks of existence we don’t lose our minds over and try to move heaven and earth to prevent. We have a vaccine now that gives good immunity to the elderly. We have mitigated the worst risks and what is left is really not much of a risk at all. There are huge quality of life ramifications for every measure we take to try to move these statistics slightly further in a positive direction. In other words, the medicine quickly becomes worse than the cure. People are waking up to this.
Vaccine mandates are a prime example. They only move the vaccination rate about 10%. Even more importantly: there is no good evidence that vaccines have proven effective in reducing transmission of the virus and this can be easily seen by comparing the number of average new Covid cases from before and after the vaccines started rolling out in early 2021. The patterns are virtually the same. The verdict is in. To the extent the official data is painting an accurate picture, the shots are good at protecting us from serious illness and death, and not much else. Once you understand this, the scientific and ethical case for mandating vaccines to people who don’t want them goes down the toilet.
The risks from the vaccine are not insignificant. For some demographics they are just as high, if not higher than the risk from Covid itself. Official government statistics from my Province of New Brunswick were recently released and found that the risk of hospitalization for a person who gets two doses of the vaccine is about 1 per 7,291 people.[4] National data on serious vaccine injuries shows an even higher figure of a startling 1 per 4700 people, though this discrepancy may be because of the way data is counted (hospitalizations vs “serious” adverse event).[5] Most injuries are suffered after the second dose and most people who get hospitalized from the vaccine don’t go for a second dose so it paints a false picture to describe risk in terms of hospitalizations per dose because what we’re talking about is a two-shot regime and the number of people that suffer from that regime.
The risk of hospitalization from Covid-19 in New Brunswick is 1 per 1712 tested Covid cases (only 4.25 times greater risk than from the Covid-19 2-shot regimes). Actual cases could be significantly higher than that because we know that most who experience Covid asymptomatically don’t get tested. When you break down these risks across age demographics, it becomes undeniable that some demographics are more at risk from the vaccine than they are from Covid itself. A new study from the UK published in Nature casts real doubt about the net therapeutic value of the Moderna vaccine for individuals under 40.[6] Widely respected British mathematician and risk assessment expert Dr. Norman Fenton has argued that these reported vaccination risks represent only the tip of the iceberg. [7]
And we have not even taken into account undiscovered long-term risks and also the likely under-reporting of the frail elderly who die after taking the vaccine, since it is so easy to attribute their deaths to something else.
Meanwhile, this fear is creating hatred and segregation of a class of people who are neither stupid or selfish and do not in the least deserve the kind of prejudice they are suffering. There is real evil being done in the name of this exaggerated fear of Covid-19. In New Brunswick, roughly the same amount of people have died per year from Covid-19 as from drug overdoses.[8] That’s just overdoses. We’re not counting the murders, fatal accidents, and suicides related to drug use. There are so many public health problems more significant than Covid-19.
Sooner or later our society will wake up from this daze of misinformation and realize that the States of Emergency went on way longer than was necessary or justified and the measures went much further and were far more draconian than the risk justified. We will look at the media misinformation, government abuses and industry profiteering similar to how we now look at the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq. It would be nice if we could see the church at the forefront of this awakening instead of at the tail end. It would be nice to see the church standing up for truth and against fear. By our silence or support of the fear that fuels these ongoing states of emergency, we implicitly condone their worst abuses. It is fear that is resulting in people being arbitrarily fired from their jobs. It is fear that is leading to harsh segregation measures against the unvaccinated. It is fear that is resulting in social breakdown and family members having nothing to do with each other because of the vaccine. Fear is the enemy we must have a strong voice against. If you support the fear, your objections to the worst manifestations of that fear are hollow. You share in the guilt.
There is still time to change course and for the Adventist Church to place itself on the right side of history. There are two fronts where the church needs to rapidly change course to regain its lost credibility: messaging and policy.
We need to first be a voice for truth about the true risks of Covid 19 and of the vaccine for all age demographics. We need to be a voice for truth about the unvaccinated and strong opponents to the character assassination being perpetrated against them. We need to be a strong voice against all segregation and discrimination based on vaccination. We need to shout it loud and clear from the rooftops that Covid-19 is not something you should be afraid of. We need to make it clear to our people that we might be going along with some of these measures out of principles of caution and avoiding conflict with the government, but we do not believe in them. If you believe that holding back your singing to God, holding back demonstration of love and affection in the church, restricting those whose feet you can wash, and encouraging a culture of fear in our churches is what is going to keep us safe, you may have a form of godliness but have denied its power.
On a policy level, we must start by cleaning the blood off our hands by ridding all church institutions of vaccine mandates whether hard or soft at all levels. We should promote individual conscience and support principled conscientious objection to church government controls of our religious services.
Finally, our church conferences and unions need to get involved supporting legal challenges that are taking place. The silence of large denominations is viewed by the courts as a general indication that these measures are not real infringements of religion. Only we can tell them otherwise. If we lose our religious freedoms and autonomous sphere of church activity indefinitely because of our silence in this crisis, we will have only ourselves to blame.
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Jonathan Martin is a Seventh-day Adventist lawyer in Canada with a constitutional and religious liberty practice. He has an undergraduate degree in Theology/ Pastoral Ministry from Andrews University and served as an associate pastor and Bible worker for 5 years.
[1] By Jonathan Martin, Adventist lawyer fighting Covid injustices in our country
[2] COVID-19 and deaths in older Canadians: Excess mortality and the impacts of age and comorbidity, https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/coronavirus-disease-covid-19/epidemiological-economic-research-data/excess-mortality-impacts-age-comorbidity.html “Approximately 90% of COVID-19 related deaths that occurred between March and July 2020 occurred among individuals with pre-existing chronic conditions.”
[3] COVID-19 death comorbidities in Canada, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/45-28-0001/2020001/article/00087-eng.htm (link down at the time of the writing of this paper but previously saved by writer).
[4] How Many New Brunswickers Had Side Effects from the Covid-19 Shot? https://tj.news/telegraph-journal/101740171
[5] https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccine-safety/#a3
[6] Risks of myocarditis, pericarditis, and cardiac arrhythmias associated with COVID-19 vaccination or SARS-CoV-2 infection, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0 “
[8] https://www2.gnb.ca/content/dam/gnb/Departments/h-s/pdf/en/MentalHealth/New-Brunswick_opioid-surveillance-report_2021-Q2.pdf