I’ve had the disheartening task of trying to reason with two of my closest family members over the last few weeks. If it was something trivial I would have just let it go. Unfortunately, it is very important, perhaps even a life-or-death issue. You see, they are Covid-deniers.
What they believe is still not entirely clear to me, but it involved the coronavirus being created in a lab, Bill Gates patenting it, drug companies hiding a cure so they can make more money later on it, and 130,000 people not really dying of COVID-19 because hospitals make more money by wrongly coding the deaths. It seems like everyone is in on the conspiracy, including the CDC, the FDA, and the NIH.
I don’t think they think I’m in on the conspiracy because I was genuinely shocked. I kept asking, “You don’t really believe this, you are just joking with me, right?” No, they really believe it, and they sent me a ten minute YouTube video from a family physician in Texas to prove it. None of his COVID patients have died, you see, so he knows it is all exaggerated.
I explained about the importance of sample sizes and statistical significance and how you can’t draw scientific conclusions from one doctor’s experience, and that such arguments are merely anecdotal. It didn’t matter that the good doctor had set himself against the CDC, the FDA, and the NIH, he was right and they were wrong.
Apparently, people are drawn to conspiracy theories out of fear and a desire to explain something they cannot manage or control. It is a shortcut for dealing with an unpleasant reality. At least that’s what the pros say, and I don’t have any reason to doubt it; but then again they may just be part of a conspiracy to suppress conspiracy theorists.
The reality is that plagues and pandemics are a fact of history. They don’t need conspiracy theories to explain them. Plagues and pandemics have devastated economies, reordered societies, and redirected nations. That the COVID pandemic may have a devastating effect on the U.S. economy does not mean the democrats or Bill Gates is behind it; it merely means we are still part of a fallen world corrupted by dangerous viruses and bacteria to which we are not fully immune, and that until we discover a way to neutralize or immunize against such viral and bacterial infections, they will remain part of our fallen world.
The good news is that as King Jesus reconciles the world to Himself and makes it into the world He originally intended, fatal viral and bacterial infections will become a thing of the past. See Isaiah 65:20-22. This will happen as the wheat and tares work together (Matt. 13:29-30), and as Christians working inspired by the Holy Spirit and accessing the mind of Christ have insightful “ah ha moments” in the lab that lead to solutions of which the Lord is already aware and is waiting to vouchsafe to those who seek Him. GS