If you’d predicted six months ago that I’d be spending vast amounts of my time on this subject, I’d have said you were crazy. But you’d have been right.
For me, that word has, in under three months, gone from never-before-encountered to encountered dozens to hundreds of times a day.
Doctors and nurses, of course, all knew the term—for a family of viruses that cause common colds and seasonal influenzas. But most of us just knew of “cold germs” or “flu bugs.”
Now suddenly our whole world has been turned upside down because many influential or powerful people think one new version (they arise frequently), apparently more contagious and deadly than most, threatens to kill millions unless we cripple our economies and—at least temporarily—forfeit our liberties to fight it.
Novel coronavirus 2019, or SARS-CoV-2, or the “Wuhan virus” or “Chinese virus” (neither of those terms is racist or xenophobic—historically it’s common to name new viruses after where they originate) stormed onto the scene and now dominates life for billions.
With dire consequences.
Before I go on, I have a word of comfort and reassurance for you. If, like many, you’re fearful because of the pandemic, know that even while you walk through “the valley of the shadow of death,” you need “fear no evil,” for God is with you (Psalm 23:4). He will “make all grace abound to you, so that having all contentment in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work” (2 Corinthians 12:8).
Now, how is the pandemic relevant to Cornwall Alliance’s mission to educate the public and policymakers about environmental stewardship, economic development (especially for the poor), and the gospel of Christ—the mission you’ve supported by your generous donations?
Why am I now urgently asking you to dig deep and donate afresh to help us address this pandemic and how governments around the world are responding to it, while continuing our usual work countering falsehoods about climate change and other issues?
Because, though people don’t generally think of infectious diseases, or governments’ responses to them, as relevant to environmental stewardship, economic development, or the gospel, they are.
Here’s how, in three points—the first brief, the others longer and more complex.
First, SARS-CoV-2 (which stands for severe acute respiratory syndrome caused by this particular strain of coronavirus) is an environmental hazard to which we need to respond with environmental stewardship.
In this case, environmental stewardship means curbing the virus’s spread and reducing its harm where it does spread. And it means doing so in a way that doesn’t do more harm than good. Not an easy task.
Second, Proverbs 22:3 says, “The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it.” We foresee dangers from both the disease and from responses to it.
How we respond affects economic development—and “development” can be positive or negative, growth or contraction.
And there are two ways, both negative, that SARS-CoV-2 affects economic development: directly, and indirectly.
Directly, when people become ill or die their contributions to economic production—all the goods and services that benefit their neighbors near and far—shrink or end, and caring for them, as we must, costs something, from a little to a whole lot.
Indirectly, measures taken to curb the virus’s spread are costly—and stating that doesn’t mean pitting lives against economy. Economy and lives are intricately tied together.
It takes people—lives—for an economy to function. And it takes an economy—people and businesses producing goods and services—to feed, clothe, shelter, transport, communicate among, educate, medicate, and otherwise serve people to enhance their health, prolong their lives, and facilitate their freedoms.
A growing economy leads to better nutrition and health care, safer housing and transportation, and lots more things that enhance health and prolong life. It also leads to reduced despair and depression and so reduced abuse of alcohol and drugs and reduced suicide.
A shrinking economy does the opposite.
For years, the Cornwall Alliance has taught that economic development—lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty—requires two things: a set of five social institutions, and access to abundant, reliable, affordable energy.
Those five indispensable social institutions are private property rights, entrepreneurship, free trade, limited government, and the Rule of Law.
And the best sources of abundant, affordable, reliable energy are fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydro, not wind, solar, and other so-called “renewables.”
For years, the Cornwall Alliance has taught that forcing substitution of “renewables” for conventional fuels to reduce global warming infringes on private property rights, entrepreneurship, free trade, limited government, and the rule of law.
And for years, the Cornwall Alliance has shown that depriving people of abundant, affordable, reliable energy from fossil fuels means slowing, stopping, or reversing the conquest of a greater risk: poverty.
Now those two points are directly relevant to how governments, in America and around the world, are responding to the coronavirus.
Both the social institutions and the energy necessary to rise and stay out of poverty are endangered by governments’ present or potential responses to the coronavirus. If we understand how, we can defend and preserve them. If we don’t, we could lose them.
Mandating that millions of businesses close their doors and millions of people stay home for weeks or months means trampling on their private property rights and their liberties in entrepreneurship and trade; expanding government powers; and violating the Rule of Law.
It means depriving them of their incomes and everyone else of all the things they could have produced if they hadn’t been shut down and kept at home.
It means subjecting all those who lose their businesses or jobs to stress and despair because they can’t pay rent or mortgage, utilities, health and home and car insurance, doctor bills, and more—stress leading to alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, and suicide.
And it’s not just the lockdowns that are the problem. It’s also some of what our governments are proposing to do as we come out of the lockdowns.
Some politicians and environmental activists are intent on using this emergency as an opportunity to impose their agendas on everyone. They’re intent on slipping mandates for wind, solar, and other “renewable energy,” along with other “Green” policies, into recovery bills.
And from all of these things, as always, it’s the poor who suffer the most.
If you’re wealthy and have saved enough to live on for six months to a year even if you lose all your income, you’ll probably do okay. If you live paycheck to paycheck, a week or two of unemployment can be devastating.
Let me develop that for you a little bit with reference to two very different nations, India and America.
Vijay Jayaraj, a climate scientist who writes often for us and whose work you’ve undoubtedly seen, lives in Delhi, India’s capital city of over 20 million people in a nation of 1.4 billion, 300 million of whom are poor.
Pretty much every day, Vijay encounters people in abject poverty. The pandemic has shown him, in a new way, how bad the consequences can be.
India’s nationwide lockdown has done enormous damage.
In addition to the roughly 300 million Indians who live under the poverty line, millions more are daily wage laborers. Day after day, Indian media report the plights of the poor who have lost their only means of survival.
Most poor families don’t have their own houses. Few have any savings. Because they lost their jobs in the lockdown, they are left without food and shelter.
Men walk hundreds of miles with children on their shoulders in the hot sun to return to their home villages because they can’t afford to stay in the cities. They eat as little as one meal a day—and sometimes nothing.
In Delhi, migrant workers and homeless people sleep on the banks of the Yamuna River, without shelter and food. They have nothing but the clothes they wear, and perhaps a blanket. In despair, some feed on decayed food dumped near a graveyard.
Casualties are unavoidable. A man in his early 20s died attempting to travel 600 miles by foot to his hometown.
All this in just one country. Globally, around 1 billion people live in slums. All are susceptible to the pandemic. But even more distressing is that the lockdown leaves them unable to afford food.
The cost in lives will be enormous—and, given the circumstances in such places— probably never accurately measured.
What about in wealthier countries, like America? The lockdowns’ toll won’t be quite so devastating, but it will be very serious.
Don’t misunderstand me. Sensible measures to curb the virus’s spread should continue. But I’m about to argue that the economic lockdown must end—quickly.
Frequent hand washing, keeping our distance in large gatherings, staying home when we’re sick, frequently sanitizing common surfaces at home and in public places, even wearing face masks when in public in hard-hit regions—all these probably need to continue for months.
Further, we need to protect the most vulnerable: the elderly and people with vascular, heart, and lung diseases (all most common among the elderly), diabetes, and immune deficiencies. Yet the vast majority who get infected have moderate, mild, or no symptoms.
Protecting the vulnerable doesn’t require keeping everyone else home, off the job. It requires quarantining the vulnerable (and if they’re willing to take the risk, they should be free to go out) and, to suppress the spread, those who are infected.
So, why do I think the lockdowns must end, and soon?
The Wall Street Journal estimated that the lockdowns inactivated a quarter of the US economy, eliminating over 29 percent of daily gross domestic product (GDP), or $17.4 billion dollars a day.
Continued for two more months, the Journal estimates, they’d cause a second-quarter loss annualized (that is, extrapolated to twelve months) to three-fourths of GDP, or $16 trillion.
Moody’s Analytics, one of the nation’s premier economic forecasting firms, thinks many counties will open up again sooner and the total loss to GDP this year will be about 30 percent. But that still amounts to $6.42 trillion of lost GDP.
So what? It’s only money, right? At least it’s not lives! Dead wrong.
In my article “How Many Uninfected People will the ‘War on the Coronavirus’ Kill?” (on our blog) I cited studies that, applied to $6.42 trillion, imply that the lockdown, even if it didn’t continue for two more months, could cause 49,000–794,000 extra deaths, with 49,000–77,000 most likely.
Another way to estimate mortality from damage to the economy is to look at unemployment. What is its impact on mortality?
During the 2008–2009 recession, Dr. Harvey Brenner, an expert on the link between economic fluctuations and physical and mental health, calculated that an extra 31,333 deaths occur per million unemployed.
In the month before this letter, 26.4 million Americans lost their jobs. By Brenner’s modeling, if unemployed long enough, that would mean a heartrending 827,191 deaths.
I haven’t found out how long the unemployment must continue in order to generate the deaths. A million unemployed for 10 minutes obviously would have almost no effect. For a week or two, little. For a month or two, more. For six months, much more.
We don’t know how long the 26.4 million will remain unemployed. I pray that most will regain their jobs fairly quickly after the lockdowns end.
But many won’t. The businesses that employed them will have closed. Or they’ll have downsized or changed their processes to require fewer employees. And it will take many months for enough customers to return to restaurants, concerts, etc., to justify rehiring many.
I won’t try to guess how many additional deaths will eventually come from the job losses. But unless those people get their jobs back quickly, the number must be substantial.
Meanwhile, controversy rages over just how lethal the coronavirus is. Some sources report around 5 percent—which would be about 380 times the lethality of seasonal flu. Others say around 0.5 percent—which would be just under 4 times the lethality of flu. Still others say around 0.12 to 0.2 percent—right around the rate for flu.
I’ve been studying the controversy on this in some depth, and it seems to me the evidence is growing that the death rate is much lower than official sources say, for two reasons.
First, the emerging evidence from antibody testing indicates that infections are far more widespread than confirmed cases. Second, COVID-19 is being listed as cause of death for many whose underlying vascular, heart, and lung diseases would have caused their deaths very soon anyway—meaning the coronavirus accelerated their deaths but wasn’t the sole cause.
It follows from that COVID-19’s death rate is much lower than officials have claimed.
I don’t pretend to know just how much lower. A study out of Stanford says 50 to 85 times lower. Yes, it’s contested. But even as I wrote this, a much bigger study from New York reached similar conclusions.
I’m convinced, though, that the coronavirus’s death rate is low enough that deaths caused by the lockdowns will likely exceed those caused by the disease. And those deaths, in the near term, aren’t the sole result of the lockdowns.
At the start of page 2 above I said I’d make three points. First was the pandemic’s relevance to environmental stewardship. Second was its relevance to economic development. Here at last is the third: the relevance of all this to the gospel and Christian faith and life.
On the one hand, I don’t really see much direct attack on the gospel by the virus itself (obviously) or the more extreme measures to curb its spread.
Not much, but some, in that believers who can’t gather for worship sacrifice spiritual growth, and unbelievers who can’t go to church lose opportunities to hear and believe.
But the greater risks are to some very important things that accompany the gospel—of which most people don’t think. This will take a little explaining. We need to see the big picture of how things tie together—and how, if we begin unraveling them, we may lose them all.
At the start of His public ministry, Jesus said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:18).
Throughout human history, bondage and oppression have been the norm for almost everyone. Liberty has been the rare exception. Americans have had the tremendous privilege of enjoying the blessings of liberty to an extent rarely matched.
But our governments’ responses to the pandemic threaten to curtail our liberties in alarming ways. Maybe not on purpose, but truly enough.
John Adams, second President of the United States, wrote in 1798 to the Massachusetts militia:
We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
In the America of Adams’s day, as Joseph Story (who served on the Supreme Court from 1812 to 1845) explained in his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (a primary Constitutional law text for well over a century), “religion” meant, specifically, Christianity.
Adams and many other Founding Fathers recognized that Christianity was essential to the founding of our nation. Both directly and through its impact on British law, it gave us the principles embedded in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
My own doctoral dissertation focused on one path by which Christianity shaped our Constitution—from the Genevan and Scottish Reformations through the Covenanters and Puritans to John Locke and John Witherspoon to James Madison, who drafted the Constitution, and 18 others whom Witherspoon taught.
To the extent that Christianity loses its influence in America, we can expect to see those principles erode and, someday, disappear.
So, what are some of those principles?
As our Declaration of Independence listed them: the belief that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (which in that time, in that context, meant not pleasure but God’s blessing—as William Blackstone explained in his Commentaries on the Laws of England).
As our Bill of Rights lists some:
- Rights to the free exercise of religion; to assemble peaceably and to petition our government; to freedom of speech and the press, as expressed in the First Amendment.
- Rights to self-defense and the means to it, as expressed in the Second, and to the security of our homes from invasion by our governments, in the Third.
- Rights against unreasonable searches and seizures of our persons, houses, papers, or effects, in the Fourth, and against being deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, in the Fifth.
- Rights to speedy and public trial by jury, in the Sixth and Seventh, and against excessive bail when accused of a crime, or punishments when convicted, in the Eighth.
- Other rights not enumerated, in the Ninth, and federalism—basically, government by the level of government closest to us that can competently fill the need—in the Tenth.
It would take too long to explain how each and every one of those finds its roots in the Bible and was delivered to America by 18 centuries of the Christian church. (To learn about that, read Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order or Michael Farris’s From Tyndale to Madison: How the Death of an English Martyr Led to the American Revolution.)
My point is that the lockdowns imposed in many parts of America to curb the virus’s spread have involved serious violations of many of these rights and claiming authority far beyond what we’ve understood for centuries by “limited government” and the “Rule of Law.”
We’ve seen orders prohibiting churches to gather for worship—even if only “drive-up” worship in which people stay in their cars—while allowing non-essential businesses like abortion clinics and liquor stores to remain open. Restricting religious gatherings while permitting non-religious ones violates the First Amendment.
We’ve seen people arrested for swimming in an ocean or playing in a park, even while maintaining “social distancing.”
Millions have been confined to our homes, deprived of liberty without due process of law—which requires proof, on a person-by-person basis, that we’re a threat to the health and safety of others.
There’s room for debate about whether emergency declarations can justify such things, but I’m with those Constitutional scholars who say fundamental rights can’t be set aside in the name of an emergency.
The net result has been an enormous expansion of government control over our lives, liberties, and property. It could do far more harm than the virus or the economic losses.
It’s always harder to squeeze government back into its proper bounds after it’s exceeded them than to keep it there in the first place.
A massive campaign to re-educate Americans about our Constitutional government, its limits, and our freedoms is a tremendously important challenge as we recover from the pandemic and the measures taken to restrain it.
The original of this article was published as a circular e-newsletter on May 19, 2020 and on the Cornwall Alliance website.
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