What Is Your Rubicon?
Are we as a society crossing a point of no return on trust between our institutions and its people? If so, what is the appropriate Christian response?
Nearly two thousand and seventy years ago a Roman general by the name of Julius Caesar returned from his battles in Gaul (modern day France) and headed towards Rome. No ordinary general, Caesar was one of three governors who, a decade earlier, had formed a political alliance known as the Triumvirate that provided a fragile peace holding the Roman republic together. Each of the three provided a check and balance on the power of the other two. You could think of it similar to the three branches of the US government where a court can strike down a unilateral presidential edict.
By this time in 49 B.C., only two, Caesar and Pompei, remained alive. Caesar was welcome to return to Rome but only without his troops. Were Caesar to cross the Rubicon River (representing the northern most boundary of Italy), the Roman Senate would consider this treason. On January 10th of that year, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with a single legion of troops, changing the political landscape forever. Within two years, checks and balances were gone. Soon ‘Caesar’ was no longer a surname but rather became a title meaning Emperor or dictator.
The term ‘crossing the Rubicon’ in our modern society represents a line where, if crossed, things will never be the same. This could be a point of no return for our society or simply a point of no return in our minds personally.
The verdict is on Omicron. Politicians and pundits want to characterize it in the scariest terms possible. The facts say: Omicron is mild, and we now even know why. Omicron’s existence may even be a good development. If this is true, what are we to make of our leaders? And more importantly, what is our biblical mandate to follow their every edict? Have our leaders crossed a line?
Omicron’s (lack of) severity is quite clear for those willing to look
As mentioned before, Omicron in terms of cases with positive test results is spreading faster than at any variant in the pandemic. Cases took off in South Africa three weeks ago, followed by a very steep rise in cases in the UK. This has yet to happen in the US, but it will happen shortly. The media are right about this.
What the media aren’t saying is that Omicron is already running its course where it started with no spike in deaths. It is true that deaths are delayed by a few weeks but there are no signs a big spike is coming. Doctors there are reporting that Omicron is about 1/10th as severe as Delta was. About a third as many people with positive cases are going to the hospital. Of those, about a third as many are ending up in the ICU, fewer still needing ventilators. Let’s take June 13, 2021, as a comparison. I pick that date because it was roughly three weeks into the start of the Delta wave in South Africa but also because hospitalizations were roughly the same at about 7,700 patients across the country. Back in mid-June about as many people were in the hospital as were testing positive daily for COVID and 1 in 5 of them were ending up in the ICU. Now (Dec 16) the official positive cases are averaging three times that level at 23,195. Just 1 in 50 are in the ICU.
But “experts” argue, if cases continue to grow at this rate, even a small hospitalization rate will overwhelm the hospitals. Except that they won’t. South African’s plateau in cases is somewhat apparent in my first chart above. But you can see this trend even more clearly by looking specifically at cases in the original Omicron epicenter, the Gauteng province (the area around South Africa’s capital Johannesburg). Single day cases peaked a week ago at 16,716 and are now running at less than half of that (most recent number is 6,748). You can see in the graph below, the 7-day average is trending lower. We could debate how much cases are going down but clearly they aren’t going up anymore.
Omicron has been spreading like wildfire for three weeks now. Yet no one can point to any overrun hospital or group of people dying from COVID in large numbers. It is true, there has been a single person who died in the UK but all official reports use the phrase, “died with COVID” which could mean they had COVID but died from something else entirely. It is the international media that implies that the person died of Omicron by saying “died from COVID.” Despite fielding many inquiries to confirm which it is, the UK government refuses to say. People are starting to catch on and ask the right questions. The conservative British newspaper the Daily Mail is questioning the narrative with this headline:
We now know why Omicron is so much milder than Delta and the original strain
South African doctors have told the world for weeks Omicron spreads incredibly fast, but the result is remarkably mild. We now know exactly why. For this we have researchers in Hong Kong to thank. They looked at the spread of Omicron in two types of tissues: bronchus and lung. Bronchus tissue is found in our body’s major airways (nose, throat and passageways into your lungs). The second type is found deep in your lungs.
The SAR-CoV-2 virus spreads from person to person when it infects tissue in your nose, throat, and bronchial system. The virus replicates itself and then is breathed out through tiny water vapor that an infected person exhales that another person inhales. COVID-19, the disease resulting from this virus, becomes serious and deadly when it gets deep into your lungs and replicates itself aggressively there. Your body’s effort to fight it results in fluid buildup in lungs (pneumonia) which renders people unable to breathe.
Researchers discovered that the Omicron variant replicates 70 times more aggressively in your nose and upper airways (bronchus tissue) as compared to the Delta variant but only 1/10th as well deep in your lungs as compared to the original strain. Thus it spreads much faster but is far less likely to causes serious harm.
Some scientists are arguing this could be the beginning of the end. From a biological perspective in a pandemic, the typical virus mutates towards a variant that maximizes life for the virus. Such a variant should spread broad and fast but not kill the host (which would inhibit its spread). The best outcome for the virus is a variant that infects everyone but harms virtually no one. Eleanor Riley, a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Edinburgh, suggests that the Omicron variant could serve as a “natural vaccine” because you are likely to get mild symptoms and the result is robust immunity.
Everything I am saying is publicly available information and independently verifiable. From the links provided you can decide for yourself if this is true. The tragedy is that medical experts and policy makers should be telling us this. Many credible doctors take to social media to speak the truth, at least until they are censored. Unfortunately, as the Omicron wave is hitting Europe, the media and leaders are not saying, “Stay calm. It is spreading fast but this will be mild and it will pass.” It begs the question, why not?
Will the media and government officials in the U.S. level with us in the next 2-3 weeks? Or will they be taking the opportunity to push vaccines on healthy kids, encourage boosters for everyone, and look to reimpose restrictions from prior waves? You know the answer to those questions. So, what should be our response? What should be our Christian response?
Vaccine passports are deemed “theologically impossible” for British church leaders
Each one of us have our breaking point before they truly speak out, even against our own organizations. Rev Dr. Jamie Franklin is curator of St. George in the Meadow in Nottingham. By his own admission, he is at the bottom of the hierarchy within the Church of England. Yet he and a few others took a public stand against vaccine passports in a letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson that gathered signatures of nearly 1,900 church leaders across the UK.
In Reverend Franklin’s words, “When the government are doing something which we regard as wrong or immoral or deceitful, it is our duty to call the government out for these things. Anything less is an abdication of our responsibility.” He believes the large number of signatories reflects that many sincere Christian believers may be reaching their limit of support for government restrictions. We need to ask ourselves are they biblically justified in speaking out or are they simply expressing their human frustrations.
Vaccine passports could be used to bar people from church attendance or lock the unvaccinated in their homes. Franklin and his fellow leaders see such restrictions as “theologically impossible” to support. Jesus would never refuse to fellowship with someone based on their medical status and neither should Christians. In the words of the 1,900 church leaders, “the introduction of vaccine passports would constitute an unethical form of coercion and violation of the principle of informed consent.” Maybe ‘coercion’ is too strong of a word. Or is it?
It is not just about church attendance. For those that see current COVID-19 vaccines as experimental, mandates could be considered a violation of the Nuremberg Code. These are a set of ethical principles most western governments adopted to never again allow forced human medical experiments that accompanied atrocities in World War II. Vaccines themselves are a great addition to society’s arsenal in confronting COVID. It is when a government goes from offering to mandating that society strays from solid ethical footing. The first of the ten codes says that when confronted with an experimental medical procedure, a person “should have legal capacity to give consent” that is free from “constraint or coercion.” Through, its vaccine mandate, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has sought to ban unvaccinated kids from their schools. I suspect they don’t have this topic in their history curriculum. Thankfully, the LAUSD may be backing down now that 34,000 students failed to comply.
In Conclusion
I invoke the image of Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon not from a political perspective but rather to question our personal views of government. As Christians we all live under the biblical mandate found in Romans 13:1 “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.” Paul penned those inspired words barely a century after Caesar crossed the Rubicon, transitioning Rome from a republic to a dictatorship. When interpreting Romans 13, are we in the United States a republic under the authority of a constitution with checks on power? Or must we obey (before God) an executive order from the President of the United States that is later struck down by the courts because the mandate “grossly exceeds” authority of the executive branch? The time has come for each of us to decide what is meant by that chapter of Romans.
We are far from a true authoritarian state where might makes right. I would argue, though, that we are closer to one than were two years ago. I pose you this question, “What is our role to speak up before we get there?”