COVID-19: Somebody Please Show Me the Evidence

April 1, 2020 | by Gunner Steele

As our world plunges deeper into tyrannical government control, economic ruin, and social panic, I stand on the side wondering one little question—why?

Yes, I can jump headfirst into all types of conjecture based on evidence, history, and logic, but I won’t do that here. I just want to make two simple points for those who are following the events of our day.

But before I do, let me advise you that I do not believe that any government, particularly the United States Federal Government, has the right to strip me or my fellow-citizens of Constitutional rights based on any “epidemic,” no matter how deadly. In other words, if there was a true, apocalypse style, flesh-eating, zombie creating disease that was so contagious you only had to breathe within 1 mile of an infected person, I still do not believe that any government has the right to force citizens to stay in their homes and cease to function.

But that is the topic of another article. In this article, I want to hypothetically assume that YES, I accept a government’s power to exercise this level of control over it’s citizen’s lives. (Remember, I don’t believe that, but for the sake of argument, let’s roll with it.) So the question now is—what evidence needs to exist in order for the government to justify taking such remarkable action?

That is my question for you. In order for the government to justify shutting down church services; canceling all public gatherings; crippling economies; destroying lives, causing fear, panic, and chaos; eliminating our right to travel; using force to intimidate religious activity; and in some cases taking complete, totalitarian control by tracking the second-by-second movement of citizens; what evidence needs to exist? What do we need to know, empirically, as a matter of fact and absolute truth, before the government should be allowed to take such action?

I humbly await your response…

And while I’m waiting, let me ask you the second, oh-so-obvious question…does that evidence now exist? Assuming you’ve answered the previous question, the second question shows if you are a consistent thinker or not.

Here’s what I mean—your answer to the first question revealed the standard that you would use in order to justify the extreme government action currently being taken. And I’m going to assume that the standard you defined HAS NOT BEEN MET in our current crisis. So then, why do you accept what is going on?

If your standard was so low that our current minimal evidence with the COVID-19 disease and its causing factor, the “novel coronavirus,” is sufficient for you, then I ask one third and final question—then why was this current extreme government response not taken during the ebola virus outbreak, the SARS or MERS outbreaks, or the very deadly and extremely contagious SwineFlu (H1N1) epidemic of 2009? Please answer that.

You see, you can’t be BOTH consistent and accepting. Pick one. Either you are consistent and objective and you therefore recognize that what the government is doing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented and inconsistent with past outbreaks, therefore causing you to question and resist the current measures being taken; or, you accept what is going on right now because you don’t care that it is contrary to common-sense, historical precedence, or constitutional law.

But none of that matters, you know why? Because you’re so scared! And that’s pretty much it. Fear controls the masses. You can do anything to anybody at anytime as long as you pump them with enough FEAR.

So before I close this article, let me offer you some common-sense food-for-thought in regards to evidence. Because as far as I can see, there is none.

You see, in my view, the evidence to justify the absolute control that governments are taking right now would have to be based on the following two things, and this evidence must be empirical, without bias, without assumptions, and with demonstrable data:

1. Contagiousness - It would have to be so contagious that merely breathing shared air with a contagious person would cause everyone to catch the disease.

The problem here is that COVID-19 has not been shown to be any more contagious than the flu or H1N1 or other past pandemics. Yes, yes, yes, I know—COVID-19 is not the flu! We get it. But please show me empirical evidence demonstrating that COVID-19 is more contagious than the flu. There is no evidence that it is any more contagious. Equally contagious? Possibly, but definitely not more contagious. So this begs the question—why the crazy response? We've lived with the flu forever. In fact it is so common that it even has it's own season! The "flu season."

2. Lethality - it would have to be so lethal, that basically everybody who gets it dies.

Remarkably, it appears that very very few people who catch COVID-19, and who have no other health issues are actually dying. In fact, unlike the flu or H1N1 or ebola or other viruses, tons of people who test positive for COVID-19 don’t even have any symptoms at all!

And those who die have been shown to typically have other health-compromising issues or diseases that would have caused their demise without COVID-19. Sure, we’ve seen some individual and rare stories of presumably healthy people who have died from COVID-19 (and the media is happily putting them on display as often as possible thereby creating a false narrative of the danger of the disease). But those are rare even though you’ve seen them touted on the news. But count 'em up, how many are they? It is just a handful.

Imagine if we had a front, leading, national news story every time someone died from pneumonia or the flu? We’d all be locked up in our homes permanently! Because at any point in time that you do the counting, influenza has killed around 30x more people than COVID-19 (depending upon what statistics you use). Pneumonia vs COVID-19? Same story.

Sorry people, but before you start acting whacky and accepting totalitarian government control, you should at the very least ask them to SHOW ME THE EVIDENCE! And propaganda, by the way, is not evidence.