The Blood Moon and COVID

Last night’s Blood Moon glowed red on people who wilfully slaughtered their fellows.

The reddish hue of a ‘Blood Moon’ is caused as the moon’s orbit takes it under the Earth’s shadow. Last night’s eclipse was special, because it had the longest duration in 580 years.

I had trotted out from my rural house at the prescribed viewing time of 5:00 AM Atlantic to see — nothing. The skies were completely clouded over. But it was a mild night, and one gets tempted to wonder about moons long ago and moons to come.

This eclipse came during at a “Beaver Moon” season. The local Mi’kmaq Indians would have been very in tune with the habits of these pelt-balls. The beavers build their dams at this time of year, and being night creatures, they are able to work longer under the light of a full moon.

The last time an eclipse of this length happened was in 1441, a much better time for the Mi’kmaq: no Europeans. Their beliefs were unchallenged. A few kilometers from my house, in fact, is the purported home of their God Glooscap. Legend has it that the Minas Basin was formed when Glooscap needed a bath, and the beavers obligingly scraped out the Basin as a tub for him. The tides come and go because the water is still sloshing after he departed the tub.

Forward to our time, and we have many people who refuse to know better.

We just got bad news in Nova Scotia: large COVID outbreaks have arisen from “several faith groups” that have remained unvaccinated. The increase in case numbers from the faith-based gatherings include secondary transmission to other faith-based gatherings.

There is no indication of spread outside the faith communities.

So far, over 81% of the population — including young children — of Nova Scotia has been vaccinated with at least one dose, and more than 76% have received two doses.

This is among the highest vaccination rates on earth. It allows us to shine a clear light on what the wilful refusal to listen to science can cost.

The spread is among the faith-based unvaccinated: of all new cases of COVID, 88% were from the unvaccinated people. Just to do the math for us numbers-challenged people, fully vaccinated people are nine times less likely to get COVID and more than 50 times less likely to be hospitalized with COVID than are unvaccinated people.

To sharpen the spotlight of blame, these cases are showing up in the countryside, where old-order Baptist families reside.

When the province said ‘you can have face-to-face meetings, but everyone must show proof of vaccinations’, the faithful indicated that no, they would ignore that. They said “We don’t know” if the vaccine would work. When the outbreak happened, the pastor said that the resulting deaths were all part of God’s plan.

Like the tides are moving for Glooscap. At least the Mi’kmaq had an excuse not to know.

But as correspondent David Gamble reports, the paster actually said “I followed what God wanted us to do. We had a great week of meetings…a young lady got saved.”

This is tone-deaf nonsense. A lady might have been ‘saved’ but others were definitely buried!

Faced with criticism about the event, the pastor claimed that Satan was trying to “drag us down”.

This religious arrogance has created intense COVID surges.

In Canada, there is no excuse for this. Free ‘Rapid COVID Tests’ are available everywhere. Not like in the U.S., where an absence of the kind of sustained public funding has chocked off the supply of tests.

A conservative bishop called vaccination a “free choice”. It’s more like a free throw of the dice:

Let’s throw those COVID dice. Say one thousand people in a faith-based community do not get vaccinated. Your odds of getting COVID are about 1 in 14. Every week.

Say you are not one of the 70 people (1 in 14 of 1,000) who gets COVID that first week. Next week, the dice roll again…and let’s say you dodged it for another week. Week three, you have another 1 in 14 chance…and this time you roll COVID dice! and you join the 214 people who now have the sickness. Your body aches, your lungs fill with fluid, and machines pump air into you. It won’t be long before you are joined by everyone else in that 1,000 person unvaccinated petri dish.

Now, let’s say when you get COVID, and you recover (as most people do)… but your ordeal is not over. Every sixteen months, your resistance to COVID (without a vaccine) dies out. Every sixteen months, you enter the roulette game again. Fresh meat. And that COVID dice keeps rolling until you die.

BTW, with COVID, the word ‘recovery’ is a misnomer. Three-quarters of patients with COVID have illnesses that last months and years; it’s a gift that keeps on giving. Known as ‘long-haulers,’ those with post-acute COVID-19 suffer from lingering, and in some cases, life-altering symptoms, ranging from extreme fatigue, silent strokes, shortness of breath and heart palpitations to brain fog and depression.

So while you are waiting to die, you are likely to be very ill.

Eventually, all religious people who do not get vaccinated will depart this earth.

Those remaining would be people who acknowledge that Science Rules. They could be people of faith, but they will be people of faith who acknowledge that Science Rules. Just like their colleagues hundreds of years ago who put that first lightening rod on the first church. Faith is great in the abstract…but in a storm let’s have that grounding wire.

Pope John Paul II himself, when he suffered the 1981 assassination attempt, was rushed where? To a church? No, to a hospital. Science Rules, even for the elite.

So we can look at COVID, in one way, as a means by which nature is trimming off the portion of the population that is faith-drenched. That believes in belief alone. That lives for religion over science.

One of the most consistent themes of the Reddit group that follows the last words of dying unvaccinated hard-cases — the https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/ group — is that even when they are finally surrounded by cages of ventilators and chest wires, they call for ‘Prayer Warriors’ to bring on the miracle!

There was a miracle of sorts. It was made two years ago. It was a vaccine to fight COVID. It was not made with Belief, but with Understanding. If you deny this Understanding, you will die.

I say this without malice. This was not my choice, my unvaccinated friend (OK, formerly-living friend).

Look on it as God’s way of pruning the religion tree. Natural selection. Why would God do this? The ways of the Lord are mysterious. So mysterious, that an undoctrinated pagan would wonder if there was a God at all.

But that’s another story.

For this story, the Blood Moon shines down on a graveyard with many tombstones that did not have to be there. Let’s hope that by the time of the next long eclipse — 2601 — our descendants will have completely absorbed the ways of science.

And maybe, by 2601, they will not be looking up at an overcast sky peering in vain for an eclipse; they will be in their starships, staring at other suns in other skies. What an adventure! I wish I could join them.

But hey — I got to see a once-in-a-500-year event. And the last time that happened, Glooscap was taking a bath in my basin. It will be a wonderful future, beyond my dreams. And that’s as it should be.