I never set out to make John MacArthur a target for my writing. Truly, I’d never given the man much thought before this last year. However, he’s a prominent evangelical pastor who a lot of people in reformed circles listen to and respect, and he keeps saying things from the pulpit that make me angry, so here we are.
That’s MacArthur this last Sunday, declaring that there’s now NEW INFORMATION from the CDC that finally gives us the truth, which proves there is no pandemic. This is met with raucous applause from his congregation. He then goes on to tell us how all this fuss about COVID-19 is just deception from Satan.
So, John MacArthur is wrong and is deceiving his congregation. When this is pointed out to him (as I’m sure it already has been), he should repent, ask for forgiveness, and make a correction. He won’t, but he should. I’ll get to why he’s wrong in a bit, but first I want to look at how we got to this point.
On August 26th, the CDC published their weekly update of COVID death counts. In that weekly update, there is a table that lists the different comorbidities (health conditions and contributing causes mentioned in conjunction with COVID) reported on the death certificates. The summary of the table includes this sentence: For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.
“But Xan, you said this was a weekly update. Is this the first time they’ve posted the comorbidities data?”
No it is not. Here’s the update from back on May 20th. Same type of data is available. At this point, the data showed 7% of deaths as listing COVID only. You can find the same thing for May 28th, June 3rd, and…well, weekly.
“I thought MacArthur said ‘for the first time, we heard the truth’.”
He did say that.
“He made it sound like it was a big reveal, a secret that the government’s been hiding.”
That is exactly what he did.
“But it’s not.”
No, it sure isn’t.
So what happened? Well, it starts, as so many terrible things these days do, with a Facebook post. Some anonymous person posted “This week the CDC quietly updated the Covid number to admit that only 6% of all the 153,504 deaths recorded actually died from Covid.” This was picked up and quoted (again on Facebook) by an Anti-vaccine advocate.
A twitter used named Mel latched on to that, tweeting the above quote. Now, the ‘Q’ in ‘Mel Q’ is because she’s a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory. If you’re unfamiliar with QAnon, it is a far-right conspiracy theory that, at its basic level, believes Donald Trump is waging a hidden war against a secret globalist cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles.
It probably would’ve stopped there, but on Saturday night it was picked up by the website The Gateway Pundit as a “SHOCK REPORT”, referencing the Mel Q tweet. If you’re not familiar with Gateway Pundit, it’s a far-right “news” site best known for having zero reporting standards and getting constantly taken in by hoaxes. Early Sunday morning one of President Trump’s attorneys, Jenna Ellis (who is also representing MacArthur’s church in their legal battle against LA County), retweeted the Gateway Pundit article.
The president then retweeted both Ellis’s tweet and the original Mel Q tweet. Somewhere in there (likely when Ellis retweeted it), John MacArthur saw it, latched on to it, and declared it as truth from the pulpit.
From Anonymous to Anti-Vaxxer to QAnon to untrustworthy news source to deceitful President to Pastor to Congregation. A bunch of unscrupulous people spread false information, and a pastor who should know better accepted it unquestioningly. Why? Because it confirmed what he already believed. Here’s where I think this is a valuable lesson for all of us. I don’t believe that John MacArthur is a stupid man. I don’t think he got suckered into this because he’s an idiot. He believed a report of dubious origin because it fit his worldview. I’ve seen this a lot on social media, from people who come from all sorts of viewpoints. We see something that makes us feel vindicated, and we hit “share” before giving it a second thought. I feel like it’s right, so whether it’s actually true or not is beside the point. That’s dangerous. It’s a big reason why our discourse is in the place it’s in today. Now MacArthur didn’t just share a tweet, he declared it from the pulpit, which is much more serious, and it’s why I’m writing about it.
Second, his statement is a gross misunderstanding of the data that displays an ignorance of what comorbidities are. The original falsehood that was tweeted said “only 6% of all the 153,504 deaths recorded actually died from Covid.”, this is what MacArthur echoes, saying “6% of the deaths that have occurred can be directly attributed to COVID. 94% cannot. Of the 160,000 people that have died, 9,210 actually died from COVID. There is no pandemic.” That is not what the CDC data says. I, like John MacArthur, am not a doctor, but I do have a modicum of common sense, and I can Google.
When a doctor fills out a death certificate, there is a section both for the immediate cause and the underlying cause(s), as well as any other significant conditions that contribute to the death. You can read about how those sections are supposed to be filled out at this website (you have to create an account to view it, so I’ll post relevant sections below). I know everyone is sensitive to whether information is politicized because of COVID, so this an article from 2005. Here’s what they say:
Item 32, the Cause of Death, is the most difficult item to complete accurately. It consists of two parts. Part I is a sequential list of conditions leading to the immediate cause of death and the time interval between their onset and the death. Part II is a list of other conditions contributing to the death but not directly causing death. Thinking about the death as a sequence of events and reconstructing this sequence helps classify correctly the various illnesses and conditions the decedent might have had.
Immediate cause of death. Part I, line a, is for the immediate cause of death (see Table 1). This should be a disease, complication, or injury that directly caused the death. A common error is to list a mechanism of death (for example, cardiac arrest) rather than a disease (myocardial infarction)…
Intermediate/underlying causes. Lines b, c, and d are for intermediate and underlying causes. Each condition listed should cause the one above it. You should be able to proceed logically from the underlying cause through each intermediate cause by saying the phrase “due to” or “as a consequence of,” moving from the lower line up through line b. There may be several intermediate causes. For example, a death may be due to a pulmonary embolus, as a consequence of hip surgery, resulting from a injury from a fall, resulting from a cerebral infarction. The underlying cause is the cerebral infarction…
Other illnesses. Part II is where to list other significant illnesses or conditions that may have contributed to the death but were not the direct causes of it. More than one condition may be listed. Many patients have multiple conditions and there may be uncertainty as to direct and contributing causes of the death. The physician is only expected to make the best judgment possible as to the most likely causes and sequences. Coders referring to international standards and rules will use the information to make a final classification of the underlying cause.
So your death certificate for a COVID patient might read something like
Immediate Cause of Death: respiratory failure
Underlying Cause a) Due to pneumonia
Underlying Cause b) Due to COVID-19
Other Illnesses: Obesity, Diabetes
This would represent the case of someone who is overweight and diabetic, but otherwise healthy, who contracted COVID, COVID caused them to get pneumonia, and because of that they died of respiratory failure. MacArthur would have us believe that this person did not really die of COVID-19, which is utter nonsense.
Some of these things listed on the chart are underlying conditions that were present before the virus was contracted (things like obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer, dementia, etc.), and many of them are complications caused by the virus. COVID is a disease that attacks the cardiopulmonary systems, so of course there are a ton of respiratory and circulatory diseases listed as comorbidities. None of these comorbidities mean that these deaths weren’t caused by COVID-19. In fact, as this epidemiologist points out, the CDC has actually estimated that over 95% of these deaths had COVID as the underlying cause.
So, what does the CDC data show? Well, it shows that people who suffer from underlying conditions like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, etc. are more vulnerable to COVID-19, and that it’s more dangerous for the elderly, who are much more likely to have these various comorbidities. That’s important news…that we’ve known since at least April.
Even as I type this, I know that there are some people who will react to this by saying "well, maybe MacArthur was wrong about this specific report, but he's still right overall. There's no pandemic. They told us millions would die, and this has been no worse than the flu. The government closed down our economy for nothing." Again, that is just not true.
1) This is not just like the flu. You can look at the CDC estimates for flu cases, hospitalizations and deaths for this last year, and going back years. The mortality rate of symptomatic cases of the flu is around .1%. Currently, the US is reporting 6,087,403 total COVID cases and 185,092 deaths. That's a mortality rate of 3%. Now, we're certainly under counting the cases, though by how much is hard to know. This also includes lots of asymptomatic cases (which our flu estimate did not). Whether we're over or under counting deaths is a matter of debate. Lets give the skeptic the benefit of the doubt though, lets say we're severely under counting cases and they should be 25% higher, and lets say we're drastically over counting deaths and they should be 25% lower. Even if we do that, the mortality rate is still 1.8%, 18x higher than the flu. To show you how absurd this comparison is, even if John MacArthur was right and the "real" COVID deaths are just 6% of the recorded deaths, the mortality rate for COVID is still twice the mortality rate of the flu.
2) I see thrown around a lot that "experts said millions would die, why should I listen to them now?" This is usually a reference to the Imperial College report that predicted there could be up to 2.2 million deaths in the US. Now, the methodology behind that report had a lot of flaws that have been well documented, but still, even if I look at that admittedly flawed study, it doesn't make the point people think it's making. The prediction of 2.2 million deaths was a prediction of what would happen if nothing was done. Do you know what it predicts if we took suppression strategies (social distancing, closing schools, quarantine)? 160,000 (and that's assuming a very aggressive transmission rate and that we reacted fairly slowly). That's...not very far off of where we've actually landed. See, even if I accept the premise that it's not that bad (and 180,000 deaths in the US seems pretty bad to me), you cannot then go back and argue that we shouldn't have done anything. If a prediction says "Something very bad will happen unless you do something" and then you do something, you cannot turn around and go "The very bad thing didn't happen! The prediction lied! Why did I have to do that thing?"
Look, if you think that the government has overreached in their reaction to COVID, that's a perfectly valid opinion to have. I don't know a lot of details about the legal case MacArthur's church is involved in, but from what I know I think the government is probably violating their rights (even though I think the way they've reopened their church is foolish). Has this pandemic been politicized in many way and have politicians been hypocrites about it? Absolutely! None of that, however, means that you get to lie about the facts to make your point. I've seen way too many people throwing truth out the window and accepting nonsense because it fit their preferred narrative.
I'm part of a Facebook group for a podcast about Reformed theology that I've never listened to. Someone invited me to the group a long time ago and I've just stayed in it. I don't comment, but I pop in from time to time to browse the posts. The group has over 20,000 members, the bulk of whom are supposedly in my theological camp. Recently someone posted the above clip of MacArthur and asked what people thought of what he said. Here is a selection of the replies (click to expand).
Ultimately, that's why I'm writing this, because I'm deeply concerned with truth. I write as a Christian, a follower of the one whose very nature is truth. I follow a God who commands me to speak truth and not falsehood (Ex 20:16, Psa 119:160, Prov 12:22, John 4:24, John 7:18, John 8:44, 1 Cor 13:6, etc.). We live in a society where the very idea of truth is crumbling beneath us. It is under assault from both sides of the sociopolitical spectrum. It is deeply concerning to me that I often see Christians as those who perpetuate that problem, not work to solve it. James 1:19 commands us to "be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to become angry." We act like that doesn't apply to the internet. Maybe if it read "quick to research, slow to share, slow to insult" we'd understand it better.
Christians, we have to be better than this. We need to care more about the truth than we do about "our side". Whether it's from the pulpit or on a Facebook feed, our lives are a witness to the God of truth, and the world is watching.
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