Orthodox Reflections

Vaccine passports are in development and trials around the world. Countries such as Japan, Denmark, and China have signaled firm intentions to issue them. Israel already has one. The plans of the US, UK and others remain more murky, and could leave much to the private sector for enforcement. One thing is certain, their widespread adoption will mean the end of our civilization. This is not hyperbole. Vaccine passports usher in a world of first and second-class citizens. Those who prove their vaccinated status will have access to everything we used to take for granted: recreation, shopping, concerts, travel, employment... Those without proof of the vaccine can look forward to life as outcasts from polite society.

Israel has the highest percentage of vaccinated population in the world (over 60%) and the most advanced vaccine passport program called “green pass.” The Israeli experiment is being closely watched around the globe. Edward Argar, Health Minister for the UK, specifically cited Israel’s green pass system as a model for how his country could return to “near-normality.” A vaccine passport in the UK could cover everything from going to the pub to shopping to concerts.

The situation developing in Israel bears watching, because as one Israeli activist warned, “Whatever happens here will happen everywhere.” So far, the situation confirms the worst fears of vaccine passport opponents: “In Israel … we’re hearing from activists that it’s a two-tiered society and that basically, activists are ostracized and surveilled continually. It is the end of civil society, and they are trying to roll it out around the world.” 

While safety is always touted for this scheme, it is frequently admitted in public that the goal is to coerce the hesitant to get the vaccines. In his March 2021 Tweet, law professor, political commentator and former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Harry Litman, was direct about this intent of vaccine passports:

“Vaccine passports are a good idea. Among other things, it will single out the still large contingent of people who refuse vaccines, who will be foreclosed from doing a lot of things their peers can do. That should help break the resistance down.”

Those wishing to push the vaccine and the vaccine passports are getting desperate. Covid is seasonal and endemic. Heading into the Summer months, cases are way down across the US and the world. Tens of millions of Americans have already had the virus, thus becoming immune. Major states such as Texas have ended their Covid restrictions. Despite dire warnings of impending doom, cases are dropping along with hospital admissions and deaths. Inexplicably for the public health “experts,” heavy lockdown states are moving in the opposite direction.

If life returns to normal, on its own and without the vaccine or the passports, then the elite’s window of opportunity to restructure our lives ends. Watch the interview below with a doctor as she admits that we need the promise of freedom as the “carrot” to encourage vaccinations (and by extension, vaccine passports):

But, wait – why all the coercion? If the vaccines make sense, why do people need to be cajoled into getting vaccinated by a “carrot” of restored freedom?

The Necessity of Vaccine Coercion

The Covid vaccines are all experimental. They lack long-term clinical trials to assess safety, and they include experimental technology never before used in humans. The vaccines are unapproved and offered only under emergency use authorization. All have reported significant side effects. While this fact has not been widely reported, all the vaccines are not the same in terms of technology used and their associated risks. Ignorance leads even medical providers to largely treat the various vaccines as interchangeable. The Astra Zeneca vaccine, not approved for use in the United States, was stopped in more than twenty countries over concerns it was causing blood clotting disorders that could lead to death. In countries such as Germany, it is now suspended for use by those under 55 or 60.

So much information is lacking about the vaccines, especially concerning long-term effects, that one UK doctor warned, “It is disingenuous to give the public the impression that there are no potential long term sequelae, no more than is the dearth of information that makes the ethical requirement of informed consent a mockery given the relentless and coercive push of the mass immunisation programme.”

The vaccines available in the US and Canada use aborted fetal cells, in one way or another, and that raises ethical concerns, particularly among Christians.

Also, Covid vaccines don’t have the same goal the public normally associates with vaccines – preventing you from getting sick. Rather, Covid vaccines are only designed to lessen symptoms when the inoculated person gets infected. The vaccines might prevent people from getting infected and they might prevent the spread of the virus from person to person – but we just don’t know for sure. Therefore, given the risks and uncertain rewards, the vaccines only potentially make sense for a very small portion of the population.

Dr. Michael Yeadon, Pfizer’s former Vice President and Chief Scientist for Allergy & Respiratory, spent 32 years in the industry leading new medicines research and retired from the pharmaceutical giant with “the most senior research position” in his field. Never heard of him? Were his views in-line with the public health establishment and pharma companies, you would see him everywhere dispensing his wisdom. Given his resume, he might even have rivaled St. Fauci for airtime. Since he has dissented from the official narrative, YouTube and other tech giants routinely scrub any mention of him from their platforms. Dr. Yeadon is a heretic who has publicly rejected the ongoing mass vaccination campaign:

In the U.K., it’s abundantly clear that the authorities are bent on a course which will result in administering ‘vaccines’ to as many of the population as they can. This is madness, because even if these agents were legitimate, protection is needed only by those at notably elevated risk of death from the virus. In those people, there might even be an argument that the risks are worth bearing. And there definitely are risks which are what I call ‘mechanistic’: inbuilt in the way they work.

 

“But all the other people, those in good health and younger than 60 years, perhaps a little older, they don’t perish from the virus. In this large group, it’s wholly unethical to administer something novel and for which the potential for unwanted effects after a few months is completely uncharacterized.

 

“There is no medical rationale for it. Knowing as I do that the design of these ‘vaccines’ results, in the expression in the bodies of recipients, expression of the spike protein, which has adverse biological effects of its own which, in some people, are harmful (initiating blood coagulation and activating the immune ‘complement system’), I’m determined to point out that those not at risk from this virus should not be exposed to the risk of unwanted effects from these agents.”

Despite all the censorship, people have gotten the message from experts like Dr. Yeadon. Unless you are at high-risk of death from the virus, you should stay away. This puts vaccine advocates in a quandary – they simply can’t make a logical argument that will persuade the majority of people. So coercion becomes a necessity, especially when you want people to risk giving their children an experimental treatment with unknown long-term effects.

Thus, the powers-that-be are creating a dystopian hellscape in which a family is thrown off a plane because a two-year-old is eating without a mask, cops carry rifles onto beaches to threaten families getting some sun, children wear dirty masks continuously for hours in barely functioning schools, and even the right to buy food in a shop is under threat.

You wouldn’t need to do all these things if the vaccines made sense for people in the face of the new Black Death.

Which makes us wonder, is all this just about vaccines?

Digital Control

Covid has given the worldwide elite access to unprecedented power, money, and the opportunity to totally remake our society. They intend to take full advantage of the situation.

A vaccine passport, as bad you might think it is, can become so much worse. Naomi Wolf is a  Democrat, tech CEO, and former Clinton advisor. She has been very outspoken about the potential for vaccine passports to become an all-encompassing Chinese-style social credit system:

It is so much more than a vaccine pass. I can’t stress this enough. It has the power to turn off your life. Or turn on your life. To let you engage in civil society or be marginalized. It’s catastrophic. It cannot be allowed to continue.

 

…it can be merged with your PayPal account, with your digital currency. Microsoft is already talking about merging it with payment plans. Your networks can be sucked up. It geo locates you everywhere you go. Your credit history can be included. All of your medical history can be included.

The slogan could easily be, “Make America China!”

There is so much money and power at stake, that the ruling elite is already planning for a permanent pandemic:

In January, a bipartisan commission released a dramatic 44-page report calling for an “Apollo Program for Biodefense,” explicitly comparing the proposal to the efforts that first landed humans on the moon. The commission laid the groundwork for its report in 2015, when it published a National Blueprint for Biodefense.

 

Now, seizing the COVID-19 moment, the commission is making the case for a vastly expanded biodefense budget — amounting to billions of biodefense dollars annually — to implement its conveniently ready-to-go blueprint.

 

Dovetailing with the Biodefense Commission’s report, the media are telling the public to “start planning for a permanent pandemic.” For example, deploying the loaded language so favored by propagandists, German-American writer Andreas Kluth warned Americans on March 24 (in Bloomberg) of a “global arms race” pitting “coronavirus mutations … against vaccinations,” suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 could “become our permanent enemy, like the flu but worse.”

 

A former writer for The Economist and a self-styled interpreter of historical successes and failures, Kluth conjures up a foe — a mutating virus too “protean and elusive” to ever be conquered — that undoubtedly hits the biodefense wonks’ sweet spot. Far from rejecting pandemic hyperbole as “zany” or “absurd,” Kluth instead cheerlessly advises Americans to brace for “endless cycles of outbreaks and remissions, social restrictions and relaxations, lockdowns and reopenings.”

 

Kluth also assures residents of the U.S. and other wealthy nations that vaccination “a couple of times a year” will be part of the “new normal.”

Unlimited budgets. New vaccines every year for a captive population. Pharma companies shielded from any legal liability. Total and complete digital control of the population. Welcome to the opportunity to “Build Back Better” as part of The Great Reset. What’s not to love?

And who can possibly oppose this?

The Orthodox Church Opposes Vaccine Coercion and Digital Tracking

Since the beginning of the “crisis”, the hierarchies of practically all the Orthodox Christian jurisdictions in America have been enthusiastically compliant with even the most extreme government mandates. Not content to merely enforce church closures, masks, social distancing, and liturgical innovations – most Orthodox bishops actively endorsed these unscientific, soul and economy-crushing measures. The bishops ignored the victims, oppressed their own priests, gave too many people the impression that Divine Services are not essential to life, embraced even the most tyrannical measures, often hypocritically failed to practice their own mandates, and throughout the “crisis” refused to exhibit Apostolic leadership. The record was so dire that we openly feared that bishops might require vaccine passports to even attend Church.

Given that track record, it was quite heartening to read the directive from Archbishop Mark of Philadelphia and Eastern America (Orthodox Church in America) that vaccination cannot become a prerequisite for participation in Church life. His Eminence even prohibited anyone from being asked about their status:

The past year has truly been a rollercoaster ride for all of us and we need to be mindful and considerate of those suffering from isolation, fear, anxiety, depression, substance abuse and loneliness, as well as those who have lost loved ones. Additionally, divisions occurred as people lost the ability to discuss differing opinions on a variety of matters. Hopefully, we are encouraged by the drastic decrease in the number of hospitalizations and deaths attributed to COVID 19 since mid-January, even before significant numbers were administered the experimental COVID 19.

 

As your Bishop, I insist each of you respect the conscience and privacy of your brothers and sisters in Christ. No one is to be asked if he or she has or has not received the injections. No one is to be denied full participation in the Divine Services or parish life regardless of his or her decision. No one should be judged or criticized one way or the other.

There is much good in that statement. It is the closest to an endorsement of voluntary, informed vaccine consent that we have seen from a hierarch in the US. The statement also acknowledges that the Covid mitigation measures actually caused extreme suffering. This was quite welcome, as so many previous hierarchical statements focused only on the effects of the virus, and not the millions of victims of quarantining perfectly healthy individuals. The statement also noted the very important fact that Covid hospitalizations and deaths were already declining before vaccination became widespread. Further, the statement makes clear that there is a diversity of opinion on matters pertaining to the virus, responses, and the vaccines. Keep your judgment to yourself. That is a basis for restoring unity among the brethren that has been badly damaged. In addition, it made clear that proof of vaccination is not a requirement for attending Divine Services. Finally, the Archbishop clearly acknowledged that the vaccines are experimental.

Axios! May God grant His Eminence many years to rightly divide the word of truth.

But it did not go nearly far enough, so there is much work yet to do. First and foremost, this is one Orthodox bishop out of over 50 in the United States and Canada. Where are his brothers? When will the assembly of bishops be offering a joint statement? One bishop is a great start, but that is all it is.

Further, the Archbishop’s remarks only pertain to freedom in the Church, and not to society at large. The Orthodox Church has the obligation to defend the dignity of God’s image in man throughout the entire world. The Russian Church has taken much more forceful, inspiring stands on vaccine freedom and digital control. We need our own American bishops to be equally strong.

Here is part of the Russian Church’s endorsement of vaccine freedom:

It is well known that, along with the risk of infectious diseases, there is also a risk of serious complications — even death — as a result of prophylactic vaccination. In such a situation, it is the patient himself who should make the choice. In the case of a child, the parents should make their choice in each particular case, taking into account the advice and recommendations of specialists, as well as other information. No one has the right to make this choice for them, even if guided by the child’s own well-informed understanding.

The Russian Church has rejected any form of vaccine coercion as being incompatible with the Christian Faith. Further, His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, forcefully rejected the use of digital technology to control and silence citizens:

“Nothing like this could have happened in the past. Human thought, technical civilization today have reached a level where, by implementing digital technologies, it is possible to ensure total control over the human person. Not just observing a person, but managing human behaviour.”

 

He reminded that the book of Apocalypse speaks of total control over the person, accompanied by the coming of the antichrist.

 

“These words are not used there, but it is quite clear from the content that we are talking about the ability to totally control human behaviour,” said the Primate of the ROC. “It says that the seal of the antichrist will be placed on a person’s forehead, and without this seal, it will be impossible to buy, sell or participate in any social relations – a person will be doomed.”

 

According to him, the devil is not in the form of a villain, but in the form of an angel of light (see 2 Cor. 11:14), and the coming into the world of the antichrist will be accompanied by the appearance of an amazing man who, by his intellectual power and influence will be able to bring humanity out of the crises in which it has fallen. This person will suggest that in order for all crime to leave our lives, let us be guided by the fact that each person has a key to everything he/she needs. For example, it can be a card – you apply it and get access to food, education, and if you do not have this card, then everything is lost.”

 

The head of the ROC explained that he cited the example of the Apocalypse and the Antichrist, “to convince those people who may not have thought about it yet, that the maximum development of total control over man means slavery, and everything will depend on who will be the master of these slaves.”

 

“That is why the Church is categorically against the use of digital technologies in ensuring total control over the human person,” said Patriarch Kirill.

 

Earlier, the Synod of ROC declared that the use of digital identifiers and wide collection of personal data has to be controlled by the society and the Church as a public institution.

The primate of the largest, and one of the most conservative, Orthodox Churches in the world is worried about technology enslaving humankind and ushering in the rule of the Antichrist. Patriarch Kirill is not alone in his concerns, as other holy Orthodox bishops and monks have made similar warnings. As noted, secular commentators have also openly worried that this will end our civilization as we know it. So while this may not be the Apocalypse or the Rise of the Antichrist, it is sufficiently frightening on its own. 

We need the Orthodox hierarchy in America to fully join this fight. Archbishop Mark’s proclamation is too limited, only one voice, and doesn’t change the fact that much of American Orthodoxy is actually helping the wrong side in this fight.

The American Orthodox Jurisdictions Feed the Hysteria

It is essential for the elite to keep up the pressure to vaccinate. The Orthodox Church in the US and Canada has helped in this effort by feeding into the general sense of hysteria through our embrace and promotion of Covid restrictions and vaccinations. The Orthodox Theological Society recently published a paper cheerleading for the vaccines. The original paper and our response is in this article.

Many parishes are still rigidly enforcing social distancing, masks, no coffee hours, no kissing the cross / icons / priests’ hands, and still canceling catechism classes. Even when the surrounding communities have reopened schools and are largely “normal,” many parishes are still pretending we are in the middle of the Black Death. Orthodox parishes are even embracing extreme measures for events when no government mandate is even involved. Take these instructions for an Orthodox Summer camp:

ALL IN campers, staff and clergy must provide a Negative COVID Test Result within 72 hours upon arrival to St. Stephen’s Summer Camp.
After getting tested, ALL IN campers and staff must Quarantine until day of travel.
Since ALL IN campers and staff will be traveling by land, they will need to stay with their traveling bubble. Do not interact with anyone outside that bubble, and do not pick anyone up on your way.

 

Mask
We are creating a safe bubble that does not require everyone to wear masks at all times. There will be times when we cannot maintain this bubble, and masks must be worn. We ask ALL IN campers and staff to bring 12 masks.

Could you guess that those instructions were sent to parents and teens in Florida, of all places?  No one working on the staff or attending this camp will have less than a 99.9% chance of surviving Covid. Many will have already had it, and been totally asymptomatic. The Covid tests, of course, have a notoriously high false positive rate. All this is just ignored. Given instructions like that, no wonder so many Orthodox Christians are still hysterical over Covid. Hysterical people are exactly the ones most open to vaccines and vaccine passports. If ever there was a time for the Church to teach her members to calmly look at the facts, it is now.

One last example is below. This was a message from a parish priest on behalf of His Eminence Archbishop Alexander of the Diocese of the South (OCA):

Archbishop Alexander has given his blessing for us to cease Covid precautions including the mask requirement on Sunday, May 30 provided we don’t see a large spike in cases and vaccines continue to to be available. We are giving advanced notice so everyone who wants to get vaccinated has time to schedule both shots.

That is great, but not enough. Masks and other reinforcements of Covid hysteria are going away in the DOS, but notice that the announcement delays dropping them to reinforce the importance of the vaccines? No mention of their “experimental” nature here.

With political leaders like Florida Governor DeSantis taking a firm stand on Covid hysteria and vaccine passports, one might wonder if the Church’s position really matters? Truth be told, it mattes most of all.

Why Orthodox Church Opposition Matters

Covid has spawned a new religion. In an interview, Dr. Wolf referred to a kind of “mantra of sanctity being woven around the mere act of vaccination… I am not anti-vaccine, but I am certainly anti going back to the Middle Ages and leaving the Enlightenment behind and having a secular priesthood that says what we are and are not allowed to question.”

The Church of Covid has the mask for its baptismal cross and the vaccine for its holy communion. It has its own priesthood of “experts” and its own orthodoxy from which you dare not deviate. We are not in a scientific debate. If we were, then we would have won it already. Rather, this has become a fight against a new religion, a type of grand heresy foisted upon us by the ruling elite. At its core is the fear of death, and the belief that man through his actions can save himself.

You can’t fight a religion like this through reason and logic. Three states so far have banned vaccine passports. As welcome as that is, those are holding actions only. This is a spiritual battle and it will not be won by earthly means. The time is now for the Orthodox Church to take its rightful place in the fight. Especially since the Roman Catholic Church is “all in” on the globalist agenda.

The Church Can’t Just Wait Out the “Crisis”

There is going to be an element of the Church that will want to lay low and avoid problems. Among the Faithful, clergy, and bishops are Christians who just want to go along and get along: Wear the mask, social distance, and thank God we are not facing “real” persecution. If police closing your church is not “real” persecution, then it would be interesting to see a definition of it. If you are honest with yourself, you will understand that the Church closures and regulations are not going anywhere. In some areas, they have gotten worse.

On Good Friday and Western Easter Sunday, multiple churches were visited by police, services were closed, and the faithful were harassed. In one example in the UK, police just walked into the altar of a Polish Church and announced the service was closed. Too many people were present, so everyone was sent home under threat of fines or arrest.

The UK is the cradle of our liberties. What happens in one nation, especially one with a related legal system to our own, is going to spread globally. You are not going to wait this out by complying, and if you try it will only encourage the evil to spread.

Resistance is Still Possible

Let us close with the following video. A protestant, Polish pastor in Canada threw the police out of his church on Easter. He has become a viral sensation. Did he handle this situation perfectly? No, but being brave actually worked and kept his church open. Several points to consider:

• He successfully resisted an unlawful exercise in authoritarianism. Something most of our own clergy have declined to even attempt. The police knew they were wrong, and confronted by resistance, they backed down.
• His resistance has inspired others to stand firm and has proven to people that Christian worship is essential and worth fighting for.
• By implication, he makes meek Orthodox compliance with these same oppressive mandates look even worse than it did.

This Polish man is not part of the true Church. He grew up under communism. He is Canadian, a group not known for their rebelliousness. Yet he stood up for the freedom of religion and against the hysterical dictates of an authoritarian regime. Isn’t it time we American Orthodox did the same?

Nicholas – member of the  Western Rite Vicariate, a part of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese in America, a COVID refugee from the Greek Archdiocese