Religious Resistance against vaccination

In the United States we can see a great tendency not to go for vaccination because according to lots of Christian citizens God would protect them.

Millions of white evangelical adults in the U.S. do not intend to get vaccinated against Covid-19. Tenets of faith and mistrust of science play a role; so does politics. Also in Calvinistic Holland we can find lots of people who do not want to be vaccinated.

Some people also come with the most absurd stories, like the government placing a chip in people or having vaccinations with “aborted cell tissue.” Others claim to have received a divine message that God was the ultimate healer and deliverer

“The vaccine is not the saviour.”

Several religious people find they do not need the vaccine because God designed the body to heal itself, if given the right nutrients. They are also convinced that it shall be the Will of God to decide who becomes ill or not and if they shall survive this pandemic.

Across white evangelical America, reasons not to get vaccinated have spread as quickly as the virus that public health officials are hoping to overcome through herd immunity.

There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do so, according to the Pew Research Center.

“If we can’t get a significant number of white evangelicals to come around on this, the pandemic is going to last much longer than it needs to,”

said Jamie Aten, founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois.

Those who refuse to have a jab forget that they are putting the lives of others in danger, the same as they are putting people at risk by ignoring the request not to have a public meeting with too many people. Several church groups can still be found to have public church services, with people coming very close to each other and by singing loud.

In the States

“The sheer size of the community poses a major problem for the country’s ability to recover from a pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of half a million Americans,”

the Times warned.

“And evangelical ideas and instincts have a way of spreading, even internationally.”

Though not all pastors advice their flock to stay away from vaccination.

Many high-profile conservative pastors and institutional leaders have endorsed the vaccines. Franklin Graham told his 9.6 million Facebook followers that Jesus would advocate for vaccination. Pastor Robert Jeffress commended it from an anti-abortion perspective on Fox News.

“We talk about life inside the womb being a gift from God. Well, life outside the womb is a gift from God, too.”

The president of the Southern Baptist Convention, J.D. Greear, tweeted a photo of himself receiving a shot.

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According to Pew Most White Evangelicals Don’t Think COVID-19 is a Medical Crisis