You and I are made up of 30 trillion cells and about 38 trillion microbes. Most all of that colony works like a family. No small part of that is our immune system which recognizes the other viruses that like to eat us for lunch. Those might snack on your daughter if they notice her parents did not get her vaccinated. Public health and faith are like the social immune system. When disingenuous blather breaks it down the virus notice the opening for every kind of infectious disease.
Public health science is not entirely easy to understand and its experts often get in their own way. And there is some class divide at work. Their scientists are usually paid more than, say, a textile worker (but a hell of a lot less than a hospital executive or specialty physician). And sometimes they talk in more syllables than is entirely necessary. If those scientists imply this gives them certainty and that their pills will always work—it set up an epidemic of dumb.
Every type of discernment is a gift of God, which is why I have special disdain for anyone who splits faith from science, especially those who do it for cash or political gain. It weakens the primary defense against infectious disease—human trust in each other.
Nobody should presume trust any more than one should assume that all 38 trillion microbes are well-meaning. Trust is earned, not granted with the academic degree; earned on the streets eyeball-to-eyeball. A great public health director like Joshua Swift in Winston-Salem is hardly ever in his office; always out and about talking to as many of the 300,000 people in his county as physically possible. He lives Rule One: if the people don’t believe you care enough to know them, they won’t care what else you know.
The curbside public health is more important than the bedside manner of clinical medicine. Why? Because the window of opportunity for public health is before the disease is next door. And you have to experience yourself as being part of a “public.” If you love your daughter, you want everyone in her county vaccinated, too. It helps to have met your local public health officer and they seemed to care about you.
The focus on humility at public scale is why religion has always insisted on accumulating human experience over time and turning the hard-won learning into rules to protect the social body. At one point, priests and epidemiologists were the same team. Leviticus was the first text of precision public health, but 3,500 years later we are still learning new lessons together as evidence accumulates such as the lesson from COVID19: Don’t close the churches if you leave Walmart open. And don’t blame God if your members die from bad leadership that leaves them unvaccinated.
Nearly everyone I have met in the practice of public health or its supporting researchers is deeply Spirited. They are no more or less likely to go to church or synagogue than any other Republican, Democrat, lawyer or janitor. You just don’t do this kind of work if you are not filled with wonder about how those 68 trillion cells work together multiplied by 7 billion bodies.
Anyone vile enough to intentionally split science from human community is, technically, shitting in the water we all drink from. Jesus said that contaminated speech was worse than contaminated water or unclean hands (Matthew 15:11)
Vaccination is a lot more subtle. It can seem an expensive annoyance to have somebody tell you that your kid can’t go to school without a proof of vaccination. Especially in Skipton in 1875 when the local pastor leading the national Anti-Vaccination League claimed, “that more people who were vaccinated caught the disease than unvaccinated.”
Further, “Every last one of them (vaccines) is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery. Who am I as a government or anyone else to tell you what you should put in your body? Your body is a gift from God. What you put into your body is between your relationship with you and your God.”
Actually, this last quote was last week by an ordained Florida bloviate named Ladapo. Nobody in Yorkshire would be that stupid now as the last real resistance to vaccination in Skipton died out in 1961 when 4 people died of smallpox, including three-year old Denise.
Once somebody makes money dumping their intellectual waste into the public stream, it is hard to make them stop. I’m talking about Fox news, not Ladapo. But it may be possible to drain the swamp of grievance that feeds their business model.
The Thanksgiving holiday may be the most important public vaccination of our public spirit. I will participate in the next worldwide protest October 18th against the political open sewer. But that will rally our tribe, probably not convert anyone. For that we need Thanksgiving. The only protection against the vulnerabilities of grievance is gratitude, appreciation and wonder at the bounty of God’s provision for us all. And why once a year? We need a Thanksgiving every quarter until the ugly poison is out of system and the children can grow freely in safe places as God intends.
There is a lazy story about the inevitable clash between religious people and public health that will always come to a conflicted head around vaccination. James Fallows, the veteran reporter, writes about how the New York Times has been framing the story of the Harvard resistance the Trumpian blitzkrieg as a slow inevitable collapse. No named sources and no collapse; the storyline itself is a moral collapse. “It affects how people in a movement feel about themselves, and whether they think they are entirely on their own or part of something larger. If 50 people protest in a small-town park, is it just those few people, at that one site? Or are other groups of 50 to 5,000 standing up in other places, for the same reason, at the same time?” The same lazy doom-casting frames public health. Both are nearly as dangerous as the sad little Lapado fellow.
Let’s flip the script. If you walk over to your public health office and ask anyone you meet where they go to church, they’ll have one (probably Baptist). If you’re a pastor, you know you have members who work in public health or the sister field, social work. Why not do it near Why not organize all the houses of worship in town to honor them on the same weekend; Thanksgiving is perfect. Buy an ad in your local paper? And a billboard. Take turkeys or cake to the public health office.
Gratitude for the people who vaccinate us against fear is the best public vaccination of all.
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