The Way We Chose

Last Tuesday afternoon, I received my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. My appointment was in Brandon, and I was surprised by how easy the whole process was. About a week before my appointment, I logged on to the booking website, and all of five minutes later I had my appointment set. Then when I got there, even though I ended up being a few minutes late because I parked in completely the wrong place - not the fault of the site which was clearly marked, but instead force of habit always has me parking on the West side of the Keystone Centre instead of the East - I was welcomed in, signed in, received my dosage, was let to rest, and then was out again to continue on with the rest of my day, all in a half-hour. I have had horsefly bites worse than the shot itself, and the side effects I experienced were handily dealt with by a single Tylenol.

I am glad I got the vaccine. Having the congenital heart defect that I do means that I have always been considered in the “high risk” category for the disease, with some estimates putting the mortality rate as high as 10-14%. That is just shy of the chances of rolling doubles while defending in Risk. Like others, I have talked to in this high-risk group, that this disease could in all likelihood be “it” - the thing that gets us - has been a constant hum, an ongoing whine, a low-grade stressor in the background of our lives the entire time over the past year. At first much worse than it is now, as with all ongoing noises, you do learn to tune it out in order to go about your life, but its there all the same.

But then, something happened to make that low-grade whine jump a couple of decibels of intensity. Recently, studies have begun to surface making hard to dispute cases claiming the same thing, unless vaccination numbers go up significantly, the chances are that this pandemic we find ourselves in will, in all likelihood, turn into something much more insidious; an endemic. Think the yearly flu, but along with all the other various strains of viruses we encounter, there would also be a variant of Covid, and with this addition would come added to the yearly flu season that much higher mortality rate for people like me.

The main reason that vaccines work to eradicate diseases as effectively as they do is that they hamper the spread of the pathogen they are developed for. They do this either by keeping the person vaccinated from getting the illness in the first place or by rendering the illness so ineffective that the time it has to spread in its infection cycle drops drastically. Multiply this effect across an entire population and the virus simply has nowhere to go, and eventually with nowhere to go, the pandemic simply peters out. This is what happened to polio and to smallpox, diseases that one decade were both among the top killers worldwide, and the next were no more due to vaccination campaigns.

But for that to happen requires that most people in a population need to get immunized. Most studies I can find peg the percentage where this effect takes hold as above 70%. At 70% is when this pandemic ends and simply becomes a bad memory and things can go finally get back to whatever normal is. But if we don’t reach that 70%, then the virus continues to spread, continues to thrive, continues to kill people like me, and what’s more, is that with every passing day the chances of it mutating into something worse, something deadlier, something immune to the current vaccine that I and millions of other high-risk individuals have, go up.

As of when I am writing this, the number of people immunized in Southern Health, the region I live in, is in the ballpark of 38% and slowing.

Being a pastor, I spend a lot of time thinking of how we should think of the goings-on in our lives in the light of our faith. I know that many have claimed that as Christians, we should put our trust in God instead of medicine for Jesus is the great physician. I have never found that argument convincing. For starters, if that were true it is kind of odd that one of the Apostles, Luke, was himself a physician (Colossians 4:14). More than that. there are examples in the Bible of using substances to treat ailments, like 1 Timothy 5:23 where Paul tells Timothy who is suffering from stomach ailments to take a little wine for it, not an uncommon treatment for a lot of ailments at that time. More than that though, It would be hard to make a case that Christians are not to interest themselves in the healing of others. We think of the gifts of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12, of which healing is one, all too often purely in mystical terms, but the Holy Spirit works in what we think of as the natural world as well. After all, the gifts of both knowledge and wisdom are on that same list too.

But for me, the strongest case for if Christians should take the vaccine is not based on asking if using medicine is right, but is instead - and here I admit I am biased - more about simply answering the call of our Lord to care for others. In Philippians 2:4 we read “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” Getting the vaccine may be for many of us inconvenient. Getting the vaccine may seem for many of us to be unnecessary because either cases are low in the area we live in or because you are not in a high-risk category yourself. But I can tell you on behalf of those of us who are in that high-risk group, this is what we need you to do. Because if things are allowed to pass to an endemic, this is what life will become for us; constantly dealing with that low-grade whine in the back of our minds that this coming flu season could very likely be “it.”

So I encourage all of you who can, get the vaccine yourself even If you don’t think you need it personally. I guarantee you that there are people in your life, like me, who would benefit from your getting it. People like me for whom this past year has been a time of constantly having to choose not to think about the, “what if” every time we step out of the house. You can help with this. You can help make things better. All you need to do is click here, and take a half-hour out of your day. And you know what? Ill even sweeten the pot for you. I will buy a Hampton Cafe ice cream treat for the first five people who message me they have gotten the shot!

I can tell you already that even if you don’t care one way or the other about the vaccine yourself if you get it, I and many other high-risk individuals will breathe easier that you did.