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Continuing Trends: Vaccine Hesitancy, Court Battles, Burials, Holidays, and Coping with Uncertainty
 
Last week the Berkley Center hosted a webinar titled “COVID Vaccination Challenges: Ethical Imperatives and Local Realities” that linked the current U.S. experience (and underlying debates) to broader COVID-19 emergencies. The event video is now available and a written summary is forthcoming. Another interesting webinar last week was held by the Vatican COVID Commission to discuss the post-pandemic world. 
 
In last week’s blast we also covered the news that Black Americans are being vaccinated at slower rates, in part due to higher vaccine hesitancy in those communities, and how Black clergy members are addressing those challenges. We are now seeing reports that British black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) people are also less likely than white people to express a willingness to take the vaccine, with higher refusal rates among Muslim respondents. The reasons include concerns about safety, misinformation, and lack of trust. In other vaccine news, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced Friday that it has donated $20 million to UNICEF as part of the organization's work with the United Nations-backed COVAX initiative, which this week sent its long-awaited first deliveries to Ghana and Ivory Coast. The initiative's goal is to deliver 2 billion shots this year to the world's most vulnerable people in low- and middle-income countries.
 
Court battles continue over COVID restrictions that affect religious gatherings. GraceLife Church in Edmonton, Canada, after initially shifting to livestream for the first few months of pandemic, resumed in-person worship over the summer. Their pastor is now being held in police custody after refusing the conditions of his bail - that he stop holding services that defy COVID-19 regulations. In the United States, the Supreme Court recently ruled to partially lift restrictions on religious services in California. In a concurring opinion Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote “the state has concluded, for example, that singing indoors poses a heightened risk of transmitting COVID-19. I see no basis in this record for overriding that aspect of the state public health framework. At the same time, the state’s present determination — that the maximum number of adherents who can safely worship in the most cavernous cathedral is zero — appears to reflect not expertise or discretion, but instead insufficient appreciation or consideration of the interests at stake.”
 
Friday, February 26 was Makha Bucha Day, an important Buddhist festival. In Thailand, more than 200,000 Buddhist devotees gathered via Zoom to attend an annual prayer and lantern ritual. Others did gather in person at temples around the country, but under strict COVID-19 safety measures. The Jewish holiday of Purim was also celebrated this past Friday. Last year in Europe and North America, Purim was celebrated before people were fully aware how the virus would spread, but as cases were already occurring. The Jewish community in Stamford Hill in north London was particularly hard hit with hospitalizations and deaths in the weeks that followed last year’s Purim celebrations, which led to pleas from top rabbis in the country for extra caution this year. Striking photos from Religion News Service show children in Israel dressed in COVID-themed costumes for Purim, including one as a gravedigger. This comes after Israel has made the news for tensions with ultra-Orthodox communities who have refused to comply with COVID regulations and lockdowns, particularly around gathering for funerals. In Kenya, the pandemic has also reshaped the funeral industry in interesting ways. Time will tell whether these shifts reflect larger cultural and societal shifts around religious or traditional funeral practices and the positives and negatives of those shifts.
 
Finally, Shiri Noy, assistant professor of anthropology and sociology at Denison University, is undertaking a project to examine how religious and secular Americans view kindness in the context of COVID-19, particularly how science and faith are mobilized as coping mechanisms with uncertainty.