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Renowned Religious Leaders Support COVID-19 Vaccines but Acrimonious Debates Persist
Vaccination continues as the issue dominating news and policy concerns with positive evidence that most religious leaders support the vaccine. Debates, however, continue in various forms that range from debates on exemptions and mandatory vaccination to how to handle conspiracy theories and misinformation.
In San Jose, California, workers are
requesting religious exemptions to avoid the vaccine. Carolina Camarena, spokeswoman for the city of San Jose, said 302 exemptions for the vaccination have been approved. In Santa Clara County, California, which includes the city of San Jose, a total of 965 religious exemptions were requested. Litigation and negative press make it difficult for employers to deny religious exemptions for the vaccine. In Colorado,
Leilani Lutali, who has stage 5 kidney disease, chose not to get a life-saving kidney transplant surgery because the COVID-19 vaccine was required for the surgery. Lutali cited her religious beliefs as the reason for not getting the vaccine. “As a Christian, I can’t support anything that has to do with abortion of babies,” she said. However,
Pope Francis, the
Dalai Lama, and prominent
Orthodox Jewish rabbis have all made explicit that they encourage vaccination.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Azza Karam, the first woman and Muslim secretary-general of Religions for Peace, spoke about her experience taking over that role and immediately facing a pandemic and the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan. She said her personal history of growing up in a conservative Egyptian Muslim family helped her work harder and made her more sensitive to the struggles of people from different races, religions, and social classes. In terms of vaccine hesitancy, Karam emphasized that the majority of religious people, across many different religions, support vaccines and the scientific evidence backing them up. “There’s a great deal of thought that taking vaccines is actually almost a religious obligation,” she said.
In Salt Lake City, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Russell M. Nelson thanked community members for complying with COVID-19 protocols in a virtual general conference on Saturday, October 2. The conference was held in a 21,000 seat meeting hall, but only several hundred members attended. The members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, who sang for the first time since 2019, were all vaccinated and tested before the conference. Leaders also wore masks when seated. A survey from Public Religion Research Institute showed that 65% of Latter-day Saints are now vaccine acceptors. Nelson said he urged people in his congregation to get vaccinated, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
Many large religious gatherings have been cancelled or downsized across the world, often to tensions and controversy, but the tempo is picking up. Special and generally meaningful precautions are still part of many. This was true for the Magal in Senegal, where large numbers traveled to Touba, a holy city, for annual celebrations of the Sufi brotherhood of the Mourides. While large crowds gathered at the Great Mosque of Touba, masks were required to enter the mosque and hand sanitizer was distributed. “People say to themselves that the pandemic is behind us, with this drop in contamination,” said member of the organizing committee Pape Ndiaye. “We pray that this will be the case, but we must continue to keep our masks.”
On the other side of the debate, Grattan Brown’s commentary for the National Catholic Register argues that the medical world has become too reliant on technology for issues such as COVID-19, abortion, and gender-affirming surgery. These issues, he said, need “human responses.” Brown said religious traditions should be allowed in every aspect of life including the running of a business or medical practice. Therefore, he concludes that forcing doctors and nurses to participate in medical procedures that go against their beliefs goes against religious freedom. Brown cites the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as an argument for allowing religious beliefs to influence the medical field and medical procedures.
