Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Friday, October 01, 2021

This is your brain on religion

A Providence TV news reporter tells us the sad story of health care workers who are losing their jobs because they refuse the Covid-19 vaccine. I'll quote two of them.


"It goes against all of my religious beliefs to the core of my existence."

 

"I have not infected one patient that I know of. Who knows what [the vaccine] is going to do [to our bodies] years from now. I have my own God-given antibodies against this virus." (She says she has been infected and recovered.)

The first speaker is a phlebotomist. The second speaker is a registered nurse who works in a hospital. There is no major religious denomination -- Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, you name it -- that has a prohibition against vaccination. There are a few Christian Scientists and other small sects who might, but obviously nobody who adheres to one of them is working as a registered nurse or a phlebotomist. 

As a hospital nurse, speaker #2 presumably routinely administers antibiotics and other medications, which as far as I know were not provided miraculously by God. While it's nice for her to think that she hasn't infected any patients, by her own admission she doesn't actually know that. And as someone whose professional education includes the basics of immunology, she knows or certainly ought to know that the only long-term effect of a vaccine is to cause your body to generate antibodies to a pathogen. She also knows that the reason she doesn't treat people for smallpox, polio, or many other diseases that once accounted for the majority of hospital patients is that vaccines have large eliminated them. 


So I can only conclude that the religion these people are speaking of is the worship of Donald J. Trump. Or maybe they're just nuts.

 

4 comments:

Don Quixote said...

Or perhaps they may worship the manufactured image of a small, brown Jewish man from 2,000 years ago who never wrote down a single thing he said, which is also nuts. Call out what you want, but it isn’t faith— it’s fear.

Cervantes said...

Well, JC never said anything against vaccination . . .

Don Quixote said...

Or, as you’ve pointed out frequently, abortion. We don’t know what the hell he said. And of course, we know that his name was not JC. That came from Saul/Paul. Basically, a shit ton of people in this world are nuts because they believe bullshit.

mojrim said...

No, it's worship of Trump as the reborn icon of...whatever. No religion I'm aware of "medicine is bad" on its dogma page. This isn't about faith, but secular, political, public ablution; hair shirts for moderns.

This is the reductio of identity politics.