Hi Sara,
You have gotten really good answers from others here.
I understand and appreciate the views of those who oppose certain mandates (vaccine requirements, masks, and especially shutting down churches and other assemblies) from a freedom standpoint. Many are more concerned about the future of their children and grandchildren.
Many of us, not so much in this forum but elsewhere, are very much in favor of encouraging people to get the vaccine but not convinced that some mandates are appropriate.
Receiving the vaccine doesn’t make you contagious with COVID because you aren’t getting the virus, you are getting mRNA that stimulates your body to make a protein that triggers a similar immune response as the virus and makes antibodies that protect against the virus.
If you are vaccinated you have some protection against getting a COVID infection. An infection happens when a virus enters your body and begins to multiply quicker than the body can fight it off. A vaccine helps your body kill off the virus before it can infect you (multiply enough to start overwhelming your immune system). If it doesn’t develop into an infection, then you wouldn’t be contagious. The vaccine will help your body fight off the virus before it can infect you something like 50-80% of the time.
If the antibodies you developed from the vaccine are not enough to fight off the virus and it multiplies into an infection in your body, then you will be as contagious to others as an infected person who wasn’t vaccinated. But since you have antibodies, you will probably have a less severe infection and be able to fight the infection more quickly. It is actually only a small number of people with breakthrough infections who get sick enough to be hospitalized. The numbers keep getting updated, but in April a study showed unvaccinated people were 29 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID then vaccinated people who got a breakthrough infection, because breakthrough infections tend to be less severe since your body is better equipped with antibodies already to fight them. Similarly, people who have already had a COVID infection tend to have less severe symptoms if they get it again, though this isn’t always the case. That’s why even people who have already been sick with COVID should still get vaccinated because natural immunity + a vaccination is the best protection against reinfection. A good friend of mine died on Saturday from a second COVID infection. She lived in another country and was unable to get a vaccine because she was under 40.
There was a study done in Israel on vaccinations, prior infections, and the Delta variant. They found that compared to a single vaccine shot, natural immunity was better protection against reinfection against Delta. But two vaccine shots or a prior infection and a vaccine shot were better than natural immunity alone.
Getting COVID is bad, even if you don’t die. Thirty percent of people even those with mild cases report lingering symptoms for months after an infection, some of them pretty debilitating. Some people who are hospitalized and don’t die end up with long term or lifelong organ damage. Even a short hospitalization with a full recovery can leave a person with thousands of dollars in medical bills. The overall effect of so many people being in the hospital with COVID is that we are all going to pay more for health insurance to cover costs. My premiums went up another 9% this year. Being vaccinated makes it 1) less likely that the virus will be able to infect you and 2) makes it less likely that you will need to be hospitalized or have a serious infection that leaves you with long term side effects.
People are required to do a lot of things to protect public safety. It is weird that they have picked this hill to die on. The religious exemptions based on fetal cell line use are hypocritical because lots of common medicines like Tylenol and Tums used fetal cell lines in their development and they never had a problem with those things.
Besides all the good it can do for your family and the rest of society (especially children – in the news today was a 10-year-old who died from COVID), here’s another good reason to get vaccinated for your own benefit (it’s been all over in the news yesterday and today):
And pregnant women or women hoping to be pregnant (!):
I’m so sorry to hear about your friend. Let us look to things unseen that are eternal. Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to me and explain. The long term effects are something I hadn’t thought about and I’m appreciative that you pointed that out to me. I thank God for these responses.
Also, there have been some Christian medical professionals and scientists who have put together some really good presentations of accurate information on this website:
The FAQ page deals with a lot of the common concerns that people raise based on things they’ve heard or read that might not be accurate.
Christy,
I wanted to ask you as well what you would communicate to someone who thinks that since there have been lawsuits against Pfizer and how things like the Tuskegee Study have been found years later that the people behind all this are evil and against us. I’ve heard from these individuals that God doesn’t want us to take part in evil and I’ve had a hard time dealing with that.
Thank you so much for sharing with me! This has been helpful. Would you point me in the direction of a study that was done showing mask mandates and lower cases?
I understand your feelings, and ironically have the same feelings myself, but toward the antivax segment. who I see a causing pain, suffering and death when their efforts result in folks not getting vaccinated and getting severe disease. I don’t know any great answers other than that what Joseph said in that what some meant for evil, God used for good. that and we are to give grace.
There are fact checks about those lawsuit claims. Basically, if someone is telling me they heard something on Facebook, I remind them that the top sites Christians are getting their information fed to them from are run by foreign disinformation bot farms. That’s a bigger concern to me personally than the integrity of Pfizer.
The troll farm pages also combined to form the largest Christian American page on Facebook, 20 times larger than the next largest—reaching 75 million US users monthly, 95% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
6.27 BILLION vaccine shots have been administered worldwide at this point. We have tons of information about risks and side effects, because they have at this point been used on so many people. It’s very disingenuous of people to keep acting like the COVID vaccines are some kind of untested technology and no one really knows how people are going to respond to them.
In the centuries-long history of vaccines there is just no such thing as “side-effects” that show up years later. If you are going to have a side-effect of a vaccine, you will see it within 6 weeks of getting vaccinated. After that point your body has processed the vaccine and the only thing remaining in your body from it are the antibodies your own body has produced in response. Claims that we just don’t know if people are going to be infertile 10 years from now because they got vaccinated are just made up nonsense and fearmongering that isn’t based in any medical reality about what could actually happen.
Greetings, and welcome! Thank you for your kind approach to discussion.
It was indeed a horrible thing that happened with Tuskegee. However, the majority of doctors and researchers have never had anything to do that. To paint all of medicine with that would be a mistake–would that help to tell them that? I am a family practice doc, and I am grateful for the shot, masking, and social distancing.
Here is a video that may help. Can Black Americans trust the COVID vaccine? - Resources - BioLogos
Thank you again, Christy for your thoughtful and kind response. I am so grateful to have found this community. Almost everyone I’m friends with, coworkers, family, church are all worried about this vaccine essentially killing people years down the line and I feel encouraged by these responses.
What is way more likely are the debilitating effects of having had COVID in the first place, or ‘long COVID’. Already noted above was the study that at least 37% of COVID survivors had long term effects.
The docs here have agreed that the side-effects that some are so fearful of or that they use as an excuse to not get vaccinated or to procrastinate getting vaccinated are really just mild symptoms of what they could get acutely if they actually got sick with COVID. Even the mild myocarditis that has affected a few teenage boys self-resolves within a couple of weeks with no interventions.
Long COVID should be the real concern, including permanent damage to any organ or limb due to the microclots associated with the disease. (That is why it is considered to really be a vascular disease rather than a respiratory one.)
Someone posted somewhere here that it is statistically more likely to be in an accident on the way to get a vaccine than it is to have a bad side effect from it (yes, there are a very few, but we know Who is in charge, and it ain’t us ).
Sara, you do bring up a good point, in that this particular virus has a binding protein that mimics a naturally occurring system common throughout the body responsible for blood pressure control and vascular regulation, binding to the ACE2 receptors. I take on a daily basis a drug called an ACE inhibitor for high blood pressure, so I have a special interest in that aspect. There is a bit unknown about the what the long term effects will be, but at least the vaccine is a small dose of just that one protein, whereas an infection with Covid floods the body with it as well as other viral proteins. As mentioned, whatever side effects the vaccine has, the infection has many times over. Here is a link to a good article about spike proteins: Spike Proteins, COVID-19, and Vaccines | Science-Based Medicine
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