Pastor Tony Evans leads his flock toward danger with anti-vaccine rhetoric

By Michael Gerson 

Columnist

January 27, 2022 at 4:23 p.m. EST

Opinion | Pastor Tony Evans leads his flock toward danger with anti-vaccine rhetoric

Activists and faith groups protest against vaccine mandates in Washington on Jan. 23. (Shuran Huang/For The Washington Post)

While conceding that “vaccines help,” Evans goes on to argue that “you should have a choice, whether it’s natural immunity or whether it’s therapeutics. You shouldn’t be mandated to put chemicals in your body. But you should be free to if you choose to. So our issue is against mandates, not against vaccinations if you choose to. … People don’t know what to do, so stuff keeps changing because God keeps messing stuff up. … So whatever decision you make, be able to trust God with it.”

This position — which assumes that God introduces an element of uncertainty into the conclusions of science to expose human arrogance — is intended to justify a reasonable middle ground of personal choice on vaccination. The problem? It is a theological absurdity based on a bald-faced deception in service to a dangerous ideology.

From the most recent data, we know that covid-19 boosters have an effectiveness of 90 percent to 95 percent against severe disease or death. According to a recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine by Minal K. Patel: “This means that if the absolute effectiveness of two vaccine doses is 90%, the absolute effectiveness of two doses plus a booster is 99 to 100%.”

Whatever this is, it is not a basis to argue that “people don’t know what to do.” People know exactly what to do to prevent — and nearly eliminate — the risk of severe disease and death from a nasty pathogen. Two doses plus a booster is as close as medicine comes to the ironclad certainty of protection.

This creates certain moral responsibilities for those in positions of influence. If they claim that strong scientific conclusions are actually in doubt, they are engaged in deception. If they address this issue without affirming the urgency of universal vaccination, they are condemning a portion of their audience to the risk of needless death.

The whole idea that chemical inputs should never be “mandated” is to misunderstand both the history of public health and the nature of a common good. Required, routine vaccination of schoolchildren has been one of the great success stories of modern medicine. Highly contagious diseases such as mumps, measles, chickenpox and whooping cough are now rare in the United States, while polio and smallpox have been eliminated. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that routine child vaccination will prevent an estimated 936,000 deaths in American children born between 1994 and 2018. This “pro-life” achievement is celebrated by a vast chorus of the living.

Maintaining public health is, in part, a matter of public authorities influencing what chemicals are introduced into which bodies. Heroin and fentanyl? Nope: bad for individuals and society. Alcohol? Not until you’re 21. Childhood vaccines? Yes, absolutely.

The coronavirus booster — which saves people from death and serious illness, at a minuscule risk — falls easily into the third category. It is now considered controversial not because of deepened theological reflection on the part of evangelicals but because of the right-wing populist fetishization of autonomy and “choice.” And pastors pulled along in this political current are sources of deadly misinformation and of terrible, reckless, foolish advice.

We tend to think that deferring to individual choice is somehow a “neutral” position. But in the case of covid, Evans and others are not asking us to choose between the views of two groups of citizens. They are creating circumstances that will result in the spread of a sometimes deadly virus. This is not neutrality. It is sabotaging a society they should be serving.

A vague discomfort with the field of medicine goes back to the early days of the Christian church. “Many thought the sick should rely only on God for healing,” the historian Robert Louis Wilken writes in “The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity.” “Turning to a physician for cure was a sign of lack of faith in God’s power.”

Yet Christian teachers such as Origen of Alexandria vigorously disputed such assumptions. “God, creator of human bodies,” Origen argued, “knew that such was the fragility of the human body that it could be subject to different kinds of maladies and injuries.” So it made sense that “if the body is assailed by sickness, there would be cures.”

In the covid crisis, by the grace of God, there are cures.