Suffer the Little Children...to be Vaccinated
And a few other things...
Earlier this month a church pre-school in Texas was found to have the lowest vaccination rate in the entire state. Rather than trigger a program to improve this, the pastor of the church celebrated this fact.
Now I’m all about freedom and the ability of church organizations to be left alone by government.
But this was just…sad.
It was sad because when I read the words of Jesus they are so full of concern for children. I think often of the story of the Jairus’ daughter in Mark 5.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%205:21-43&version=HCSB
In summary, Jairus is a synagogue leader who comes to Jesus to heal his precious daughter. Jesus is delayed by other healing work and when he arrives the child is dead. Not to worry, not to be outdone by death itself, Jesus raises her. She mattered to him; not as a statement, but as a human being he loved and who was loved by her family.
Our daughter Elysa once played Jairus’s daughter in an Easter passion play. I cried every single time she came back to life. The story was made far more powerful when I saw it portrayed with my own child.
The thing is, Jesus made a point of caring for children.
In Matthew 19:14 Jesus said, “suffer the little children to come unto me, and do not deter them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.” This is the King James, and the usage of “suffer” is to “allow or endure or be patient.” He’s saying be kind to them, allow them to come to him, the one who loves them most.
When he walked the earth he was ever kind to them. It has been postulated that the modern view of childhood really came to exist because of Christianity and this makes sense to me.
Therefore childhood and children deserve our protection.
That’s why vaccination matters. Because children matter. History is replete with the misery of disease and death visited on the smallest because humans were powerless against the pestilence brought by diseases like polio, smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, mumps, measles, rubella, Haemophilis influenza and others.
(This is diphtheria.)
When brilliant minds gave us a weapon against those diseases, we not only achieved incremental scientific triumphs. The application of those vaccines was a way of honoring the love Jesus had for the children.
The advent of vaccines protected, and protects, children from paralysis, infertility, brain damage, respiratory difficulty and a host of other problems. It offers them a chance to live full lives of joy and service. A chance to love, to laugh and to have little humans of their own. When they live we can eventually access the brilliance and gifts that lie inside them. Who knows what wonders will emanate?
Without question, and I’m hardly the first person to say this, a tour through any dilapidated graveyard from the early 20th century or older will reveal tiny tombstones with lambs or angels, with birth and death dates barely legible which total only a few days, months or years. Those graves were once well-watered with the tears of grieving parents.
When Christians say we shouldn’t offer this care to children on the grounds of spurious science or political statement, then it’s really decidedly in opposition to the Pro-Life movement.
Trust me, I’m Pro-Life. However this means we care about the unborn as well as about giving living children a chance to thrive, giving families a chance to shape them and society the chance to benefit from them.
My grandmother Leap was born in 1907. She often told the story of her baby brother who would call to her in the morning to get him out of bed. He lived to about two or three when he died of an infectious disease. This was probably around 1915 or so. What killed my great uncle? What killed that child I might later have known and who might have told me jokes or taken me hunting?
She didn’t know, nor do I. It may have been flu, or diphtheria. It may have been RSV. It may have been something for which antibiotics would have been life saving. It may have been genetic, or none of the above and the inevitable consequence of living in an age, and in the relative scarcity of Appalachia at that time, where advanced care was passing rare.
One of my uncles was infertile from having mumps. If he had not had that disease, I might have even more wonderful cousins than I do. He would have made a good father, his wife a great mother.
Both of those situations might have been changed by vaccination.
Ultimately there are a lot of things we should do to keep the children safe.
We should “suffer the little children” to have the shelter, food, water, warmth and other things that protect them from harm. We should always defend not only their safety but their innocence.
But without a doubt, we should “suffer the little children” to be vaccinated.
Their lives are too precious to take a chance.
PS The issue of falling vaccination rates is not uniquely American. Rates are falling in Europe and in Canada, for instance. This can’t be simply attributed to free-market medicine or general ignorance. Vaccine resistance is not confined to any political administration. I’m hardly a public health expert so I won’t try to speak to all of the causes.
No doubt some of it could recently be tied to lack of trust in public health brought on by the interventions applied during the COVID pandemic. A lot of trust was incinerated and it will take time to recover it.
It’s doubtless a complex problem.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-childhood-vaccine-rate-decline-canada-measles/
With modern genomics, if we (as a society) were willing to pay for the costs of investigation, it would be worthwhile to actually research to see if children with purported vaccine injury carried biomarkers of genetic susceptibility to such. Whole genome sequencing is an established technology. Maybe a reader is aware of such a study. I am am oncologist but would love to see such research published or performed, regardless of result
I am annoyed by the “one size fits all” public health mentality. When you force an unnecessary hepatitis B vaccine on a one day old or put 3 mRNA vaccines on the childhood schedule in the 1st year or give Gardasil to every 9 year old or give untested RSV vax to pregnant women I think parents follow the money instead of the science.