Many evangelicals say they will not be vaccinated against Covid-19. Some experts say distrust and misinformation have played a role

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“I’m just telling you today, if being anti-mask and anti-vaccine is anti-government, then I’m proud to be anti-government,” said Spell, who made a national name by protesting against the Covid-19 rules in Baton Rouge. , Louisiana, told Life Tabernacle Church congregants.

He goes on to say, “If you have a 99.6% survival rate, why would you want someone to contaminate your bloodstream with something that may or may not hurt you?”

While 95% of evangelical leaders who responded to a January poll by the National Association of Evangelists said they would be willing to receive a vaccine, Vraja strongly opposed it. He is among the significant number of evangelical Christians who have opposed vaccination for Covid-19.
Pastor Tony Spell preaches to his congregation at the Tabernacle Church of Life.
In a Kaiser Family Foundation survey published last month, 28% of white adults who identify as evangelical Christians said they would certainly not receive a vaccine, 6% said they would be vaccinated only if needed, and 15% said they would. said they would wait and see.

The feeling against the vaccine against evangelists is fueled by a mixture of distrust in the government, ignorance about how the vaccines work, misinformation and political identity, some experts say.

“They (evangelicals) are the group that is most likely to say they won’t get the vaccine,” Samuel Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma who specializes in religion, told CNN. “They exercised or expressed the greatest resistance to the vaccine from the beginning.”

And they’ve held that position repeatedly in polls for the past six months, according to Perry.

Misinformation has contributed to the gospel’s distrust of the vaccine

Among Republicans, white evangelical Christians are more likely than other religious groups to believe in certain conspiracy theories, according to a study by the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

“There is a tendency within white Christian nationalism to want to believe in this kind of conspiracy, because I think it reinforces this idea of ​​us toward them,” Perry said. “The problem is that people who feed that fear have an incentive to continue to fuel their fear, because people keep clicking and people keep listening.”

Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge, where the pastor is "anti-mask and anti-vaccine."

News and information “silos” also play a role in the vaccine’s hesitation among evangelicals, who listen to conservative media hosts questioning the vaccines or denouncing them directly, Perry said.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, for example, recently wondered if vaccines actually work.

Some at Life Tabernacle Church say they will not receive the vaccine

Spell’s congregation is quite diverse, in part because it makes buses with people from all over the city. CDC data show that black and Hispanic people are about three times more likely than white people to be hospitalized with Covid-19 and about twice as likely to die from the disease.

Although people of color tend to be most at risk for Covid, the pastor said he still discourages vaccines.

“I don’t know anyone in my church, black, brown, Salvadoran and Honduran and Mexican, who had the virus,” he said. – I do not know anyone.

Perry said leaders like Spell “really bought into this idea that if I continue to sow this narrative in which people feel victimized, fearful and angry, they can continue to build my audience, to build my own credibility in this group of people who say “Yes, everyone else is not trustworthy except you”.

At Life Tabernacle Church, a handful of people CNN spoke to said they were not interested in receiving the vaccine.

Jeff Jackson, parishioner of the Church of the Tabernacle of Life, told CNN that he believes vaccines are “harmful to your health.”

Patricia Seal, also a parishioner of the Church of the Tabernacle of Life, said that while she loves former President Donald Trump, “when it came to getting shot, I said, you can have anything you want. I don’t want it. “

Jacob McMorris, another parishioner of the Church of the Tabernacle of Life, said he did not want to be vaccinated.

“I feel like I know it works medically, but when you put something in you to help you stop getting it, it doesn’t work for me,” he told CNN. “I never liked that idea.”

Only one CNN interviewee, Kerry Williams, said she received a vaccine. “Yes, I have the vaccine,” he said, noting that he had to take his second.

Health expert: 70% of the population needs to be vaccinated to help control the virus

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the number of Americans who have been vaccinated and who intend to be vaccinated continues to rise, while the number of people who say they want to “wait and see” is declining.

But for white evangelists, the number of those who oppose getting a Covid vaccine remains high, Perry said, and this can be a problem for some areas, where it is a much larger percentage of the population than nationally.

“We will see consequences in those regions of the country,” Perry said. “And this will be felt by the vulnerable and the elderly.”

Evangelicals make up about 25 percent of the U.S. population, according to Pew. And some experts say that 70% of the population should receive the vaccine to help control Covid-19.

“This is a highly contagious infection,” Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, previously told CNN. “So we anticipate that in order to truly substantially control the disease, we will need to vaccinate at least 70% of the population, it is so contagious that we need many people protected so that the virus cannot find anyone else infected.”

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