Sunday April 30, 2023
“April 24- April 30 is World Immunization Week,” declares an email that just arrived in my inbox .
Generally speaking, I resent being told what my priorities should be. If it isn’t World Immunization Week demanding my attention, it’s National Backup Your Computer Day,. National Cleavage Day, or even Ask A Stupid Question Day.
Back in university, a professor told me I’d get better marks if I didn’t argue with the question! But since he gave me 85% anyway, I didn’t see much room for a higher mark.
I had a similar reaction, later in my life. My work meant I was often called on to lead worship. My church followed a “lectionary” that prescribed Bible passages for every Sunday.
Perhaps “lectionary” needs some history.
The Catholic Church has followed its own lectionary for centuries. Vatican II led to a revised version.
Protestant leaders saw that a lectionary could reduce the problem of some clergy repeatedly harping on their favourite texts and ignoring the rest of the Bible. So they formed the Consultation on Common Texts, which led to the Common Lectionary, which in turn led to the Revised Common Lectionary most mainline churches now use.
Sometimes that lectionary felt like a straitjacket. It didn’t always match what I had been asked to speak about, let alone what I WANTED to speak about.
A good thing
I tell you all that so that you can understand that I’m not writing about Immunization Week just because someone else thought it was a good thing.
It IS a good thing. And I support it 100%.
Immunization may be the most important medical development in history. Instead of waiting until people get sick and then attempting to treat them, we can ban the disease before it takes hold.
Essentially, we give our bodies their own private security system.
I joined Rotary 20 years ago mostly because of its campaign to eradicate polio around the world.
Some of you may remember the polio epidemics of the 1950s in North America. One year, 2,000 children died of polio in New York city alone. Almost all families knew a child who had to wear braces, walk with a cane or crutch, or even rely on a monstrous “iron lung” to breath for them.
Rotary’s polio campaign began with some clubs in the Philippines, in 1979, using the newly developed Salk/Sabin oral vaccine. It didn’t need a trained nurse or doctor; anyone could put a drop into a child’s open mouth.
Rotary immunized six million children in the Philippines and proved that “service clubs” were a viable means of providing health care.
The idea spread. Most of Rotary’s 46,000 clubs got on board. So did the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Local clubs were key. As with anything new, there was a hostile reaction. Rumours claimed that the vaccines were a western plot to sterilize the kids, take over their minds, or even convert them to Christianity.
But because the vaccines were not administered by white-skinned foreigners, but by trusted local people, the program worked.
So close, still so far
Currently, only two countries in the whole world still have polio in the wild -- Afghanistan and Pakistan. And they have only a handful or new cases.
Immunization has reduced polio cases worldwide by 99.9%. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative estimates that vaccines have saved about 20 million children from paralysis.
About 430 million children have received the vaccine, at a cost of about $3 per child.
In another year or so, polio may be as extinct as smallpox.
Remember when you had to get a regular smallpox vaccination? Every time you travelled outside North America? Smallpox proved that even diseases that have been around as long as humans, can be beaten.
We used to have TB X-rays every year. Tuberculosis now survives mainly in remote Indigenous communities.
Routine vaccinations brought rubella, whooping cough, mumps, chicken pox, diphtheria, tetanus, and hepatitis A and B under control. COVID-19 vaccinations freed us from irritating mask mandates.
We almost eliminated measles too -- until a few factions spread disinformation about measles vaccines. The same way that polio programs were misrepresented overseas.
Some evangelical Protestants put their faith in Bible verses instructing them to leave healing to God, to distrust anything devised by humans.
And some anti-abortion Catholics rejected the measles vaccine because, 58 years ago, researchers had used cell lines from aborted fetuses.
I consider both forms of rejection untenable -- and possibly criminally negligent. If a child is persuaded -- or forced -- not to get immunized for religious or moral principles, isn’t the persuader as culpable as an accomplice in crime?
World Immunization Week marks the best of human development. Celebrate it!
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Copyright © 2023 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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Your turn
Letters continue to come in about several past columns:, particularly about the impact Wood Lake’s publications have had on your congregational or personal lives. Thank you for all of those letters. It’s good to know that we (collectively) made a difference.
Last week I ventured into a touchy subject – spanking and physical violence against children. I’ll add some comments later.
“Oh, the memories you stirred up with this column,” Jim Henderschedt wrote. “I too was raised with spankling and as a result I too was a spanker. One day our son came home from high school with news that he and a friend were caught with something that could result in expulsion. I was so frustrated and angry that I resorted to a spanking that I am sure was humiliating to him.
That never left me nor did my shame that I felt of myself. Two our three years ago I sent an email to him profusely apologizing and asking his forgiveness.
:He responded with … ‘Dad, I do not remember the incident you are referring to. It did not make any lasting impression on me if it happened the way you told it, so please let it go. All I remember is you and Mom being good parents.’
“It brought the meaning and result of forgiveness home … because I remember and I am sorry for the times I did spank my children.”
Vera Gottlieb asked, “Where is god to allow all this?”
Tom Watson recalled, “From 1943 to 1950, I attended grades one through eight in a one-room red-brick country schoolhouse. Huge blackboard at the front of the classroom. Behind the lower edge of that blackboard was a 12" long, 2 1/4" wide, 1/8" thick rawhide strap. The keep-order-tool of the day. Honestly, I don't think the teacher liked using it any more than erring students liked getting it.”
One-time classmate Janie Wallbrown wrote from the different country’s perspective: “Here in India hitting children who misbehave is still the most used method of punishment…
“The point of having children in India is so that they can take care of you in your old age. So beating into submission and obedience does that job. The relationship between parent and child is different obviously.”
Not everyone agreed with my views on spankiong and physical punishment. For example, Robert Caughell wrote, “People are fed up with politically correct touchy-feely attitudes from ‘experts’ like this. OK, experts how do you discipline an unruly child, or do you let them act up and push limits? I am not in favour of using harsh punishment but a little tap on the bum, side of the head, gets the point across to behave.”
Mirza Yawar Baig recalled his own experience: “I was a victim of the ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’. It was not spared and I don’t know that it made much of a difference other than getting me used to it. Beating children is a pathetic admission of helplessness of the adult who is saying in effect, ‘I can’t make sense but I am bigger than you are and I can hurt you, so you must obey me, no matter what.’“
Baig went on, though, to criticize inconsiderate adults who clearly had never learned to behave: “I can’t help but imagine the pleasure that I would have got from applying a blunt instrument to their behinds at some point in their youth.”
Some other letters – which I have not printed -- argued that small children have not developed enough of their brains to understand a reasoned argument for good behaviour. That’s true enough. A quick swat may teach a kid to stay out of Mom’s cookie jar; it won’t convey a broader message about hitting his sister. At the same time, it WILL convey its own message about what it means to become an adult. Adults get to impose their will on weaker people. They’re entitled to use force to get their way. And as they demonstrate by their medium for discipline, the body ranks higher than the mind.