Former Heads of the National Council on the Arts
(RNS) — Quondam National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins said he is "heartbroken" that more of his fellow white evangelicals have not received the COVID-19 vaccines.
"I am just basically heartbroken in a circumstance where, equally an answer to prayer, vaccines have been adult that turned out to be much better than we dared to hope for," he said in an interview with Religion News Service on Wednesday (Feb. two).
"And yet they are yet non seen every bit something that a lot of white evangelicals are interested in taking part in and, every bit a outcome, people are dying. I just didn't encounter that happening and certainly not at this scale."
Collins is the founder and senior fellow of BioLogos, an organisation that seeks to foster the integration of "rigorous science" with Christian faith. He and BioLogos President Deborah Haarsma, an astronomer, spoke to journalists at a Faith Angle Forum/BioLogos webinar on Wednesday titled "Faith and Science in an Age of Tribalism."
Haarsma said on the webinar that the country's divisions have reshaped views of science.
"The globe has become so aggressively polarized that it seems like every issue has to land in a ruby-red military camp or a blueish camp, and when yous view the globe that way, somehow Christian religion gets assigned to blood-red and scientific discipline gets assigned to blue," she said. "And for scientists who are Christians, similar myself and Francis Collins, this just doesn't make any sense to us."
Collins stepped down in December after 12 years every bit the NIH director and still runs a government enquiry lab and so spoke as a private citizen.
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He tied "this ruby-red-bluish situation" — including social media, political letters and words heard in churches — directly to the COVID-19 pandemic. He said it includes white evangelicals who are resistant to or disinterested in pursuing vaccines — some 30% to twoscore%, according to PRRI and Pew Inquiry Center.
"The civilisation war is literally killing people," added Collins, citing estimates that more than 100,000 people have died unnecessarily due to vaccine resistance and hesitancy fifty-fifty as "hundreds of thousands of lives" were saved.
Francis Collins, from acme, Deborah Haarsma and Peter Wehner participate in a Faith Bending Forum/BioLogos webinar titled "Faith and Science in an Age of Tribalism," February. two, 2022. Video screen grab
Collins said in an interview after the webinar that many white evangelicals have been "victimized by the misinformation and lies and conspiracies that are floating around, particularly on social media and some of it in cablevision news."
But he besides wondered about his success in conveying the lessons from the science he has watched develop over the last two years.
"l Iook at myself and say, 'Have I failed in my office as a public communicator?'" he said.
Haarsma said she understands that some resistance to vaccines and boosters has nada to do with evangelicalism.
"There'due south some people who were vaccinated once and had a bad reaction, so they didn't want their 2nd shot or didn't want the booster," she said in the joint interview with Collins. "And I'd similar to explicate to them that, hey, getting another shot could really assist y'all and you lot might not have a bad reaction again."
Her system has online resources about the pandemic — including a February 2021 commodity on Christians and vaccinations that has been viewed half a million times — and has developed a curriculum on faith and science for Christian high schoolers and home-schoolers.
A recent study published by the National Academy of Sciences indicates that after some unvaccinated Christians heard from medical experts who shared their religious identity — including Collins and BioLogos — they said they intended to receive the vaccine, that they would encourage others to likewise and that they had increased trust in those experts.
Collins explained that the researchers compared a group that was given factual information well-nigh the condom of the vaccines and another that received the same data along with a brusk video clip of Collins identifying himself as a scientist and a Christ follower.
"I was pretty astounded by that," he said, calculation that the findings indicated that "unless that truth comes at you from somebody you trust, you're not going to telephone call it truth at all."
In the webinar, Haarsma mused that dissimilar public health messaging earlier in the pandemic might have averted some of the current resistance and mistrust.
BioLogos President Deborah Haarsma speaks during a Faith Bending Forum/BioLogos webinar titled "Religion and Science in an Historic period of Tribalism," Feb. two, 2022. Video screen grab
She said many influencers said "trust the science," but "what a lot of Christians hear is, yous want me to trust the science instead of trusting God?"
Haarsma said messages about caring for your community or being patriotic might accept been more effective. But, like Collins, she said the greater problem was "the incredible misinformation."
In response to a question from Organized religion News Service, Collins and Haarsma, both of whom have musical backgrounds, concluded the webinar with a word of congregational singing as the country still faces the omicron variant.
Collins said it's a "bad idea" to take off masks to sing in an enclosed space nether atmospheric condition where the Centers for Disease Command advises against it — such as communities with high manual of 100 or more cases per 100,000 people — unless everyone in that location is known to have been vaccinated and boosted also as tested that solar day.
"That's more than and more what people are trying to do in terms of making these things possible, is to go to the extra lengths of reducing the likelihood that anybody there is currently infectious," he said. But he added apace: "Fifty-fifty that'southward not a guarantee."
Collins said he has been in circumstances where he has sung with a mask on: "It's a lot improve than not singing at all."
RELATED:Francis Collins 'a bit' frustrated with evangelicals amidst COVID-xix vaccine push
Source: https://religionnews.com/2022/02/03/francis-collins-on-covid-evangelicals-the-culture-war-is-literally-killing-people/
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