Faith leaders discuss COVID-19 vaccine on ABC-7 town hall

Leaders of religious communities have a role to play in encouraging members of their congregations to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and in building a more just, equitable society where members of all faiths and none are recognized as members of the common human family.

Those were among the conclusions of an April 8 online town hall led by Alan Kreshesky of ABC-7 News. Participants included Justin Lombardo, chief human resource officer of the Archdiocese of Chicago and leader of its COVID-19 task force; Bishop Horace Smith, pastor of Apostolic Faith Church and a hematologist/oncologist at Lurie Children’s Hospital; and Rabbi Wendi Geffen, senior rabbi at North Shore Congregation Israel.

Kreshesky asked the leaders about reasons members of their faith communities might be reluctant to be vaccinated, including that some Catholics have raised moral questions because of the use of cells derived from tissue from aborted fetuses in the development of vaccines.

Lombardo said that question has been settled by Pope Francis, who on several occasions has spoken of being vaccinated as a moral good.

“The Holy Father as early as last March spoke out about the vaccines and called being vaccinated a moral act, a moral requirement of faith,” Lombardo said. “We have a moral obligation to protect not just our own lives but the lives of everybody else. As recently as Easter Sunday, the Holy Father spoke about the urgency of making the vaccine available to everyone, particularly in underserved countries and communities, and the moral obligation to make that happen.”

Cardinal Cupich also has encouraged everyone to be vaccinated as soon as they are able to.

“Our own cardinal positioned it as an act of love,” Lombardo said. “If you think about faith, as people of faith we don’t act in isolation. There’s not one faith tradition that’s represented here or anyplace else where humans act in isolation. We act as community, and as community, our tradition says we look after each other, we take into account the weak and the poor and the vulnerable, and so our moral obligation’s set by the pope, witnessed by his own vaccine. … It is a morally settled question that the good of the vaccine outweighs any potential moral liability.”

Bishop Smith said there has been suspicion of the medical and government establishment on the part of the Black community, with many pointing to the U.S. Public Health Service’s unethical experiment on the Tuskegee airmen, Black men who were not told they had syphilis and not treated for it while health officials observed the course of the disease.

Bishop Smith said he has studied the vaccines and their development, and encouraged members of his congregation not only to be vaccinated now, but also to participate in the clinical studies of the vaccine.

That is important because the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and magnified the inequities in the economic and health care systems that have harmed Black and Latino communities for years.

“I remember when COVID began to hit us really hard, and people were saying things like, ‘I wonder why so many African Americans and Hispanics are getting COVID?’” Bishop Smith said. “I said to myself, ‘Why are you surprised?’ Longstanding, decades long, health inequities is the major issue which underlies hesitancy. People have not received proper access to care, they have not received quality of care, they have not received the kind of care they need. … Two or three times the number, per capita, of African Americans and Hispanics are dying of COVID and experiencing severe COVID because of underlying health inequities. That means that those communities have a suspicion against the majority health community that we need to dispel with proper information. We need to say to them, ‘Here’s why these vaccines are both safe and effective, and here are the safeguards.’”

Geffen said the COVID-19 pandemic has made everyone more aware of the inequities that cause harm to underserved communities. Maybe before, she said, people could say they didn’t know.

“No one can say that anymore,” Geffen said.

The very pandemic that has raised awareness has also made it more difficulty for members of different communities to work together, Geffen acknowledged.

“We’re not living in a time when it’s really easy to bring four different communities together to walk hand-in-hand,” she said. “We do have the ability to walk hand-in-hand with technology, so people can share their stories. If someone can share their story, that’s what’s most compelling for any listener.”

It is also important, the panelists said, to maintain the connections formed now once the crisis is over.

“We’ve got to do that because that creates the integrity of our word,” Bishop Smith said, adding that it will be a wasted opportunity if “once the danger is over, we just go back to our villages and build separate lives.”

Bishop Smith said he reached out to leaders of Chicago’s Asian American community following increased reports of violence, and he plans to maintain a relationship with them in a public way, setting an example for others.

“It’s not enough to do good” he said. “You must be seen doing good. We have to come together to talk when there is not an acute emergency.”

To view the town hall recording, visit abc7.ws/2QcuVgJ.

For more information about the archdiocese’s vaccination campaign, visit archchicago.org/coronavirus/covid-vaccine.