vaccination

Covid Vaccination and Sin

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Have you had your jab yet? I got mine last week and lived to tell the story!

There are many vaccines available today, but of course the only one that most people are interested in a the moment is the corona virus.

Vaccines have brought a massive improvement in health conditions and life spans over the last century or so. Second only to the provision of clean and safe water, vaccines have changed our lives for the better. Diseases such as small pox and measles used to ravage communities and kill millions of people, but we don’t even think about them these days.

It amazes me that within about 12 months of the covid virus exploding around the world we have a number of vaccines available to protect our community. It used to take years, even decades, to discover how to beat a disease, but the increase in knowledge about genetics has made it possible to rapidly discover, test and deploy these vaccines.

There is another disease rampant around the world that we have learned to live with but is just as deadly. This disease is not a physical virus, but is deadly. You won’t get it by contact with other people and you can’t heal it with an injection.

The disease goes by many names- pride, self-centredness and sin are but a few.

It is a condition of the spirit that says that I am the most important person in the world. Everybody has to bow to my demands. I can do whatever I like regardless of how other people might feel.

Just about every problem in our lives comes down to our desire to control our own lives, to live as if nobody else matters and to ignore God’s ways for our lives.

There is a cure for this. It involves admitting that we are wrong and asking God to forgive us through Christ then living His way not our own way.

Tough medicine perhaps, but absolutely essential.

Whooping Cough Today. What The?

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I remember a fragment of a conversation with my mother when I was a small child. It must have been about the time I was to get some vaccinations. She said with some passion “whooping cough is a wicked thing.”

Who could argue against that? The thought of a tiny baby literally coughing itself to death is just awful. The ready availability of vaccines for this and other deadly diseases means that some of the deadliest diseases are no longer a threat.

So why is it that in the last three weeks two families in our town have been infected with whooping cough with at least one member in each family seriously ill? How can this even be a thing in 2019?

As far as I know both families are fully immunised, and don’t have much direct contact. Which means that there is at least one other family carrying the bacteria in town.

As I understand it, in Australia immunisation rates are about 95%. The whooping cough vaccine gives about 80% protection, and if you do come down with the disease it is generally a less severe condition. In Narrabri there are likely to be about 350 people who are not immunised.

The effectiveness of the vaccine relies on everyone in a community being immunised so that the chances of being exposed to the disease is close to zero. But if the rates of vaccination fall, then everyone in the community is put at risk.

At particular risk then are babies who are yet to be sufficiently old to receive the vaccination. In recent years, pregnant women often receive a booster to pass on immunity to their child.

Some people refuse to immunise their children for all kinds of reasons, most of them not based in fact. There are rare side effects from some of these vaccines, and sometimes these are exaggerated in certain groups.

Whooping cough is still a wicked thing. Sadly it is still a real thing.