There’s been a flu epidemic in BC recently that Government health authorities are trying to counter with vaccination, preferably of everyone. My wife and I have taken the shot annually since my return to BC in 2001.
However, there are those who refuse the offer; some for religious reasons; others, for personal reasons. Just a few days ago, a hospital worker in Grand Forks, BC, was fired for refusing vaccination. His reasons were personal: he does not believe it is effective; a person should have the right to refuse. He also rejected wearing a mask, for it gives him a feeling of suffocating (Vancouver Sun, 24 Apr/2014).
There are also some Christian denominations that reject vaccination, seeing it as human unbelieving resistance to God’s protection. It so happens that the fired employee and some of those denominations come from the same stock I do: Dutch emigrants. Hoekstra, that employee, does not appeal to religion, at least, not in the report I have read, but he does display that Dutch stubbornness and insistence on principles come what may, for which my people are well known. At least one of those refusing denominations are of the Dutch Reformed family of churches, of which I, too, am a member, though one less conservative. So, I should be well wired to understand their rejection of vaccination. Understand, perhaps, but agree, no!
If you study the lives of the members of such a denomination, you will find that all through their lives they take precautions against all sorts of threats and dangers. They intervene in the course of both nature, God’s nature, and technology at many fronts. They have brakes on their bikes, cars and farm machinery to prevent accidents. Why then no intervention to prevent sickness? I suspect they subject themselves to medical surgery. I am sure they intervene in the darkness by the use of electricity. As a fellow Reformed Christian, as wired as I am, I simply do not understand their selective refusal to intervene.
As to Hoekstra, he perhaps should have the personal right to refuse vaccination, but only under a certain condition. The authorities did right when they fired him and prevented any further contact with hospital patients and staff. In fact, he and his fellow objectors, along with their live-in families, should be quarantined in their homes so as not to infect and endanger the general public. They should be isolated till the epidemic has past.
I am no specialist in health issues, but I do know that refusal to accept polio vaccination in certain Muslim regions has led to the recurrence of that disease. Recurrence only in countries where the people refused to be vaccinated. Would Hoekstra argue that this is a coincidence? Come on. Spare me.
Modern medicine is a precious gift from God. It will not do for us to despise or reject it, even though it has its problems. Abraham Kuyper, a role model to many Reformed, would regard medical science as part fulfillment of Jesus’ promise to lead us into the truth and, in fact, that we will do greater things than He Himself did (John 14:12).
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