Opinion | ‘The blood of Jesus is my vaccine’: how a fringe group of Christians has hijacked faith, undermining the fight against Covid-19
- On social media, a small number of Christians are offering a pastiche of biblical symbols to link the idea of Jesus’s blood and protection from illness
- An expert says that appealing to people’s beliefs in spreading vaccine misinformation is particularly potent and such views can be extremely hard to combat
“The blood of Jesus is my vaccine” read one of the signs at a recent protest against lockdown regulations in the Australian city of Sydney. While our tendency might be to roll our eyes at such ridiculous anti-science views, these sentiments have a long and complicated history in the Christian tradition.
Kolina Koltai, a vaccine misinformation researcher with the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, points out that appealing to people’s beliefs and values in spreading vaccine misinformation is particularly potent. Such views can be extremely hard to combat, because doing so is perceived as an attack on someone’s core beliefs.
While for some, Jesus’s “blood” is spiritually invoked through prayer, other misinformation links the protective power of Jesus more explicitly to taking communion (or the Eucharist). Taking communion daily, such people claim, prevents you from getting sick from Covid-19.
Communion is a Christian ritual in which token amounts of bread and wine are consumed to recall Jesus’s last meal with his disciples before dying on a cross. While different Christian traditions hold a variety of theological views, at the heart of communion is the idea that bread and wine are ritually shared as a way to spiritually connect, to have “communion”, with Jesus and with one another. The bread symbolises Jesus’s body and the wine his blood. Drinking communion wine then is drinking the blood that saves, according to these fringe views.
