Religious perspectives on Vaccination: Mandatory Covid-19 vaccine for SA Churches

In public health history, vaccinations have been seen as very helpful as they help protect societies from preventable diseases and save many lives around the world. Despite the fact that few religious groups oppose vaccination for a variety of reasons, almost all major religions in the world support vaccination as long as it complies with religious precepts for the preservation, protection, or well-being of livelihoods. However, during the surge of Covid-19 outbreak in South Africa and elsewhere, governments witnessed unprecedented hesitancy and opposition to the Covid-19 vaccination by the general public. Those who opposed the Covid-19 vaccine cited multiple concerns or reasons, ranging from possible side effects, adverse events, vaccine safety, vaccine effectiveness, conspiracy theories, and religious or cultural reasons. Based on a literature search, this paper attempts to discuss various religious views on the subject of vaccination in general and subsequently make use of such perspectives to support calls for a compulsory Covid-19 vaccination, especially for South African churches. This is a timely topic of central concern as it seeks to politely dispel religious misunderstandings and confusion that could arise as a result of debates on mandatory vaccines for Covid-19. Health and religion will be brought together to shape the ongoing discussions about the moral urgency of a mandatory Covid-19 vaccination in South Africa.

Introduction

This collection of articles was conceived long before the outbreak and worldwide spread of Covid-19. It was intended as a review of recent trends in the writing of modern medical history in Greece thanks to the broader social relevance of public health history. While it still represents current ideas on the history of health and medicine among its Greek practitioners, it appears, nonetheless, at a time when public opinion has put the notions of public health, contagion and governance into sharp relief as societies are being overwhelmed by insecurity and a primal sensation of fear. Thus, public health and social medicine have entered the historiographical limelight.

Healthscaping a Medieval City: Lucca’s Curia viarum and the Future of Public Health History,” Urban History 40: 395-415

In early fourteenth-century Lucca, one government organ began expanding its activities beyond the maintenance of public works to promoting public hygiene and safety, and in ways that suggest both a concern for and an appreciation of population-level preventative healthcare. Evidence for this shift (which is traceable in and beyond the Italian peninsula) is mostly found in documents of practice such as court and financial records, which augment and complicate the traditional view afforded by urban statutes and medical treatises. The revised if still nebulous picture emerging from this preliminary study challenges a lingering tendency among urban and public health historians to see pre-modern European cities as ignorant and apathetic demographic black holes.

A morning with Louis Pasteur: a short history of the “clean hands”

This article examines the story of Louis Pasteur from the point of view of a classic movie presented at the Weekly Seminars of the “Oswaldo Cruz Institute”, at the end of the 2017 activities. Although very old, the movie The Story of Louis Pasteur (Warner Bros., 1936) inspired spectators and gave rise to an energetic debate that led the authors to decide for publishing the comments of the Seminar Coordinator, the guest commentator and the audience. The movie communicates to the public the legacy of one of the greatest precursors of the public health history using also fictional characters. The article presents the reliable passages in Pasteur’s biography and the fictional ones, without disrespecting the production of the creators of cinematographic work. The major merit of the movie, one of the first steps towards the policy of scientific diffusion, is to disclose the importance of vaccines and hand hygiene to prevent infectious diseases. The authors argue that the film-maker impeccably captured the scientist’s tenacity in the relentless search for discoveries and Pasteur’s idea that only persistent work can lead to rewarding results, remembering that the context created by previous researchers enabled Pasteur to establish new paradigms. Finally, the authors cite movie passages illustrating realities that are still in force: (i) the inertial resistance of science to new paradigms, illustrated by the medical-scientific community opposing to simple practices proposition, such as washing hands and boiling instruments, and (ii) the excessive confidence, and even arrogance, of some specialists, instead of serenity and humility that arise from committed study and accumulated knowledge.

Introduction

Questions about the safety of youth tackle football, its intimate association with American schools, and its existence as a form of entertainment for adults are as old as the game itself. This book examines the history of debates over the safety of youth football—not only changing medical understandings of the sport’s health effects but also the social and cultural attitudes that shaped those understandings. With its focus on safety debates, No Game for Boys to Play provides a bridge between sports history and public health history, examines the values and beliefs animating the development of one of America’s most popular activities for boys, and considers how football’s effects on children’s bodies came to be framed as a matter of public health and well-being.

The Path to Pistoia: Urban Hygiene Before the Black Death*

When the Black Death struck Western Europe in late 1347, city dwellers across the region were already practising public health, in part by building, maintaining and monitoring infrastructures whose prophylactic value emerged from the experience of intensified urbanization. The demands of a new urban metabolism, evident from the twelfth century, prompted numerous cities, including Pistoia, to develop preventative health programmes in anticipation of and in response to diverse threats. The latter certainly included famine, floods, pestilence and war, but Pistoians and others were no less concerned by routine matters such as burials, food quality, travel and work safety, artisanal pollution and domestic waste disposal. All of these were recognized as impacting people’s health, based on the medical and natural-philosophical theories prevalent at the time, and their management took into consideration not only climactic conditions and multi-species behaviour, but also the smooth functioning of sites such as wells, canals, bridges and roads. The political value that municipalities and other stakeholders began to place on the upkeep of these sites exceeded their economic function and thus questions the seminal role that scholars tend to attribute to the second plague pandemic in public health history. It also demonstrates how a key aspect of Euro-American modernity continues to shape interpretations of urban and health histories and suggests a broader path for historicizing community prophylactics.