Best of 2021 | God Doesn’t Want Me Vaccinated
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Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 27 December 2021
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We’re re-running some of our favorite episodes from the past year. This episode originally aired in September 2021.
Who are the people seeking a religious exemption to the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate? What are their religious claims? And how do workplaces decide who has a real claim to belief versus a convenient letter from a pastor-for-hire?
Guest: Ruth Graham, reporter for The New York Times.
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Podcast production by Mary Wilson, Danielle Hewitt, Elena Schwartz, Davis Land, and Carmel Delshad.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey listeners, happy holidays. I'm going to keep sharing episodes that were some of my favorites from the year that just was. Today, I'm sharing an episode from back in September. That's when COVID vaccine mandates were just starting to roll out in earnest. And there were these holdouts, people who are desperately trying to avoid the shot. |
| 0:22.0 | Back then, I talked to Ruth Graham from the New York Times about a very specific type of holdout, |
| 0:27.9 | those that were trying to use religion as their get-out-of-vaccine-free card. |
| 0:36.7 | For the last few weeks, Ruth Graham, she is a reporter over at the New York Times, has been logging on to Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, to eavesdrop. |
| 0:47.0 | Ruth reports on religion. |
| 0:49.2 | She was interested in QAnon at first. |
| 0:52.0 | And then it turned out that there were all kinds of interesting conversations happening there. |
| 0:57.3 | It's just a much more freewheeling space, I guess you could say. |
| 1:01.9 | It's hard for Ruth to describe what she's hearing. |
| 1:05.2 | Is it religious chatter, political? |
| 1:08.3 | You know, on some of these topics, it is so hard to disentangle the political from the |
| 1:14.4 | religious. I would say it was political conversations that were completely woven through |
| 1:20.6 | with faith. So people sharing prayer requests, but then the content would be political, praying for Trump, praying for Trump's |
| 1:29.8 | return, and then also people sharing a lot of personal anecdotes, you know, feeling like it's a |
| 1:35.6 | quasi-private space. Lately, these personal anecdotes have started focusing on one topic in particular, |
| 1:42.9 | whether your job can require you to get a COVID vaccine, |
| 1:46.4 | and whether your religion could get you exempted if your employer is clamping down. |
| 1:51.2 | So you have people, first of all, just letting each other know that this is an option. |
| 1:55.7 | You have people sharing language on, you know, certain Bible verses to cite, certain just kind of legal language |
| 2:04.6 | or quasi legal language to sound official and you're, you know, when you make a request to your |
| 2:09.4 | employer, it's, I would say, like, a rising kind of desperation in some of these quarters to |
| 2:15.8 | find a way out of these mandates. |
... |
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