“I Identify As Fully Vaccinated”: The Nature Of Truth

“A lot of people are using the phrase, ‘I identify as fully vaccinated’ and taking their masks off,” said Kerry Ott, the public information officer for the Luce, Mackinac, Alger and Schoolcraft health department in Michigan. “I’m not kidding. …They’re not vaccinated, but they’re going to take their masks off.”^[1] Indeed, with the new Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines, most of the country is on what the news media calls the “honor system,” and the temptation to lie is enormous. Not only is personal comfort, normalcy, and human connection at stake, but increasingly our country is witnessing the development of a new kind of caste system where the vaccinated become the privileged elites while the unvaccinated are treated with disdain or even punished for their health choices.

In an interview on CBS This Morning, former First Lady Michelle Obama said, “You wanna hang out with us? Get your vaccine.”^[2] Health care workers at Houston Methodist Hospital have been harassed and fired for refusing to be vaccinated, with their employer telling them, “100% vaccination is more important than your individual freedom. Everyone [sic] of you is replaceable. If you don’t like what your [sic] doing you can leave and we will replace your spot.”^[3][4] Tickets to a Florida punk rock concert are being sold at only $18 for vaccinated fans versus $1,000 for those unvaccinated.^[5] And “a Michigan high school is punishing unvaccinated students by charging them $80 to go to prom, while vaccinated students can attend for free.”^[6]

“The rule is very simple,” President Biden announced in May. “Get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do. It’s vax’ed or masked.”^[7] Similarly, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has promised, “If you are fully vaccinated, you are protected, and you can start doing the things that you stopped doing because of the pandemic.”^[8] But for a sizeable portion of the population, the price of this freedom is too great. They are unwilling to receive a first-of-its-kind vaccination that delivers a highly politicized and rushed experimental drug not yet fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Indeed, only about half of all employees have opted to be vaccinated at the very government agencies promoting the vaccine—the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—despite being pressured by their employers through town halls and education seminars.^[9]

What then are those who refuse to be vaccinated to do? Faced with the choice of taking a questionable vaccine or being treated as social lepers in our new COVID caste system, some in Michigan are employing a method that has proven to be highly successful in other politically, culturally, and morally sensitive matters. They are choosing to identify as fully vaccinated. In short, they are choosing to simply believe their bodies are just as immune to COVID-19 as those who are fully vaccinated, and they are hoping that the rest of society will accept their new identity and leave them alone.

This approach to COVID-19 obviously can’t protect them or anyone else from being infected by COVID-19. It is simply unacceptable, according to the “experts,” because it can kill people. CNN reports, “The new guidance could essentially allow anyone to go mask-free indoors without proof of vaccination. And that kind of honor system might jeopardize others, including children under the age of 12 who can’t get vaccinated yet and adults who might be at more risk than they think.”^[10] People can’t just ignore facts and science because of personal preference! … Or can they?

This is precisely what many in our country have done on a variety of other issues:

• We permit people to choose which sex they want to be, regardless of the fact that the presence of a Y chromosome makes one genetically male, and the absence of a Y chromosome makes one genetically female. In fact, the U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the Equality Act (H.R. 5; S. 393) which redefines “sex” to include gender identity based upon “a perception or belief, even if inaccurate” (emphasis added).^[11]
• Abortion advocates choose to believe life occurs at birth, despite a plethora of scientific evidence to the contrary. Testifying before a 1981 Senate Judiciary subcommittee, Dr. Jerome Lejeune, the father of modern genetics, announced, “To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion … it is plain experimental evidence. Each individual has a very neat beginning, at conception.”^[12]
• Leading historians have roundly rejected the New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project, saying, “This is not true. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding—yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false.”^[13] Nonetheless this new version of American history has been produced as a school curriculum used in all 50 states.^[14] Increasingly, schools are embracing such critical race theory—another name for the anti-Christian and divisive ideology of Cultural Marxism.^[15] Teachers are being taught to challenge the dominant ideology of whiteness, while students are required to evaluate which aspects of their racial, religious, sexual, and gender identities have privilege or oppression attached to it.^[16]
• Confronted with hundreds of riots across the country because of a demonstrably false narrative about racist police officers hunting innocent Black people, many of our national influencers and government officials endorsed the narrative^[17][18][19] and dismissed the riots as “peaceful protests.”^[20] Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan even referred to the hostile takeover of the city’s downtown as democracy, tweeting, “Seattle is fine. Don’t be so afraid of democracy.”^[21]

How is it that our nation is content to ignore objective facts and science on a plethora of social issues that cause real harm to real people, but we cannot apply this same standard to COVID-19? It may be that the harm produced by these other issues are often directed toward unknown strangers who rarely make the news, whereas the potential harm in ignoring the risk of spreading COVID-19 effects many of us personally and is plastered all across the news.

Regardless, truth is objective, not subjective. It doesn’t change, but our relationship to truth changes. We can choose to embrace or to reject truth. In other words, we are subjective in whether or not we accept and acknowledge truth. However, just because we don’t acknowledge how our views of truth may affect others doesn’t make the truth any less real. We can pretend our actions don’t have national and personal consequences, but it doesn’t change reality.

Sometimes it takes being faced with the same logic on something “obviously true” to help us realize our hypocrisy. Unvaccinated people—who have not been infected with COVID-19—obviously are not immune to the virus and risk spreading it. No amount of ignoring this truth or believing it away will change this reality. We can easily see this, yet somehow we fail to see another equally obvious truth.

God judges nations for habitual sin. Specifically, God judges nations for embracing several of the practices listed above: Sexual immorality (LGBTQ); shedding innocent blood (abortion); promoting evil (critical race theory); lawlessness (riots). Unless our nation experiences incredible cultural reform, judgment will eventually befall America. No amount of wishing it away can change this.

In Jeremiah 25, God prophesies judgment against many nations for their sins, declaring, “Behold, disaster is going forth from nation to nation, and a great tempest is stirring from the farthest parts of the earth” (Jer. 25:32). God tells the nations they can be sure of their pending doom because He did not even spare His chosen nation, Israel, judgment against their national sins:

You shall say to them [the nations], “Thus says the LORD of hosts: You must drink [from the cup of my wrath]! For behold, I begin to work disaster at the city that is called by my name, and shall you go unpunished? You shall not go unpunished, for I am summoning a sword against all the inhabitants of the earth, declares the LORD of hosts.” … “The clamor will resound to the ends of the earth, for the LORD has an indictment against the nations; he is entering into judgment with all flesh, and the wicked he will put to the sword, declares the LORD” (Jer. 25:28–29, 31).

Fortunately, it is not yet too late for us to turn back national judgment. Jeremiah also prophesied, “If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it” (Jer. 18:7). National repentance and cultural reform may seem impossible, but the Bible provides accounts of nations equally as wicked as ours that did repent when confronted with judgment (Jonah 3:4–10). We must stop pretending that judgment will not befall our country if we simply refuse to talk and think about it. Just as people cannot identify as being fully vaccinated anymore than a biological male can identify as female, so also our nation cannot identify as being right with God. Let’s put aside wishful thinking and confront the truth: Our nation is on a perilous trajectory destined for judgment. Only then can we begin seeking a solution.