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Episode details

Radio 4,3 mins

Rev Dr Jane Leach - 08/02/2021

Thought for the Day

Available for over a year

Good morning. Have you had your vaccine yet? Talking to family and friends this week, mercifully, almost everyone had nothing to report… unless, they’d had their vaccine. Comparing vaccine notes has become the new national sport, and despite worries about how well current versions will cope with new variants of the virus, the prospect that the adult population of Britain will all have received at least one dose by June is certainly news that lifts the spirits. Posed in a different context, though, the question, ‘Have you had your vaccine yet?’ takes on a different complexion. Last week I was part of a global meeting of the International Association of Methodist Schools, Colleges and Universities. In groups we were asked to compare notes about our national vaccination programmes. We heard from our colleague from the Democratic Republic of Congo that conversation is pointless because nothing is available. We heard from our American colleague about the low uptake amongst black, Hispanic and indigenous communities that have little trust in the healthcare interventions of their government. We heard from our South African colleague working in a teaching hospital where the fight is on against the new South African strain. And I began to feel uneasy as I realised that I would have to confess to the vaccine privilege of the UK, and even to the row over alleged vaccine nationalism in the context of post Brexit trade. We had already begun our meeting mourning the death of the brilliant, entrepreneurial, strategically-minded and steadfastly honest, Prof Munashe Furusa, Vice Chancellor of the Methodist University in Zimbabwe, taken by Covid at the age of 59; and now it became painfully and personally obvious to me, that vaccinating me by May, might be at the expense of my international colleagues and of some of the vulnerable people amongst whom they work. In the Methodist community – worldwide – the word ‘connexionalism’ is often on our lips. It implies, not, so much being part of a single polity in which all are subject to the same discipline, as being part of a transnational community in which all have obligations of duty and friendship to one another. Yet, even within such a connexion, it takes work to focus on and respond to the needs of neighbours far away. The Financial Times on Saturday highlighted the connections between all countries and all peoples as it described the global Covid landscape as the race between vaccination and new mutations. It argued that not only is it a moral obligation but a practical necessity for those countries with the means to ensure the vaccination of those countries without for, in truth, none of us will be safe, until all of us are safe. This is undoubtedly true, but for me, it’s the moral question that remains. The question asked of Jesus, by a lawyer who was trying to limit his sense of connection and obligation, ‘but who is my neighbour?’.

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