A bunch of San Diego cops who already received exemptions to COVID vaccine mandates are now demanding they be exempt from even being checked for COVID, claiming that the swab tests also violate their Christian faith. It’s just more proof that these religious exemptions are nothing more than lazy excuses to avoid perfectly sensible safety precautions.
You may recall that many conservative Christians asked for exemptions to the vaccine because they claimed the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines “employed or benefitted from the cell lines of aborted fetuses.” That connection between abortion and the vaccines was minimal at best. More importantly, the exact same claim could be made about other vaccines that those same people never objected to in the past—along with drugs like Tylenol, Pepto-Bismol, and Tums. How sincere were their convictions, really, if they said no to the COVID vaccine but yes to aspirin? The bottom line was that Christians (and it was almost always Christians) didn’t have some constitutional right to their job when their unvaccinated presence put other people in danger.
Those religious exemptions flourished, and it made our collective immune response much weaker than it needed to be, which is a major reason we’re still seeing new COVID variants infect the public.