What is the global impact of COVID and the vaccines?

PROF CHANG: Hello, I'm Curtis Chang, I'm a theologian and former pastor and we here at Redeeming Babel have produced a series of videos to help Christians think about the vaccine. One of the ways that God helps Christians think is through trusted leaders in our faith community. One such leader is Rich Stearns. Rich is the President Emeritus of World Vision, the leading Christian agency addressing global poverty. And he was in fact the longest serving president of that organization. Rich, welcome and thanks so much for joining us.

RICH STEARNS: Yeah, I've been looking forward to this conversation, Curtis. Thanks for having me.

PROF CHANG: Rich, I'm gonna ask you the same question we ask all of our guests to start out with which is have you gotten the vaccine yourself?

RICH STEARNS: Well, Curtis, you know, I'm gonna disclose that I just turned 70 last month. And so I was very much in the target audience demographic of the COVID-19 virus, the group with the highest mortality rate right who contract the virus. So my wife and I were eager to get protected. And so we signed up as early as we could in January. We got both of our doses by mid February and I felt like screaming, "Free at last, free at last." We had another motive for being vaccinated other than our own safety. We hadn't seen four of our six grandsons in more than a year. And so after we got vaccinated, we were able to fly to Chicago to our newest grandson's baptism and reunite with the rest of our family as well. So there was a real benefit to feeling that we could travel safely now and be protected.

PROF CHANG: That's so wonderful to hear. I had the same experience of feeling that of that free at last. So it's great to hear. Now Rich, for decades you played a leading role in helping the Christian church think more, not just about ourselves in this country, but about the needs of the world, especially the global poor. So help us do that now with the vaccine and the pandemic. Like let's start with how has the pandemic affected the rest of the world, especially the global poor?

RICH STEARNS: Well you know what's happened here in the United States with COVID over the last 12 to 18 months has caused us frankly to turn very inwardly to our own problems, right? So we all struggled with this issue and how it affected our work, our families, you know, our freedoms. And so as a result, we kind of took our eye off the rest of the world. It was almost every man for themselves, right? We're gonna try to take care of ourselves and see what we need to do here. But as is the case with most things that are negative in our world, the poor are often affected more. They're affected more by natural disasters, by climate change, by diseases, you name it and the poorest of the poor are usually hit harder by these things. So in the case of COVID, as you would expect, developing countries don't have the most robust healthcare systems. So people in Tanzania or Sub-Saharan Africa or Bangladesh don't have the same ready access to treatments or to vaccines in their country. And so if you contract COVID in one of these countries, for the poorest of the poor, they won't be able to go to a hospital, they won't be able to receive therapies and treatments. There won't be a ventilator available for them if they need it or medicines that could help in mitigating the impact of the disease. And so COVID has had a devastating effect on people who live in poorer countries, and especially the poorest people in those countries. Just a few facts about this. First of all, the economic shocks have caused massive income losses for people who are living on the edge, people who don't have savings accounts or 401Ks or safety nets provided by their governments, unemployment insurance, bailout checks that come in the mail. So these people are living right on the edge. There's one estimate that 400 million jobs have been lost in the developing world in the last year, 400 million jobs. And economists estimate that the impact on the poor from COVID is twice as bad as the 2008, '09 global recession. And it's been estimated that 135 million more people have been driven into extreme poverty. That means living on less than two dollars a day. So 135 million, it's the first time in decades that global poverty has actually increased instead of decreased. It's been on a steady, slow decline. And this past year, 135 million more people were driven over the edge. Just a couple of other impacts on the poor, 1.6 billion students, billion students were not in school this past year. And these kids in developing countries, they don't have laptop computers and distance learning or remote learning. So that's a lost school year. In some cases, two school years have been lost by these young people in these countries. And another thing that you wouldn't think about, but there's a phenomenon in the developing world called early marriage. And early marriage takes place when a family who is poor and maybe they have three or four daughters and they have to feed these young girls. And so because of the pressures on these families, they want to marry their daughters off as quickly as possible so they become somebody else's responsibility. And so World Vision has worked very hard to prevent girls of age 12 or 13 from being forced into early marriage, which is a terrible tragedy typically for these girls. And now because of hunger and poverty, more of these girls are being pushed into early marriages to men in their 20s and 30s. So that's another kind of tragic impact of the disease. But if you just look at the human suffering that this disease is causing, we've seen it here in the United States in our nursing homes, but all you have to do right now is look at India. India is on fire with COVID, 300,000 to 400,000 cases a day recently. And the deaths are so great that they're literally doing open air crematoriums in fields and they're just burning hundreds and hundreds of bodies a day in open fields. But just think of the suffering. Those bodies that are being burned are somebody's mother, somebody's father, somebody's son, somebody's cousin. And it's just terrible what COVID has done globally in our world.

PROF CHANG: Rich, thank you so much for opening our eyes. You're totally right that we've gotten so self-focused that we don't fully realize the devastating damage that you're kind of even just sketching out for us. So what is the hope for the vaccine across the world to actually stem and reverse this damage? What's the hope and promise of the vaccine and what's happening with vaccine access across the world right now?

RICH STEARNS: Well again, you know, in terms of those of us getting in line to be vaccinated, the wealthy countries are way ahead of the poor countries, right? So wealthy countries, like the United States or United Kingdom, we bought up all the vaccine doses from the pharmaceutical companies and got in line ahead of poor countries. So this is not a surprise to somebody that's worked with global poverty all these years. There was just a feature on NPR this week, National Public Radio, where they said that vaccination rates, well, just for comparison, we just achieved in the United States, 50% of all adults have been fully vaccinated in our country. And something higher than that have had at least one dose, maybe 60%. So we're leading the world right now in vaccination rates and getting our population vaccinated. But in Sub-Saharan Africa, they estimate it's maybe one percent have had vaccinations, one percent. In India, I think it's around 10%. In Bangladesh, it's under five percent. So most of these countries, largely because they don't have vaccines to put in people's arms, they can't get them yet because the wealthy countries are buying them all up. So this is a real problem right now. Now even when they get the vaccines, they don't have the infrastructure to vaccinate their populations in the same way that the United States does. So that's gonna be a problem going forward. And you might ask, well why should American Christians actually care about what's happening in other countries? And I want to give you a couple of reasons. First of all, we're called to care about the least of these in our world. The scripture is filled with verses about our responsibility to care for the poor and the downtrodden and the neglected. And these are people made in the image of God and we're called to care about their lives as well as our own lives. But the second reason is self-interest. The pandemic is having just a devastating impact on the economy, on the global economy. And that will continue to impact the US supply chains and our economy as well for several years in the future. But there's also a health reason, that when the virus is out of control in a country like India, population of over a billion people and the virus is virtually out of control there, that virus constantly mutates and mutates and mutates. The more people that carry the virus, the more mutations. And some of these mutations are going to prove to be resistant to the vaccines we've developed. And so this whole cycle could repeat itself again and again and again if we don't help the rest of the world get this virus under control. You know, some new variant that comes out of India or Bangladesh could come to the US and we find that the vaccines don't work at all and here we go again, the same lockdown, shutdowns, masks, all of the things that we're trying to get away from finally are gonna come back in spades if we don't look to the rest of the world. This is a global problem that we have to solve together.

PROF CHANG: Rich you make such a great case how we're all completely interconnected and interdependent such that what happens in India can really affect us. And it is probably a great case of why vaccination is really a collective decision that we should be making too, that we should be unified in wanting everyone, as many people as possible to get vaccinated. I want to explore ways in which we may be affecting each other even in other ways beyond the economy or even just the biology of the vaccine, but how attitudes can actually shape and affect one another. And I want to ask you, in America, we have a large population of folks who are resistant and hesitant or suspicious of the vaccine, and many of them are actually Christians, evangelical Christians. How does the vaccine attitudes of American evangelical Christians here, how could it possibly affect potential receptivity of Christians in other parts of the country when and if vaccines finally arrive there?

RICH STEARNS: Well one of the things I learned in my travels with World Vision, I think I traveled to 60 different countries over the years I was there, is that Christians in the developing world often look to American Christians for all kinds of role modeling, right? They read the books by Rick Warren and Tim Keller and popular American Christian authors. They model even their churches after what they've seen in American churches. And so like it or not, deserve it or not, we are often role models for Christians around the world who look to Christians in the United States for information. So if they see us being resistant to the vaccine and maybe making it a political issue instead of a health issue, they're more likely to do that as well. They read American media and social media and they see how we're addressing issues like COVID-19 and they often look to us for answers. So we just have to realize that our behavior is impacting not just people in the United States, but it's impacting people a world away in Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and countries like that as well.

PROF CHANG: Well that's so profound because somebody who doesn't take the vaccine here thinking it's no big deal because I can go get a hospital, go to the hospital and get medical care, that same option, I think what you're saying, is not available to somebody in India and Africa. And so their decision to not take the vaccine is spreading this decision that actually has far more damaging consequences across the world. Is that essentially what you're saying?

RICH STEARNS: Yeah I mean that's a great point is if you do get the disease here and if you're not in a high risk group, you have a very high likelihood of surviving and thriving because of the good healthcare system that we have here. But you do the same thing in Tanzania or Kenya or South Sudan and you'll have a very different outcome. And people that might've done well in the United States in healthcare could easily die in one of these developing nations.

PROF CHANG: So Rich, bring us home here. If you had to summarize, what is your encouragement to American Christians with regard to the vaccine? What is that word?

RICH STEARNS: Yeah, my hope is that American Christians will lead by example. This is a wonderful opportunity for us to be a positive witness in our own country and in the world. It's an opportunity to demonstrate the love of Christ to our neighbors by doing something that will, yes, it will help us, but it will prevent other people from becoming sick. I like to read a little bit about church history and in the early centuries of the Christian Church in the Roman empire, there were two devastating plagues. One of them, they think might've been smallpox and then they don't know what the other one was but these plagues literally killed a third of the population of the Roman empire when they struck in the first couple of centuries. And while everyone else, the Pagans were fleeing the cities, they were fleeing to the countryside, they were avoiding the sick. In some cases, they were like pushing their own family members who were sick out onto the streets just heartlessly trying to protect themselves and then fleeing to the country so that they'd get out of the infected cities. Well, while the Pagans were doing that, the Christians were caring for the sick. They were putting their own lives at risk to care for the sick. Sometimes the Pagan sick, Pagans that were not Christians, but they were sick and they needed help and Christians stayed behind risking their own lives. And many, many Christians died caring for the sick during those first plagues. But it was such a powerful witness to the Pagan culture that after the plague subsided, many people came to Christ because of the modeling and the witness of these Christians that were self-sacrificial in caring for the sick. And so in our country, all we're being asked to do right now, we're not being asked to go into a plague zone and care for the sick risking our own lives, we're just being asked to take a vaccine to protect our own lives and to show other people that the vaccine is safe and effective and can make a huge difference. So this is an opportunity to witness in our culture for the greater good. And I would encourage people, and especially young people who largely, now young people haven't been vaccinated because they weren't eligible until recently and young people have a very high chance of having a mild case of COVID, right? But right now, if young people would get vaccinated, it would be an amazing thing to help the whole country. Just a short story, my daughter, one of my daughters has a friend who a couple of months ago decided that she would go to a wedding out of state. And it was a very small wedding. It was kind of a wedding in the middle of COVID and only 30 people were at that wedding. And so she went to go to the wedding of her friend and then flew home and then had some time with her parents at home and then discovered she was COVID positive and that 18 people of the 30 who attended the wedding had contracted COVID. And for my daughter's friend, it was a mild case, but her father and mother got infected and her father passed away a few weeks later out of COVID simply because she as a young person had gone to a wedding of a friend, a small wedding with masks, and had contracted the disease on that trip. And so if young people can get vaccinated, you never know whose life, which loved one's life you might save by getting vaccinated yourself so that you don't bring that disease to your father, your mother, your grandfather, your aunt. So I would just encourage people to do it. It's painless, it takes just a few minutes and it's just an amazing blessing. It's what we've been praying for, right, all these months, that there'd be a cure, that there'd be something that could prevent this disease from spreading. And now we have it.

PROF CHANG: Rich, thank you so much for sharing your wise and challenging words.

RICH STEARNS: Well, it's been great to be with you. I really appreciate the work you're doing and we just need to get the word out in Christian circles that this is a real opportunity for us to share the love of Christ with our neighbors.

PROF CHANG: Amen to that. Thank you, Rich.