Texas Pastor Admits “I Was Wrong” About Vaccines After His Own COVID Scare July 26, 2021

Texas Pastor Admits “I Was Wrong” About Vaccines After His Own COVID Scare

By Hemant Mehta
July 26, 2021

Danny Reeves is the Senior Pastor at a Texas church called First Baptist Corsicana. And for much of the past year, his social media has been a non-stop flow of right-wing talking points like this one:

But that began to change last week when he was taken to the hospital for — you guessed it — COVID.

Let’s set aside the fact that he’s giving thanks to God instead of the doctors, nurses, and scientists who actually helped him stay alive.

Let’s ignore how he treats COVID like a personal enemy out to destroy him when it’s actually a disease that we can now beat fairly easily… with a vaccine.

Let’s forgive the request for prayers when he spent the past year spreading Republican propaganda that urged so many people to follow him down the route of rejecting a vaccine.

Here’s what’s interesting: During his recovery, Pastor Reeves appeared to accept the fact that he’s been wrong this whole time. You have to read between a lot of Christian mumbo-jumbo to find it, but he shifts his rhetoric from vaccine denial to vaccine hesitancy to vaccine acceptance. Here are some glimpses from a much longer thread:

Within a couple of days of that thread, in which he said vaccines weren’t bad but still a personal decision, Reeves went even further in the right direction:

“I was wrong.”

And then yesterday, he tweeted this:

God used me to save others. Please consider getting vaxxed. Learn from my story.

Look, this guy is not a profile of courage by any means. He’s a pastor who used his platform to spread misinformation that could’ve been deadly for the sort of people who believe his bullshit. But when he was the one affected by his lies, he suddenly “found religion” on the vaccine… at least to the point where he’s urging people to get vaccinated so they don’t have to go through what he just did.

It’s almost a running joke that Republicans don’t give a damn about certain issues until it affects them personally. They’re against same-sex marriage until they have a gay child or relative who wants to get married. They’re against stem cell research until there’s a chance it could save someone they love. They’re against drug abuse until they’re caught abusing drugs, at which point they think everyone should be sympathetic to the problem.

The irony is that the last sermon he preached, on July 4, was all about the problem of apathy. Reeves didn’t do the right thing even though a fellow pastor caught COVID last summer. Reeves didn’t do the right thing even though multiple staffers at his church caught COVID last December.

It wasn’t until he caught COVID that he decided vaccines were useful. All it took for him to come around to the side of responsibility was a hospitalization and his own brush with death.

It shouldn’t take a personal tragedy to get someone to do the right thing. Even now, Reeves is only saying the right thing half-heartedly. But I guess it’s something.

He’s not a hero. But if he lives, he could make a world of difference by telling everyone in his congregation to get their damn shots. As of this writing, the church hasn’t announced anything like that.

(via @RonFilipkowski)

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