I don’t mind admitting it. I thought I had read just about every religion-angle COVID-19 vaccine story that there was to read (and I say that just before heading out the door to drive deep into the Cumberland Mountains to get shot No. 1 at a small-county health clinic).
The Detroit Free Press published a long, long story the other day that certainly proved me wrong on that. The headline: “Vaccine-mobile brings COVID-19 shots to Dearborn mosque, helping to convince the hesitant.”
The key to the story was mentioned in an email from the GetReligion reader who (thank you readers who take the time to do this kind of thing) sent us the URL for this story. Here is part of her note:
What I really liked about this article was the way it presented vaccine concerns of the Metro Detroit Muslim community in the context of how the mosque met those concerns. Some of the concerns are unique to the Muslim community (such as the relationship of vaccination to the Ramadan fast) and others are more broad, but the article shows how this religious community is addressing them. The article quotes a variety of actual community members, which I always appreciate.
The Ramadan angle?
That’s the connection that I admit had not occurred to me. The key is explaining the specific link between the strict rules of the Ramadan fast and the simple act of getting a shot of vaccine. We are not talking, at this point, about conspiracy theory talk about the vaccine formulas containing traces of pork.
Here is the crucial part of the story, quoting Mirvat Kadouh, vice chair of the Islamic Center of America's Board of Trustees.
"We are trying to vaccinate as many people as we can before Ramadan," Kadouh said early Monday morning, spreading a plastic tablecloth over a folding table in a large conference room, where the Islamic Center's first COVID-19 vaccine clinic was about to begin.
