I understand why ministers and preachers want their congregations back in the building. Churches are no different from social and service organizations. Most club and church memberships meet weekly and develop a friendship with others and a routine. Churches operate on donations at their services and service organizations often do the same.

Churches are different in one respect. Ministers, preachers, custodians and others are paid employees. The bigger the congregation, the bigger the payroll. Some large and mega churches spend over a million in salaries. Most don’t have enough tucked away to keep paying salaries for long. They need people in the pews putting checks, cash or electronic payments in the “baskets.”

The other reason is the routine and one I learned over twenty-eight years ago as president of a service club. People who attended every week formed a routine and enjoyed people who they would not normally see otherwise. When people miss a few meetings they lose the routine need and will often not return as often or not at all. Being out for six, eight, ten weeks will end a lot of organizations and give club members and congregation members a chance to stop going or to go someplace else.

Whichever is the reason for talking their congregation back into the pews, the people will be told it is “God’s Will” if they get sick or die.

As a news junkie, I hear a great push to fast track a vaccine. I understand why the rush and why the administration wants to fast track it, and why so many experts want more testing on human subjects before massive use. I, and they, remember other fast tracked vaccines and drugs.

The first polio vaccine by Dr. Jonas Sauk was conducted on kids from orphanages. It was successful–for a while. Before it went out to many others, they found that every one of orphans had a severe case of polio. The vaccine was weakened, retested, and mass produced.

There is a reason not to fast track a vaccine and give it to millions. Some races, ethnics, age groups, compromised, and of course, pregnant react differently. Remember the last class’s experiment with a fast track sleeping pill called Thalidomide? It caused thousands of women to give birth to babies without arms and legs.

This is just two examples of fantastic blunders in which the FDA didn’t research drug company’s claims to their testing of human subjects. I believe the World needs vaccines so we can over populate Earth. As I talk with my senior citizen relatives around the country, none of us will be in the front of the lines.

Let’s think about how to either keep from getting the virus or how to get over it over it once we got it. Apparently we can keep from getting it by staying in the steam room or maybe the warm pool room of one of Trump’s resorts. Several times Trump said heat and high humidity will kill it. If that was true it wouldn’t have been in the southern hemisphere’s summer. Brazil’s death toll is rapidly climbing. Its heat and humidity hasn’t slowed it.

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern went straight to the countrywide lockdown when the virus first appeared. Today they have no cases and a fully functioning economy. Why? They paid attention to what the WHO said and didn’t keep calling it a hoax as people died.

As people died here, our President partied, campaigned, denied, and said he had everything under control. With over 61,000 dead and increasing, he still is patting himself on the back by saying it would have been much worse without him in charge!

Of course, we can’t overlook the medicinal remedies he has espoused as cures. They have been promoted by his celebrity friends before the FDA said supposed cures didn’t help and could be dangerous. Commonsense says don’t put household cleaners into the body or stick a u-v light up your butt. Still thousands called their local, state and federal poison control agencies.

We are behind the eight ball while those countries that reacted quickly are opening up. Almost all New Zealanders love Ardern for her quick action on guns and the virus. We, on the other hand, are greatly divided and can’t believe our leadership.