It is an honor to stand in a tradition that has improved many lives throughout the centuries. In this I agree with Dr. Poland that much of our tradition represents common grace. However, Dr. Poland’s article leads the unsuspecting reader to believe that the “common graces” of masking, social distancing, and vaccinations saved us from the pandemic. Nothing could be further from the truth.

April 2025

The Rev. Dr. Gregory Poland’s “Seven Lessons on Public Health and the Local Church”1 represents a very biased one-sided perspective of the Covid-19 pandemic and is fraught with significant medical and theological misrepresentations and errors. If Dr. Poland’s conclusions represent the official position of the PCA, then I would argue that we have in fact learned nothing significant from the past five years. This rebuttal presents the other side of the story.

Introduction

I have not advised the White House or the Department of Defense and I don’t have an academic appointment. Nor am I a teaching or ruling elder in the PCA. I do attend a large PCA church in southcentral Pennsylvania, having arrived at a Reformed understanding of faith from my Anabaptist upbringing. Along with my wife, we represent 1% of physicians in the USA who are not employed by a corporate hospital, insurance, or government entity. I’ve been practicing in the trenches of an agrarian community as a country doctor for the past several decades.2 We had the privilege of successfully treating hundreds of Covid patients through our office during the C193 pandemic. I, along with Dr. Poland, have pledged “my life in the service of humanity,” acknowledging that “the health and life of my patient will be my first consideration.”4

It’s unlikely that anything I write will change Dr. Poland’s mind. That isn’t specifically my goal. As Dr. John West writes, “If you have already embraced Stockholm Syndrome Christianity, I doubt this book will persuade you to abandon it. But if you are one of the growing number of Christians troubled by the shocking failures of Christian leaders at all levels—and you want to become part of the solution—this book is for you.”5 This rebuttal is for those “growing numbers.”

Dr. Poland is a well-published academic physician-scientist with over 500 publications. He is familiar with the protocol of adding conflicts of interest at the end of journal articles. This was conspicuously absent in the byFaith publication. At the risk of “poisoning the well,” I think it’s important to state those conflicts upfront. Even though they are at the end of an article, I generally read them first, because it’s through those conflicts that I interpret everything else. Here is just one of those declaration of interests:

GAP offers consultative advice on vaccine development to Merck, Medicago, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Pasteur, Emergent Biosolutions, Dynavax, Genentech, Eli Lilly, Affinivax, Novavax, Bavarian Nordic, AstraZeneca, Exelixis, Regeneron, Janssen, Vyriad, Moderna, and Genevant Sciences. GAP holds patents related to vaccinia and measles peptide vaccines. RBK and GAP hold a patent related to vaccinia peptide vaccines. GAP and RBK have received grant funding from ICW Ventures for preclinical studies on a peptide-based COVID-19 vaccine…6

For many years he has been a proponent of compulsory influenza vaccination7 despite the fact that a study in 2017 critiques the widespread assumption that institutional vaccination of workers protects patients, stating that “current scientific data are inadequate to support the ethical implementation of enforced HCW [health care worker] influenza vaccination.”8 A Cochrane 2018 database review concluded that the “certainty of evidence for the small reductions in hospitalisations [sic] and time off work is low.”9 It’s beyond the scope of this rebuttal to address the impossibility of using biblical law to defend compulsory medical mandates—including vaccination.10

American novelist Upton Sinclair was known to tell his audiences, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”11 The following four rebuttals to Dr. Poland’s arguments aim to elucidate that understanding.

Rebuttal #1: Science Does Not Have the Final Word and Is Meant to Be an Open Debate

I think Dr. Poland believes the first part of the above statement, as he states that “science can say nothing of moral or theological truth.” However, he mentions “science” quite frequently without actually defining what is meant by science. He argues that Christians’ rejection of “science outright” is nearly akin to rejecting the created order established by our Sovereign Lord, yet he never specifically identifies what science is being rejected.

By inference, those questions are answered by his reference to opinions different from his own as anti-science, conspiracy theories, and misinformation—all epithets used routinely during C19 to discredit, disembody, and disenfranchise those who were unwilling to follow a mockingbird narrative. In doing so, he commits the fallacy of argumentum ad verecundiam, or an appeal to authority, which “occurs when one argues that a position is true because it is held by an authoritative individual, institution or organization.”12 One is reminded of Dr. Fauci stating that criticizing him was “really criticizing science because I represent science.”13

Over the past 5 years we were repeatedly told to “trust the science.” But as Sir Patrick Vallance, the former chief scientific advisor for No. 10 Downing Street noted, “There is no such thing as ‘the’ science [because] science by its definition is a moving body of knowledge that tries to overturn things by testing the whole time.”14

Dr. West notes that calling views different from one’s own anti-science “betrays a strikingly unsophisticated understanding of science.” He goes on to state:

The more one knows about the history of the scientific enterprise, the more skeptical he or she is likely to be about equating the current consensus view of science with science itself. Science is a wonderful human enterprise, but scientists can be just as blinded by their prejudices as anyone else…

Far from being anti-science, dissenting views in the scientific community help science thrive by counteracting groupthink and sparking debates that can lead to fresh discoveries.15

Dr. West further warns, “When scientific dissenters aren’t allowed to be heard, theologians and pastors may end up making embarrassing theological concessions that aren’t required by…science.”16 Disagreement with a prevailing narrative doesn’t automatically make one “anti-science.” One only needs to remember Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis who suggested around 1847 that the cause of puerperal fever was from physicians not properly washing their hands between the pathology lab and the obstetrical ward of the Vienna General Hospital. “He faced fierce opposition from some of the most prominent physicians in Europe,”17 and unfortunately died in an insane asylum in 1865 at the age of 47. The Semmelweis Doctrine of infectious disease wasn’t accepted until the late 19th century, nearly 50 years after its proposal.

What Dr. Poland calls science ends up being scientism—which is by definition “a religion where you are expected to unquestionably trust the pronouncements of the anointed ‘scientific experts.’”18

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