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With millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses already plunged into American arms and hundreds of million more doses on the way, can healthcare professionals confidently receive the vaccines themselves and also recommend them for patients?

While responses to this question often involve important emotional factors that need to be addressed, this article focuses on three rational considerations: safety, efficacy and ethics.

When COVID-19 began sweeping around the globe in early 2020, career healthcare missionaries were faced with the option of staying in their countries of service to weather the storm or evacuating back to the United States before the borders closed. Without sufficient quantities of protective equipment for staff members, would rural mission hospitals be able to survive the pandemic? In countries where the medical infrastructure is limited at best, would there be enough resources? What about food and other supplies to help to meet the day-to-day needs if the airports closed?

I remember early on hearing in the news about a virus causing problems in China. It wasn’t long before we heard news of it spreading. As it began to spread, we were busy planning for March, our busiest month of mission trips. We send the most teams in the month of March, which gives mission opportunities for various schools during the annual spring break period. We sent our first two teams out before countries began closing their borders. While these two teams were still out of the country, we began cancelling our remaining trips. First it was for the month, then it became two and on through the summer. Before we knew it, we had cancelled every single remaining mission trip scheduled throughout the remainder of 2020—all as a result of COVID-19.

When 2020 started, I had a plan. A plan to follow God’s leading to serve on a mission trip in Southeast Cambodia. Like everyone else, those plans were completely changed when the pandemic hit.

But God.

I am blessed to live in central Kentucky. Driving through the picturesque countryside, horse farms are seen throughout the region. Many are ornate and extensive. Others are more modest. Others still have a few horses for personal pleasure and a barn. No matter, they all share this one specific feature in common: fences.

Introducing a new video-based teaching program from CMDA to equip healthcare professionals to share the love of Christ with their patients and colleagues

When I started medical school nearly 40 years ago, Roe v. Wade was only a decade old. At that time, there was little if any talk of abortion, but prevailing medical thought accepted legal abortion as a procedure that saved women’s lives.

I had spent more than four years wishing and praying for a CT scanner at Tenwek Hospital, a 300-bed referral center in rural southwest Kenya where I was serving as a missionary surgeon in Africa. For years, every patient who came to us with a closed head injury, an abdominal mass or recurrent abdominal pain had to be referred to a larger hospital in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya. But more often than not, patients wouldn’t or couldn’t go to Nairobi, regularly due to the high cost of travel and treatment.

My husband and I had just moved from Michigan to Texas for my first year of medical school at the University Health Science Center San Antonio. We walked up to the door of a house we had never visited, hand-in-hand wondering what the evening ahead would hold, with unfamiliar people, in this unfamiliar part of the country. As we arrived at the front door, we could hear the sounds of conversation mixed with laughter inside, along with the delicious aroma of cooking pizza tantalizing our taste buds. Another couple our age greeted us warmly while handing us an apron, sending us toward a buzzing kitchen to begin creating our “couple pizza” for the pizza bake-off contest! Wow! It was a Texas size welcome.