Kathy Hochul, the Democrat Governor of New York City and successor to disgraced Gov. Andrew Cuomo, said on Sunday that those who refuse to get vaccinated against COVID are not heeding God's call to do so. The 63 year old governor took to Brooklyn's Christian Cultural Center over the weekend to call upon New Yorkers to be her "apostles" and help encourage unvaccinated folks to get the COVID jab.
"I wear my 'vaccinated' necklace all the time to say I'm vaccinated. All of you, yes, I know you're vaccinated, you're the smart ones," Gov. Hochul declared, as reported by Breitbart. "But there's people out there who aren't listening to God and what God wants."
The New York governor was referring to those who refused to get the COVID vaccine. Hochul said that after she claimed she prayed "a lot" during the pandemic, "God did answer our prayers. He made the smartest men and women, the scientists, the doctors, the researchers - he made them come up with a vaccine. That is from God to us and we must say, thank you, God."
"I need you to be my apostles," Hochul told the audience, adding that New Yorkers can "love one another" by getting vaccinated against COVID. The New York governor said, "Jesus taught us to love one another and how do you show that love but to care about each other enough to say, please get the vaccine because I love you and I want you to live."
In mid-September, Hochul vowed to fight back against a lawsuit filed by a group of Christian health care practitioners who decried New York's COVID vaccine mandate as unconstitutional because it failed to provide religious exemptions, AP News reported. A federal judge temporarily blocked New York from enforcing the vaccine mandate's clause on prohibiting religious exemptions.
"Everyone from the Pope on down is encouraging people to get vaccinated," Hochul countered, referring to the current Roman Catholic Church's Pope Francis. The group of Christian health care workers claimed that they do not want to be forced to get vaccinated with an experimental drug that uses aborted fetal cell lines in its testing, development, or production. All three COVID vaccines approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, have used fetal cell lines during its research and development.
The Christian group's representative, Thomas More Society senior counsel Stephen Crampton believes that the court will rule for people's rights to refuse getting vaccinated on the grounds of their religious beliefs, regardless if they are part of a religious group that is endorsing the COVID vaccines.
"My sincere religious convictions may not be 100% the same as the leader of my church or my denomination and the law respects that and it should," Crampton said.
Crampton assured however, that the Christian group he represents are not "anti-vax" in general, despite the fact that the use of human cell lines has long been around, specifically for widely-accepted vaccines for rubella, chickenpox, shingles and Hepatitis A. Aside from New York, seven other states do not provide religious exemption for school and childcare immunization requirements.
EDITOR'S NOTE:
Christians should be careful not to take the words Gov. Hochul used, no matter how "religious" they sound, as if they were from the very heart and mouth of God. The Bible still is the ultimate standard by which Christians should make decisions.
In South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem's words about the Biden administration, "they many times talk about being religious. But I think that it's really time for all of us to look at the actions of our leaders and see if they line up with a word of God."
