A Texas evangelist preacher and member of Donald Trump’s faith advisory council told parishioners to skip the flu shot in favor of prayer, inviting scorn from concerned medical professionals and epidemiologists.



“Jesus himself gave us the flu shot,” Gloria Copeland said in a video posted last Wednesday that has slowly begun to go viral, no pun intended, after some observers highlighted Copeland’s ties to Trump.

“Just keep saying that ‘I’ll never have the flu. I’ll never have the flu,’” she continued. “Inoculate yourself with the word of God. Flu, I bind you off the people in the name of Jesus. Jesus himself gave us the flu shot. He redeemed us from the curse of flu.”

Copeland’s advice is standard fare in the charismatic Christian tradition, but is also medically unsound as the US faces its worst flu epidemic in a decade.

“So far this year the cumulative rate of hospitalization is the highest since we began tracking in this way,” Dr Anne Schuchat, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told reporters late last week after the rate climbed above 50 per 100,000. Schuchat is less than a week on the job after Trump’s prior CDC director, Dr Brenda Fitzgerald, resigned over financial conflicts of interest.

This year’s tough strain of influenza has hit children especially hard. Sixteen children died of the flu in the week ended 27 January, bringing total pediatric deaths to 53 for the season, according to the CDC’s weekly report.

Medical professionals advise that flu shots are an important part of a holistic prevention strategy, even though this year’s vaccine has been calculated at an effective rate of as low as 10%. Health workers often report that misconceptions about the flu vaccine actually causing or contributing to the outbreak (it doesn’t) can stymie their efforts to fight the bug.

Also, empirically more helpful than appeals to providence or, for some, relying on the social media rumor mill: frequent hand-washing and staying home when sick.

Trump’s faith advisory council is a veritable who’s who of rightwing televangelists. It has stuck with him while he has had to disband two business advisory councils and an infrastructure panel due to defections by key members.