ABSTRACT
The initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic were characterised by denial, suspicion, myths, mistrust, inaction and conspiracy theories, which impacted on the people’s attitude towards vaccination hesitancy, resistance and low vaccine uptake despite their availability in Zimbabwe. Faced with such resistance, the government introduced measures meant to coerce people to receive vaccines such as the exclusion from public transport and unpaid leave for unvaccinated civil servants. Against this backdrop, the chapter seeks to explore the responses of the Roman Catholic Church and the Reformed Church in Zimbabwe to COVID-19 vaccination. We argue that the intervention of religion played a pivotal role in influencing the majority of the mainline church members to embrace the vaccination programme in Bikita and Masvingo Districts. Using fieldwork data collected between September 2020 and August 2022 through qualitative research methodology and a lived religion conceptual framework, the study established that the mainline Christian responses in the rural and urban settings were varied but generally revealed a positive transformation towards COVID-19 vaccination and concomitant containment measures. The chapter concludes that the adherents of both the Roman Catholic Church and the Reformed Church in Zimbabwe in Masvingo and Bikita Districts overall responded positively towards the vaccination programme in Zimbabwe.
