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KILLEEN, Texas (KWTX) – Jewell Shelton, 87, who lives alone in her Killeen home, will tell you she lives with the Lord and never leaves home without him.
She’s a woman of faith and that faith has guided her all of her life. Shelton has never been inoculated against any diseases and she’s lived through some of the worst outbreaks.
“I lived in an era with polio, mumps, chicken pox, measles,” Shelton said, “I don’t need (vaccines) because I was always told ‘you got God, you’re going to be okay.’”
Living through yet another global health crisis – the COVID-19 pandemic – one of Shelton’s sons began pushing her to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
It didn’t go well.
“I told him that if God wanted me to get it, then I would get it,” Shelton said. She continued rejecting the vaccine but kept on praying, she says, for guidance.
That guidance came weeks later when her 91-year-old sister, also a woman of faith, died of natural causes.
Shelton said she found a COVID-19 vaccination card in her sister’s belongings. That created a change of heart for Shelton and eventually a change in her vaccination status.
“I felt so much peace about it,” she said. “God put doctors on this earth to help us and if we have faith in God first and then in the doctors, then why not?”
Shelton’s decision had an impact on someone more than a thousand miles away in Chicago: her son Albert Heath.
Heath had decided he would never get the COVID-19 vaccine.
In fact, he says he hosts a radio show where he had been encouraging his listeners to avoid the vaccine.
But he says his mother’s faith in God and science changed his own heart too.
“Its a scary situation,” said Heath, “She lived through the Tuskegee airmen experiment and so many other different things in life that seemed like the cards were stacked against us and she made it. So this decision to get the vaccine wasn’t an easy one for her,” he said.
Heath also got the vaccine this week and is now spreading a different message to his audience.
“To everyone out there who is on the fence, I say let your conscience be your guide. She let hers be hers,” he said.
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