Science is too often thought of as a counter to faith or spirituality; one being grounded in the knowable and discoverable, the other being unexplainable and divine. But in this, the season to celebrate miracles, scientists have delivered us nothing short of one: a vaccine for the devastating COVID-19 virus that has upended life across the planet for almost a full year and taken 1.7 million lives.

On Friday morning, Vice President Mike Pence rolled up his sleeve and did a service to the country by getting a shot in the arm in front of the cameras. As the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the one Pence received, is rolled out across the country along with the newly approved Moderna vaccine, front-line healthcare workers and those at greatest risk from COVID-19 are among those being inoculated.