Tag Archives: Amish Community

Lying For Campaign Purposes

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I suppose candidates’ lying isn’t either new or unusual (unfortunately), but some lies can mislead with serious consequences. The Covid pandemic taught us to do our own research on medical issues. I have heard many people say that they regretted taking the Covid vaccine. I haven’t heard one person say that they regretted not getting the Covid vaccine. There are currently questions as to which vaccines are absolutely necessary and which are not. Until those questions can be answered, politicians should not be using vaccines to make political points.

On Monday, The American Thinker posted an article about the discussion surrounding measles cases in America.

The article reports:

On August 25th, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro held a press conference to address the measles outbreak unfolding in his state.  He started by saying:

“Just this morning, the Pennsylvania Department of Health announced the first two measles-associated deaths in Pennsylvania in 35 years. Both individuals were from Lancaster County, and both were unvaccinated.”

During the press conference, Governor Shapiro didn’t share any details about the identities of those who died or about the deaths themselves, instead choosing to focus on the issue of vaccination. He claimed the measles outbreak isn’t unique to Pennsylvania, that declining vaccination rates are a national issue, and that current leadership at HHS is to blame for the problem.

Now, after much confusion and back-and-forth between PA authorities and the HHS, we are learning the details behind the two “measles-associated” deaths. Both victims were infants born in the Amish community of Lancaster County, PA.

    • First Infant: Passed away shortly after birth from a lacerated spleen. Although the infant tested positive for measles contracted from the mother, the virus was not the cause of death.
    • Second Infant: Suffered from a severe genetic disorder that compromised her immune system, making her exceptionally vulnerable to fatal complications from measles or other infections.

The article notes a few things about the MMR vaccine:

The MMR vaccination rate in the U.S. stands at 92% — slightly lower than five years ago, but still high enough to maintain herd immunity nationwide. By contrast, the vaccination rate within the Amish community is reported to be around 25%. Consequently, Governor Shapiro’s claim that measles is “a national problem” is flat-out false. The current measles outbreak is localized to the Amish community in Lancaster County, PA. Using a national platform to claim the entire country is equally affected is a clear politicization of public health.

Generally speaking, the Amish community children are healthier than the average American child. That probably has a lot to do with eating food fresh off of the farm and living in an atmosphere that is very close to nature compared to the world other children live in.

It’s sad that the Governor saw fit to use the tragedy of two families to make an invalid political point.

A Quiet Attack On Religious Freedom

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Jenna’s Side, a substack blog, posted an article on Monday about New York State’s financial attack on Amish schools.

The article reports:

In a display of audacious evil, the Empire State has fined three tiny Amish schools a combined $118,000 for allowing unvaccinated children to sit in single-room schoolhouses with other unvaccinated children. The schools—Dygert Road, Pleasant View, and Shady Lane—have accumulated $52,000, $46,000 and $20,000 in penalties, respectively. Under New York law, each breach carries a fine of up to $2,000, and the state considers each day an unvaccinated child attends school a separate violation. In this case, however, officials graciously calculated the first two schools’ penalties using just one day of violations per child. (If they were counting every day, ten pureblood kids showing up for a single school week could theoretically add another $100,000 to the tab.)

…The three schools in question aren’t sprawling state campuses where kids are being bussed in from fourteen zip codes. These are mostly one-room, Little House on the Prairie-style classrooms serving a dozen or two kids from the surrounding community. They sit on private land. They get no public funding. The families keep to themselves. They aren’t asking taxpayers to pay for their healthcare, their kick scooters, or their beard oil. All they’re asking is to be left alone.

Apparently, this is an impossible ask.

When the fines were first imposed, the Amish sued. They lost in federal district court. Then they lost at the Second Circuit. Then the Supreme Court vacated that judgment and told the appeals court to reconsider in light of its recent religious-liberty precedent. So the Second Circuit reviewed the case and basically said “Yeah, still no.”

One has to wonder what grave threat a self-sufficient, self-isolated, charmingly old-timey community presents to the region at large. I mean, if the rest of the state is all juiced up on the full glorious regime of immune-boosting jabs, how are the Amish a danger even if they hitch up their buggies, breach containment, and storm the closest Target?

The Amish are located in a number of states. They are small, peace-loving, old-fashioned communities that are a threat to no one (except maybe some of the control freaks in government positions). Their disease rates are considerably lower than those of the people outside their communities, and the Amish are a threat to no one. The State of New York needs to leave them alone.

Fighting Fraud Before The Voting Ends

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On Friday, Just the News posted an article about some of the challenges some areas of the country are experiencing in keeping our elections honest.

The article notes:

In the aftermath of the messy 2020 election, Michigan police sent to the FBI a strong body of evidence documenting a multi-state scheme to submit fraudulent voter applications. Three years later, nobody can explain what the bureau did with the case as a similar scheme has now surfaced in the battleground state of Pennsylvania with less than two weeks to go before Election Day.

If criminals are charged for their actions, those actions tend not be be repeated.

The article reports:

Prosecutors in Lancaster County said Friday they had uncovered a large-scale scheme to submit fraudulent voter applications that were collected at shopping malls and other locations. Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams told a news conference that detectives have found about 60% of some 2,500 voter registrations submitted in recent days to the county’s election office were fraudulent.

“At this point, it is believed that the fraudulent voter registrations are connected to a large-scale canvassing operation for voter registrations that date back to June,” Adams said. The prosecutor said that while detectives continue to review applications, they have confirmed fake names, identifications, and signatures were used to submit applications and create potentially fake voters. In some cases, real voters’ names were used but the voter said they neither approved nor signed the registrations.

…”Staff noticed that numerous applications appeared to have the same handwriting (and) were filled out on the same day,” Adams said during the press conference. “The confirmed indicators of fraud that detectives came across were inaccuracies with the addresses listed on the applications, fake and false personal identification information, as well as false names,” she continued. “Also, applications that had names that did not match the provided Social Security information.”

Lancaster is a politically influential county in the battleground state and home to a large Amish population that both parties have courted. Pennsylvania’s State Department, which oversees elections, praised Lancaster County for its quick actions.

It has been reported that much of the Amish population is supporting President Trump because of government over-regulation of their farms.

The article also details some of the fraud found in Michigan. Please follow the link to the article for further details.

The Joys Of Herd Immunity

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Yesterday Townhall posted an article about the Amish community and the coronavirus. I recommend that you follow the link and read the entire article. It has a number of really good points. There is a lot of common sense in the Amish approach to the coronavirus that the rest of America and some of the American medical community has not yet discovered.

Here are a few highlights from the article:

Contrary to assurances that hospitals would be overwhelmed and bodies would be piled up in the street unless everyone locked down, masked up, and got a Covid vaccination, the Amish community – a technology-eschewing Christian group generally distrustful of government – actually managed through the pandemic just fine after a brief shutdown in early 2020.

“There’s no evidence of any more deaths among the Amish than in places that shut down tight,” Attkisson (Sharyl Attkisson, an investigative reporter and host of “Full Measure”) said. “Some claim there were fewer here. That’s without masking, staying at home, or vaccines.”

The article notes that some of the Amish customs may have created herd immunity:

…When they take communion, they dump their wine into a cup and they take turns to drink out of that cup. So, you go the whole way down the line, and everybody drinks out of that cup, if one person has coronavirus, the rest of church is going to get coronavirus. The first time they went back to church, everybody got coronavirus.

The Amish had a remarkable attitude toward the coronavirus:

Even those who believed that they had Covid tended not to get tested. Their approach tended to be, “I’m sick. I know I’m sick. I don’t have to have someone else telling me I’m sick.” Or a concern that if they got a positive test, they would then be asked to really dramatically limit what they were doing in a way that might be uncomfortable for them. So, we don’t have that testing number.

…Yeah, all the Amish know we got herd immunity. Of course we got herd immunity! The whole church gets coronavirus. We know we got coronavirus. We think we’re smarter than everybody. We shouldn’t be bragging, but we think we did the right thing.

The article concludes:

‘Herd immunity.’ The medical establishment will tell you there’s no such thing, yet somehow it’s working for the Amish, who are now thriving while much of the rest of the world still languishes under Covid tyranny.

Maybe it’s time we stop thinking of the Amish as ‘backward.’

 

Great News–But It Was Not An Easy Trip

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Yesterday The U.K. Daily Mail reported that the Amish community in New Holland Borough, Pennsylvania, has achieved herd immunity to the coronavirus.

The article reports:

The administrator of a medical center in the heart of the Amish community in New Holland Borough estimates as many as 90 per cent of Plain families have since had at least one family member infected, and that this religious enclave achieved what no other community in the country has: herd immunity. 

‘So, you would think if COVID was as contagious as they say, it would go through like a tsunami; and it did,’ said Allen Hoover, an Old Order Mennonite and administrator of the Parochial Medical Center, a clinic that primarily serves the Plain community.

The article also notes:

By late April, when Pennsylvania was still under stay-at-home orders, the Plain community had resumed worship services, where they shared communion cups and holy kisses, a church greeting among believers.

Infections quickly followed.

‘It was bad here in the spring; one patient right after another,’ said Pam Cooper, a physician’s assistant at the Parochial Medical Center.

Just how deep into the community the infections spread is impossible to know. Hoover speculated that among those displaying symptoms, fewer than 10% consented to be tested.

In late April and early May, when Hoover said the virus ran unimpeded through the Plain community, the county’s positivity rate — the percent of positive tests — exceeded 20%, its highest of the pandemic, according to Covid Act Now, a nonprofit that provides local disease data. (Last year, the World Health Organization recommended governments use a rate of 5% or lower for two weeks as the threshold for reopening.)

If Hoover’s assessment is accurate, and if more Plain patients had been tested, the positivity rate could very well have been higher.

While so few were tested, many exhibited all the symptoms that have become so emblematic of the disease.

Cooper estimated the medical center saw — on average — nearly a dozen infections a day, or roughly 15% of the patients it serves daily.

The disease, as has been true in the wider community, knew no boundaries. Hoover became infected in November; at least one of his children was infected twice.

‘It really went through pretty quick, in a few weeks,’ Cooper said.

The number of patients ebbed in the summer before picking up again in the fall, although not at nearly the rate as was seen in the spring.

Cases now are rare. Hoover said Tuesday that the center hasn’t had a patient present with COVID-19 symptoms in roughly six weeks.

Please note how reluctant the medical types in the article are to admit that this community might actually be done with the coronavirus. The article also fails to note how many people died from the coronavirus during the time it was going through the community.