When it comes to actions taken to address the Covid-19 threat, hindsight is still very much underway. For your consideration: a story and outcome you probably aren’t hearing much about anywhere else. It takes place in the heart of Amish country.
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania: thousands of families lead lives largely separate from modern America.
The Amish are a Christian group that emphasizes the virtuous over the superficial. They don’t usually drive, use electricity, or have TVs. And during the Covid-19 outbreak, they became subjects in a massive social and medical experiment.
Sharyl: So, it’s safe to say there was a whole different approach here in this community when coronavirus broke out than many other places?
Calvin Lapp: Absolutely.
Calvin Lapp is Amish Mennonite.
Lapp: There’s three things the Amish don’t like. And that’s government— they won’t get involved in the government, they don’t like the public education system— they won’t send their children to education, and they also don’t like the health system. They rip us off. Those are three things that we feel like we’re fighting against all the time. Well, those three things are all part of what Covid is.
After a short shutdown last year, the Amish chose a unique path that led to Covid-19 tearing through at warp speed. It began with an important religious holiday in May.
Lapp: 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.
Lapp says they weren’t denying coronavirus, they were facing it head on.
Lapp: It’s a worse thing to quit working than dying. Working is more important than dying. But to shut down and say that we can’t go to church, we can’t get together with family, we can’t see our old people in the hospital, we got to quit working? It’s going completely against everything that we believe. You’re changing our culture completely to try to act like they wanted us to act the last year, and we’re not going to do it.
Steve Nolt is a scholar on Amish and Mennonite culture, and Mennonite himself. He’s studying Amish news publications to analyze community-wide trends.
Sharyl: So, are you saying, as of about May of 2020, things kind of went back to normal in the Amish community?
Steve Nolt: For the most part, yeah, by the middle of May, it’s sort of like back to a typical behavior again.
That also meant avoiding hospitals.
Nolt: I know of some cases in which Amish people refused to go to the hospital, even when they were very sick because if they went there, they wouldn’t be able to have visitors. And it was more important to be sick, even very sick at home and have the ability to have some people around you than to go to the hospital and be isolated.
Then, last March, remarkable news. The Lancaster County Amish were reported to be the first community to achieve “herd immunity,” meaning a large part of a population had been infected with Covid-19 and became immune.
Some outsiders are skeptical, and solid proof is hard to come by.
Nolt: 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.
Lapp: We didn’t want the numbers to go up, because then they would shut things more. What’s the advantage of getting a test?
One thing’s clear: there’s no evidence of any more deaths among the Amish than in places that shut down tight— some claim there were fewer here. That’s without masking, staying at home, or another important measure.
Sharyl: Did most of the community, at least the adults, get the Covid-19 vaccine?
Nolt: Again, we don’t have data on that, but I think it’s pretty clear that in percentage terms, relatively few did.
Lapp: Oh, we’re glad all the English people got their Covid vaccines. That’s great. Because now we don’t have to wear a mask, we can do what we want. So good for you. Thank you. We appreciate it. Us? No, we’re not getting vaccines. Of course not. We all got the Covid, so why would you get a vaccine?
By staying open, the Amish here have one tangible 2020 accomplishment few others can claim.
Lapp: We have this joke: when everybody else started walking, we started running. We made more money in the last year than we ever did. It was our best year ever.
Did the Amish really find a magic formula? They say yes. And they don’t care who doubts it.
Lapp: 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.
Sharyl (on-camera): Nolt, the scholar, is publishing a paper on the Amish social response to government mandates and Covid-19.
https://fullmeasure.news/news/shows/amish-covid
On YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/O1DgWYdukZU
That is one side of the story. The fact is there are many obese older Amish. Dozens of Amish died from Covid. Not at all convinced there were less Amish that died. One Amish man said he’s sure their children had covid. They didn’t want to get tested so they could go to their farmers market. I could say a lot more.
What we must consider is the time, or lack of it, that these vaccines came on the market.
Vaccines can take anytime from 3 to 10 years, sometimes as long as 15 years, before they are deemed safe to give to the public. Very strict tests must be made. But these vaccines were available in just a few short months. Why?
People were not dropping dead as if they had the plague, Ebola, smallpox, or anthrax. So why the big push for inoculation?
Even after the double shot of anti-covid19 vaccine people are now supposed to get booster shots. If the vaccine is so good why the follow up?
I believe the pharmaceutical companies just see this as a means to make enormous profits through the fear that many people have about covid 19.
The profits from these vaccines run into the billions of dollars with no end in sight to say to people “You are fully protected now from cov 19”
The pharmaceutical companies are quite content to have people vaccinated and have booster shots as long as the people live.
I believe in the herd immunity is the best method for protection. Get the disease and get over it. Not to spend the rest of life in requiring unnecessary booster shots.
Good on you Amish communities and other anti vaxers. You have it right in your approach to covid 19.
What we must consider is the time, or lack of it, that these vaccines came on the market.
Vaccines can take anytime from 3 to 10 years, sometimes as long as 15 years, before they are deemed safe to give to the public. Very strict tests must be made. But these vaccines were available in just a few short months. Why?
People were not dropping dead as if they had the plague, Ebola, smallpox, le or anthrax. So why the big push for inoculation?
Even after the double shot of anti-covid19 vaccine people are now supposed to get booster shots. If the vaccine is so good why the follow up?
I believe the pharmaceutical companies just see this as a means to make enormous profits through the fear that many people have about covid 19.
The profits from these vaccines run into the billions of dollars with no end in sight to say to people “You are fully protected now from cov 19”
The pharmaceutical companies are quite content to have people vaccinated and have booster shots as long as the people live.
I believe in the herd immunity is the best method for protection. Get the disease and get over it. Not to spend the rest of life in requiring unnecessary booster shots.
Good on you Amish communities and other anti vaxers. You have it right in your approach to covid 19.
I think this approach is a valid one in certain circumstances. If you are in a small close knit community, then the virus will go through, killing some, making some ill, and then it will be done. Maybe 1% of the community will die, but life goes on for everyone else. Judging by the size of Amish communities this would be maximum a few hundred people in the larger ones, but for many small communities 1% would only be a few people. Doesn’t sound too bad.
However, this is not a valid response on a national or international level. If 1% of the US population died, that would be 3 million people. That would be unacceptable. Also, the virus has a chance of mutation in each person it infects. If a country allows everyone to get infected, it has millions even billions of chances to mutate. This is how the delta variant, more contagious and deadly than the original, originated in India. Are we really happy to risk more virulent and deadly variants?
Only a brief mention of death rate is not good enough. Maybe those of the Amish who died and thier relatives made thier peace with it, after all death is a natural process. However, I personally think that we should avoid as many unnecessary deaths as possible. If you compare the death rate to New Zealand where fewer than 50 people have died in a population of over 5 million, the Amish haven’t done so well.
I visited the Amish today and loved how none were masked or afraid. I wonder what they would think of the fact that much of the population is RACING to inject their innocent children with these drugs.
I posted this article on Facebook and guess what? t was “fact checked.”
The Amish mistrust the government. Good for them! Thomas Jefferson and the other founding fathers would smile and approve.
many mistrust their government, the world over, definitely not only the founding fathers, smiling while we go about our business.
First off, it’s interesting to just look at overall deaths as an indicator of how many “extra” people covid took from us in 2020. If the number is in line with previous years then it would make you wonder just how serious covid was. I mean we know the majority of what covid does is to take people who are already close to death and sort of push them over the edge. The amish say there was no spike in deaths, as you would expect during a pandemic. I know deaths were in line with previous years throughout most of 2020 in the US, but now I’m hearing the CDC all of the sudden report some big spike for the total at year end. I just don’t trust anything coming out of the government on covid so it’s hard to get verifiable numbers.
Secondly, it makes you wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t done anything other than protecting the sick and elderly from covid and just let everyone else live normally. Part of me thinks things would probably be better now than they are. Would there even be a delta variant if it weren’t for the vaccines? I’m thinking all the quarantining and vaccines might have made things worse.
OK, here are the total death numbers in the U.S.: 2017 (2,813,503), 2018 (2,839,205), 2019 (2,854,838), 2020 (3,358,814). As you can see, the number increased greatly from 2019 to 2020. In fact, the CDC has stated that the number of excess deaths in 2020 was more than 500,000. As also can be seen from the data, the death counts were relatively stable until 2020. So, yes, there was a big spike in deaths in 2020. It wasn’t all due to COVID (the other top 9 causes of death increased by about 70,000 in 2020), but there’s no other rational explanation that would account for the large increase other than COVID.
I have no idea how many of those COVID deaths were “pushed over the edge” by COVID. But I highly doubt that that many were “already close to death”.
There were those (me among them) when the pandemic started who thought that just letting nature take its course was the best idea. Well, that’s what Sweden did. The results weren’t good. Sweden’s population is about 2 times the other Scandinavian countries, and their death count is about 15 times higher. And their economy didn’t do any better than their peer countries. Even their health minister said that that approach turned out to be a mistake.
Assuming we took no mitigation steps, health experts had estimated that we would have had well over a million deaths (we are at 742K + 1500/day now). No one knows the true figures (but Sweden’s example gives us a clue), but I think it’s safe to say that we would have lost many hundreds of thousands more people with no mitigation steps. Of course, anyone is free to believe that that price is acceptable to avoid the economic pain that we have endured.
Many people also subscribed to the idea of protecting the vulnerable and everyone else carry on as normal. I always regarded that as a nice, but impractical idea. For example, elderly people as a group were vulnerable so that would have required all elderly people to be basically quarantined. I don’t think that would work for large numbers of the elderly since many are still in the workforce or live in multi-generational housing.
The sad thing about the whole COVID scam is that no matter what you do some people will die. It’s the flu. Thousands die of the flu every year. It’s sad but it’s a fact of life. The vaccines don’t actually do anything to prevent you from getting or spreading COVID. They just create new variants. The key to surviving COVID are medications that will prevent you from having to go onto a ventilator. If they put you on a ventilator you’re pretty much a goner. There are several medications that will prevent the virus from interfering with your blood cells ability to transmit oxygen and drugs and vitamins that will help your body’s immune system fight it off. Given enough time your body will fight it off. You just have to be able to breath long enough for it or work. But the media who receive large payments in the form of “This program brought to you by Pfizer” have told everyone these drugs which are very safe and very low cost will kill you if you take them. It’s a crime against humanity. Not kidding. I know people who were fully vaxxed and put on ventilators and died from COVID. They were given antibiotics but none of the drugs that would have prevented their deaths. Good people. I miss them.
Antibiotics don’t fight viruses.
Choice! Live free or die trying! This is a virus. They mutate. There is no cure. It must run its course. Glad the Amish are thinkers. Wake up, America.! Amen
Did the Amish use any home remedies? Maybe elderberry concentrate, vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc?
Where are all the dead homeless people from covid?
Drug use, alcohol use, poor diets, they should be dropping like flies.
It’s almost as if being outside in the fresh air and sunshine laden with vitamin D is better than being cooped up inside with high viral loads while wearing useless masks.
The Amish seem to be following the Swedish approach to Covid. And now Norway is treating Covid as just something for the society to live with. This actually makes sense, as the Covid infection fatality rate is about 0.2%. This is comparable to a bad strain of the flu virus, and we don’t shut down our society due to the flu. ( 0,2% = 2/10 of 1% ) We are not dealing with the Ebola virus here.
I look at nature, a few years back the deer were dieing from blue tongue at a time when the deer population was was high. The strong survive the week died off keeping a strong heard to repopulate. It is the way of nature. And now are stupid government (the Democratic party) to insure a win at elections, has opened at southern border letting millions of illegals into are country for no other reason but to get there votes . You elected them in power now deal with it.