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1. It seems to me that I addressed this argument at the time, and also later in the video: a healthy person who is not experiencing symptoms has the presumption in his favor that his mere presence does not endanger others beyond a negligible risk, and the burden of proof is on the others if they want to claim otherwise. From a superficial acquaintance with the materials, it does not seem they meet that burden—and in any case, no serious discussion of it is taking place.

2. The theoretical harm that the Green Pass is meant to prevent is also not harm to specific people. One cannot claim that the private individual who wants to receive a client arriving at his business *right now* is putting him in danger. After all, there is no reason to think the business owner is infected. The overwhelming majority of human beings are not sick with a contagious disease, and when they are sick, it is for a very negligible period of their lives. Even if the client happened to come during exactly that period, for the overwhelming majority of that time the business owner would feel symptoms and stay home to rest. Even if not, there would be no reason to think he is contagious (pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic people are not a significant source of infection according to studies), and even if he were contagious, there is no reason to think the client would be exposed long enough to a sufficient dose of virus-bearing aerosols to create a meaningful chance of infection, and even if so, there is no reason to think he lacks natural protection—whether from other coronaviruses, or from NK cells, or in some other way—which explains the high percentage of people who did not get infected (despite close intimate contact with confirmed patients); and even if, against most odds, he does get infected, there is no reason to think he belongs specifically to the tiny fraction of the population for whom infection is associated with mortality, all the more so if he is vaccinated, in which case the odds drop by about another factor of 20 (that is, vaccination alone, assuming the reported numbers are correct, lowers the chance of severe illness or death to significantly below seasonal flu).

In such a situation, if infection occurs, the cause will be attributed to the virus itself and not to the person, because such negligible probabilities are not considered a component of human action or human responsibility, just as we did not assign responsibility for the roughly 100,000 deaths attributed annually in the U.S. to flu to those who “infected” them.

It should also be taken into account that researchers speak about advantages to exposing the immune system to the world, about which one may say: what doesn’t kill you strengthens you (for example, children who grow up in a very sterile environment tend more to develop autoimmune diseases).

Of course, I do not presume to settle the professional dispute, though it seems there is systematic silencing of voices that do not fit the agenda, which causes me to give them more weight, since an expert’s chances of arriving at the truth are lower if he is unwilling to listen to the opposing side.

Here we are already entering the question of how much risk each policy involves, and of course that can be discussed, as I noted at the end of my remarks. Just don’t forget that we are not talking about danger to one person but to the public, and for part of the public this is a direct danger even if you cannot at this moment point to the specific person. It is like firing a missile into a crowd of people, one of whom will definitely be hit, but the chance for each individual is tiny. Do you think that is the same as adopting toward Hamas a policy that allows it to develop missiles that may hit us in the future? Or even releasing terrorists who may hurt people in the future? And that is different from the danger you are speaking about, of the evolutionary development of a vaccine-resistant virus, where this is a broad uncertain risk not directed at any person at all (not even one concrete person out of many).
But all of this concerns the level of risk. The main arguments you raised were general and principled, and here I addressed only those. You presented it as though there is no justification for restricting the liberty of a person who thinks differently. But if I think your policy poses a significant risk to me, I have the right to restrict you, even if you think otherwise. And certainly when I am not forcing you to get vaccinated but only am unwilling to let you enter my space if you are not vaccinated. If as a result you find yourself forced to get vaccinated (what you called passive coercion)—that’s your problem.
Needless to say, regarding the importance of listening to other opinions, I completely agree. That is true for all sides.

I demand that all parents of unvaccinated children, spreaders of the deadly disease, God have mercy, execute their children—and preferably by burning—for the sake of the total destruction of the deadly virus that endangers Rabbi Michi and me. And anyone who goes out and drives on the road in a private car has forfeited his blood, and had better throw himself into a fiery furnace because he endangers Rabbi Michi and me.

As is well known, Rabbi Michi and I are vaccinated, and therefore we are forbidden to be infected by the deadly virus. The role of the vaccine is to immunize against deadly contact with the unvaccinated, God have mercy.

There is only one question I have not managed to answer.
If the vaccinated can be harmed by infection from the unvaccinated, it follows that the vaccinated themselves can also infect other vaccinated people.

And if so, what have the fearmongers achieved by frightening people specifically about the unvaccinated? The frightened have solutions.

Rabbi,

Illnesses like influenza, RSV, or about 5,000 deaths each year from infections in hospitals, 8,000 from smoking damage, some of it passive, road accidents, and so on, also constitute a danger to the public. The question, as argued, is whether the risk exceeds the norm in a way that would justify depriving people of rights—a deprivation you would never dream of imposing in any of those other normal risks.

The fact that you cannot point to a particular person who creates the risk, cannot point to a particular time when he creates it, or to the action by which it is created—that is the difference between people without a Green Pass, or drivers on the road for that matter, and an identified, specific terrorist firing a missile into a crowd of people. The latter is a specific person, the action itself is dangerous, and the risk is direct, deterministic, and immediate, whereas with the former you do not know which among them will produce the annual mortality statistics, when they will do so, or by virtue of which act of driving it will happen. Depriving the unvaccinated of rights would in this respect be similar to depriving drivers of freedom of movement, even if the statistics are supposedly different (supposedly, because there are virologists who argue that if not for mortality from coronavirus there would have been mortality from influenza-like viruses and other infections. The fact that coronavirus won the struggle against other viruses in the competition over who would dominate human infection does not mean that without it there would not have been alternative mortality). Incidentally, it should be noted that the similarity to motor vehicles exists only in this respect, because driving a car as an inherently dangerous tool is fundamentally different from the natural presence of a healthy person near other human beings, which cannot in itself be considered dangerous. One cannot impose responsibility on a person for failures in someone else’s immune system.

As for terrorists, Hamas members have already proven their dangerousness. Developing weapons is an act that for them leads to a concrete risk of death as a direct result of developing the weapon. When there is a proven enemy with malicious intent to harm, the whole attitude is entirely different, since the entire process, from planning to execution, is considered for this purpose a deterministic mechanism, and you can cut it off at the start. The same applies to releasing terrorists (except for those who have repented): the Islamo-fascist indoctrination pretty much ensures that they will try to harm again, so the very release is the first move in a quasi-deterministic process that will lead to harm; it is itself dangerous, like releasing a hungry lion. Releasing terrorists is problematic for several additional reasons as well (criminals deserve punishment, and one should not give a reward to the terrorist group to which they belong).

The common denominator I referred to, in terms of the risk to “public health,” both from the unvaccinated and from the vaccinated (according to the various theories), is that one cannot point to any person or act that is itself the dangerous act (as with drivers). “Policy” in itself is not defined as a dangerous act. You claim that this is precisely the issue under discussion, but it does not seem so. You do not restrict freedom of speech as a natural right, for example, even when it is a “dangerous policy” by all accounts (for example because of lowering morale or preaching for the release of terrorists—and such things have happened).

I’ll repeat again that the moment the debate is conducted on the plane of how concrete and tangible the danger is, we have already left the principled discussions you described in the video, and it was against those that I wrote what I wrote. I also disagree with you about the degree of tangibility of the dangers (a contagious disease spreading at such a rate is not comparable to the flu in any sense, and every person carrying it may be regarded as a ticking time bomb. And the numbers you brought are utterly meaningless because you are referring to numbers after preventive measures were taken, and even then it is not comparable), but that is a dispute that cannot be settled here, and therefore I did not open it at all.

Rabbi,

The discussion of how concrete the danger is relevant in a certain sense, though admittedly not the main point. What is principled is the distinction between a situation like a person in a frenzy running through the street with a drawn knife, which is in itself considered a dangerous action, so that even if the chance of each passerby being harmed is small one may infringe the freedom of movement of the person performing the act, versus the innocent presence of a healthy, asymptomatic person near other people, which is not defined as a dangerous action, has never been defined as such, and is presumed not to be dangerous in itself (for the overwhelming majority of asymptomatic people are not unknowingly infected with a contagious disease, and even if they were infected—as asymptomatic people they are not a significant source of transmission). To claim otherwise—the burden of proof lies on the claimant to prove why there is reason to suspect that this specific individual is infected.

The problem lies in shifting attention from the individual to the collective. One must deprive all individuals of rights because statistically within collective A there are some infected people who will infect people in collective B. That is not acceptable, because a “collective” is nothing but a legal fiction and not an individual with rights. Otherwise, it would in principle be acceptable to deprive all drivers in the world of freedom of movement, because statistically many people will be killed because of them—a kind of “collective punishment” that is illegitimate.

I disagree. When there is an epidemic that is contagious at such a rate and liable to spread throughout the population, one can liken every suspect person to someone causing concrete harm.
Most asymptomatic people are not infected, among other reasons because of preventive measures. And in any case, here a mere majority is not enough. A significant minority is also problematic. Danger is treated more stringently than prohibition.
I do not think one needs to assume any ontic premise here regarding the existence of collectives (though I personally tend to hold such a view). Even someone who does not hold such a position understands that public considerations sometimes override the rights of the individual. People go to war when necessary even if they do not subscribe to a collective metaphysics.
As for drivers, that is an entirely different situation. The main reason for this is the reasoning of the Talmud in chapter 2 of Bava Metzia (regarding returning lost property based on identifying marks according to the view that identifying marks are not of Torah origin): none of us would want driving in the streets to be forbidden, and therefore each of us is willing to take the risk upon himself and upon others so that it will be permitted for him. Here it benefits him too. But that is not the case regarding coronavirus. Most people think one should get vaccinated, and whoever does not vaccinate should bear the consequences of his actions. Here there is no general agreement to remove the restrictions, because that does not help the vaccinated but only those who do not want the vaccine. I am not supposed to take risks because you do not want to be vaccinated.
Incidentally, a similar difference also exists between coronavirus and influenza. I already wrote that in flu the number of deaths is significantly smaller (certainly without preventive measures), but beyond that we already know that vaccines do not eliminate the flu. Every year a somewhat different flu spreads, and therefore every year everyone is urged to get vaccinated. From this you can understand that shutting all of us down because of the flu means shutting us down forever. Not so regarding coronavirus: a shutdown may eliminate the problem. That is at least so long as the thesis of those virologists you quoted about the development of a vaccine-bypassing mutation is not proven. I am sure that when that is the situation, the attitude toward coronavirus will be more similar to the flu (subject to the other differences I mentioned). In short, uncertainty does not override certainty.

It should be checked whether one of the vaccine’s side effects is the loss of common sense.
If a vaccinated person can be infected, then he can infect others.
And if he cannot be infected, why should he care whether the other side is vaccinated or not?

And one more thing about terminology: if someone injected a substance that does not immunize him, and he still continues to fear the virus, that means one thing only—that he is not immunized. Therefore one should stop saying “vaccinated” and “unvaccinated” and instead say “cowards” and “non-cowards.”

As stated, the question was whether one may remove a healthy, asymptomatic person innocently present near others from the presumption of being non-harmful, as was customary from the beginning of history (until the beginning of COVID). You present several arguments:

1. “There is a contagious epidemic.”

There cannot be an epidemic (in the accepted sense of the word) without excess mortality. In 2020 there was no excess mortality (see graphs below). Positive PCR results are not an epidemic.

2. “Most asymptomatic people are not infected, among other reasons because of preventive measures.”

This is a disputed claim (many argue there is no difference between countries that adopted preventive measures and those that did not). In any case, that statement is not enough to remove an asymptomatic person from the presumption of being non-harmful.

3. “There is a significant minority, and danger is treated more stringently than prohibition.”

This is a claim unsupported by the present state of morbidity data (which is very low). Even when it was high, it would not necessarily follow that there was a significant minority, because there is no evidence that asymptomatic people are a significant source of infection (and there are indications that they are not), and even if they were, such a minority would not constitute a danger, since as stated, there was no epidemic.

4. “Public considerations sometimes override the rights of the individual,” like going to war.

The question was whether one may remove a person from his presumption of being non-harmful, and this claim does not in itself undermine that. In addition, it is not so simple: the Torah in fact allows the fearful and fainthearted not to participate (and if it is a mandatory war, the individual himself tends to want to participate of his own accord because his life is in danger). Be that as it may, this is only in rare emergency situations like war, and the burden of proof—that this is an emergency on such an extreme scale—lies on the one who wants to deprive natural rights, not on the one preserving them.

5. There is social agreement about which risks to take (driving yes, unvaccinated no), and that is what determines the matter.

That does not seem right. If a person is forbidden to endanger the life of another, social agreement cannot permit it any more than it can permit theft or rape. What permits it is the fact that the present act of driving by a normal driver is not considered a life-endangering action (the risks are accepted only as a statistical calculation at the collective level, and for that the individual is not responsible).

6. Regarding the difference between coronavirus and influenza, it seems to me that few think coronavirus will disappear once and for all. The more common view is that it will return from time to time like the flu.

Mortality in 2020 (Central Bureau of Statistics data, normalized)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ExZkaYTWEAQ9x0W?format=jpg&name=medium

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EzWamzrUYAY5KCa?format=png&name=900×900

The first link is wrong (the second is fine). This is the link:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EwJrzdpXEAUxt8f?format=png&name=large

Copenhagen, you’re just wasting your effort.
Today only someone who injected a foreign substance into his body—engineered by companies whose one goal is to make as much profit as possible, and originally engineered in the Chinese microbiology lab, and originally before that multiplied inside bats—is considered a pure and spotless human being. Batman.

This substance causes the injected person to develop schizophrenic thinking: on the one hand he calls himself and the rest of the injected people “vaccinated,” and on the other hand he is forbidden to be exposed to the thing against which he is supposedly “vaccinated.”

Copenhagen,
1–4 and the link: I already answered about the numbers. And there is also an ignoring here of the drastic and immediate drop in morbidity following the vaccine.
5. Of course it can. A person is allowed to take certain risks upon himself. That itself is exactly the reasoning in Bava Metzia there.
6. We shall live and see. At the moment you certainly cannot determine that.

Rabbi,

The principled discussion dealt with the claim that there has been no demonstration here sufficient to remove every person walking around among others from the presumption of being non-harmful. True, you responded to the principled discussion in the video, but what is the response based on? On the idea that the presence of a healthy, asymptomatic person (who has not broken into his body’s cells with mRNA encodings of a foreign protein) among people “is like firing a missile into a crowd of human beings one of whom will certainly be hit,” and that “when there is an epidemic spreading at such a rate… one can liken every suspect person to someone causing concrete harm.”

To that I replied that not only was the burden of proof for removing the person from his presumption not met, but one can positively prove that there is no epidemic, based on the numbers in the link, and in addition that rates of positive PCRs (on the basis of which the epidemic claim was raised) are not relevant to the matter. For as researchers claim (including the inventor of PCR himself, who won the Nobel Prize), a positive result does not mean the person is infected or sick and has almost no clinical significance in itself.

Incidentally, the decline in the morbidity wave in Israel and also in several other places in the world happened before or with the beginning of the vaccination campaign—and cannot be explained by it. For example, in Britain there was within two to three weeks a drastic 50 percent drop in morbidity, even though they had barely managed to vaccinate between 2–10% in that time, and even for those vaccinated not enough time had passed for effectiveness. They simply began vaccinating at the peak of the third wave or a bit after it, and such viruses usually appear in phases of three waves after which there is some sort of immune equilibrium, temporary at least, in the population.

As for 5, a person can take certain risks upon himself, but he cannot decide whether to place others in mortal danger (not even the public); and in precisely this respect the comparison stands between driving and the hypothetical possibility that someone will die “because of” an asymptomatic person who is near him. (As stated, since exposure to viruses is normal and even necessary for proper development of the immune system, even in such a case in my view the person is not the cause but rather the virus or the failure in the injured person’s immune system—but that is another discussion.)

The Last Halakhic Decisor,

Interesting questions, but we did not drift into them for the sake of focus

Why do we need proof? When a presumption is undermined, we do not use it. That is a clear principle also in Jewish law: when a presumption has been weakened, one does not rely on it.
As for the drop in morbidity, it seems to me the argument is already bordering on delusion. If the remarkable correlation between the drop in morbidity and vaccination in Israel is not sufficiently probative, then I do not know what proof would satisfy you.
As for 5, he absolutely can. See the Bava Metzia passage to which I referred you. I also cannot understand: if you do not accept this reasoning, then how do you yourself explain the permission given to people to drive cars, especially when it is done for non-essential needs?

When a presumption is undermined, one can rule against it with weaker means (for example, a single witness where otherwise that would not have been sufficient), not that it is nullified. In any case, there is not even any undermining here. Perhaps there could be such undermining if it were proven that one of the members of a person’s household had been a confirmed patient in the last week (even that is not certain, since coronavirus cannot be defined as a dangerous virus for a normal person—experience teaches that a normal human immune system knows how to overcome it). But we have never undermined the presumption that the presence of a healthy person without symptoms is not in itself harmful, certainly not sweeping it aside for the entire population.

When confirming some hypothesis, the confirmation should in principle repeat itself in similar observations. Otherwise, we will have to say that correlation does not necessarily mean causation. But such confirmation is not obtained in other countries (Britain, for example, as stated), and in many countries there was דווקא a significant rise in morbidity rates around the beginning of vaccinations. Even in Israel the correlation is not so remarkable:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E1pxemDXMAEdD-y?format=png&name=900×900
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E0675HHWUAIVoFM?format=jpg&name=large

I do not see how one can infer from the reasoning in Bava Metzia that the majority can decide whether to endanger the life of the individual. The entire discussion there concerns the owner of the lost article himself, who is willing to risk his property on less-than-perfect proof (identifying marks) because others do not have such proof and in order to recover his lost item. The owner of the lost article is not there risking the property of others or their lives. The permission to drive cars stems, as stated, from the fact that a specific act of driving by a normal driver is not considered a dangerous act.

I think we’ve exhausted this.
Just a clarification regarding the Bava Metzia passage. You are misunderstanding the sugya there. It is not about a waiver by a particular owner of lost property, but exactly the opposite: a decision by the entirety of lost-property owners. This reasoning comes to say that when a claimant comes and says he is not willing that his lost object be returned based on identifying marks because he does not waive the requirement for witnesses, we reject his claim on the grounds that all owners of lost property waived it. Exactly as in our case.

If I sum up, the claim was that a collective is not a moral or legal entity with rights, and therefore calculations about which policy will supposedly reduce the collective’s exposure to risk do not in themselves override natural rights or the presumption that the individual person is non-harmful. I did not see a refutation of this claim, or evidence that one may remove the individual from that presumption. There was talk about epidemic and contagion, but it was not proven that there is or was an epidemic, or that the mere presence of a person near others is prone to infect others with a virus in a way that endangers their lives.

In light of this, the video’s claim stands: that a Green Passport is an illegitimate measure (aside from the other problems—that it is essentially a totalitarian surveillance measure).

As for the passage, do you mean this:

“Rav Safra said to Rava: Does a person do himself a favor with property that is not his? Rather, the owner of the lost article prefers to give identifying marks and take it back, for he knows that he has no witnesses, and he says: Not everyone knows its precise identifying marks, but I can give its precise identifying marks and take it back” (Bava Metzia 27b).

Indeed, that is exactly the Talmud passage.

This interpretation does not seem compelled by the text. To provide an adequate answer to the problem raised by the question, “Does a person do himself a favor with property that is not his?”, it seems preferable דווקא to say that the answer speaks of the reasoning according to which the owner of the lost article is considered one of the parties to the agreement (and therefore does himself a favor with his own property), not part of a minority over whose back a majority of lost-property owners makes agreements.

Be that as it may, one cannot project from a situation of lost property, where there is in any event property already at risk, to the claim that the majority may decide when it is permitted to endanger the lives of the minority (outside the framework of an action permitted under the principle of double effect).

Exactly as with driving and the like. One to one. If a person comes and says, I did not waive it and therefore I demand my lost property that was handed to so-and-so based on identifying marks—what would they tell him? Obviously they would dismiss him out of hand. This is a general social agreement by implication. Exactly like a person who objects to allowing drivers to travel on the road, to whom one would say that he agrees by implication as part of the public at large.

Even according to that view, the whole reasoning exists in a situation where from the outset it is rational to think the true owner of the lost item is one of those consenting. But it seems that if a person comes before the delivery, claims ownership, and demands that the lost article not be delivered to someone else claiming ownership based on identifying marks alone, because he also has witnesses, we could not say there is no substance to his claim that he has witnesses too.

This is not similar to a situation of a person performing an action that places others in real mortal danger, where there is no reason to think he consents to that (certainly not when protest is voiced). By contrast, if someone objects to the general permission for normal drivers to use the road and demands preventing future acts of driving, we would have to ask him which driver exactly is endangering him and when. And he would have no good answer. He would have to say that the danger is not to him but to the public, and does not arise from a specific act but from the totality of acts. But a collective is not an entity with rights.

The collective has rights. The Germans, may their name be erased, had the right to use the yellow badge to mark the contaminated, unvaccinated Jew. The Germans had a Green Pass. And that was an implicit social agreement. And that is what determines things.

To the extent that a person supports a demo-dictatorship with totalitarian tendencies, he will make greater use of imagined “social agreements” in John Rawls style and that of his progressive (or fascist) admirers, as against the idea of laws of justice and natural rights that no real or hypothetical social agreement has been granted the authority to violate (as in the approach of Robert Nozick).

For some reason the video was removed from Rumble without any explanation. I uploaded it to Odysee:

https://odysee.com/@Theologizer:1/The-Green-Mark:f