Q&A: Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated
Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated
Question
Hello Rabbi,
In recent months we have been witnessing a significant rise in the level of violence in the discourse between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. The peak, of course, was the Prime Minister’s speech, when he defined the unvaccinated as dangerous to society, ticking time bombs, and used all kinds of terror metaphors (submachine guns spraying Delta bursts…).
Usually the Rabbi stands as a beacon of autonomous, critical, and original thinking.
Regarding the vaccine issue, you’ve made some very harsh statements: you justified Rabbi Sherlo’s statement regarding medical treatment, and you claimed that as far as you’re concerned, unvaccinated children would not go to school.
And I ask:
1. How much did you actually check that the claims on which you are relying in order to decide are the only ones that exist regarding the vaccine? I’m deliberately not talking about right/wrong, because there is no truth here: there are studies with conclusions in both directions and scientists’ theories.
2. In the Israeli media you only hear one sound and other voices are silenced, but there are many doctors and scientists – https://pecc.org.il/council/ – who argue otherwise. Did you make an effort to hear both sides before choosing a side?
3. And even if you are convinced that you are right and everyone else is stupid, mistaken, or wicked when they don’t think like you, is that enough to deny basic rights: the right to earn a living, to education, to medical treatment, to freedom of movement?
4. In general, as a champion of logic who says at least twice a day (when you lie down and when you rise up) that correlation is not proof of causation, how are you so convinced that vaccines are what stop waves of illness? Weren’t there two waves before the vaccines that stopped (please just don’t answer me that it was thanks to the lockdowns—there is so much literature against that that it’s already ridiculous)? And isn’t there now a wave equal in intensity even though there are vaccines? Aren’t there countries similar to us that vaccinated about 80%, like Iceland and Malta, and are also experiencing a fourth wave even though they vaccinated about two months after us?
5. There is already extensive literature showing that vaccinated people also get infected and infect others, and that their viral load is identical to that of the unvaccinated, with even hints that it may be slightly higher. Doesn’t that contradict the claim that the unvaccinated are a danger to society?
I could ask much more, but the point is different. I’m not coming to persuade or to say that I’m right.
I’m only asking: how long will we continue with the current method—wave, another vaccine, blaming the unvaccinated for everything? Now they’re giving a third dose; there’ll be a fifth wave and we’ll give a fourth dose and the green pass will become even harsher, we won’t let the unvaccinated leave the house. Sixth wave, fifth dose… will we lock them up in unvaccinated hotels? Seventh wave… will we deny them health fund membership? Impose an unvaccinated tax on them?
In the end, individual rights exist precisely for this purpose: to make sure that in states of emergency and pressure we don’t forget all our principles and clamp down on everyone like in authoritarian regimes.
It seems to me the time has come to calm down a bit with the incitement and with everyone’s little idea of how to make life miserable for the neighborhood unvaccinated person.
What do you think?
P.S. I’d be happy to send sources for every claim I raised—not journalism, but professional scientific literature.
Answer
I don’t intend to get into these endless arguments. I’m completely exhausted by them. You’re mixing together two kinds of claims here: an ethical one and a scientific one. That is, between the question of whether the state is permitted to do something and the question of whether it is correct.
My claim is that the state has the authority (and only the state, not all kinds of private smart-alecks, even if they really are smart and really are right) to determine public policy, and if in its opinion vaccination is the correct path, it has the right to deny the unvaccinated various things. This is regardless of whether the state is right (it may be mistaken). This is not coercion against you, because we are dealing with harm to me, and therefore decisions have to be made one way or the other. My right as a citizen to defend myself against you, even if you are right, is no less than your right to receive all services even if you are wrong. I wrote similarly regarding the decisions of Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky (the authority argument).
I assume you know that I am far from thinking that the establishment is always right, but I also do not tend to accept conspiracy claims that the overwhelming majority of experts do not accept. At least so long as I haven’t seriously checked for myself and don’t have full professional knowledge (and it doesn’t seem important enough to me to undertake such a comprehensive investigation. I’ll only say that if you do make such an investigation, it’s worth taking into account that not the whole world—and certainly not professionals—is stupid). That’s all.
Discussion on Answer
Michi,
With all due respect, you’re being disingenuous.
The principled claim behind the question is not what the state is generally allowed or forbidden to do. Indeed, you are right when you say that in principle (abstractly) the state may impose “various things” on the citizen.
Rather, the assumption in the background is that the state needs to come with clean hands and with a minimum of self-criticism when it comes to impose “various things.” That is not the situation in practice.
In other words: in this case, the state is hiding behind the abstract principle (which is correct, for purposes of our discussion), even though in practice, in the details, there is no justification for a very large part of its conduct. At the very least, that is the opinion of many serious people (that there is no such justification).
There’s no need to get into the details because this has been discussed here endlessly.
Also, your use, again, of the word “conspiracy” smells of disingenuousness. True, there is no shortage of fools and crackpots among the “corona opponents.” But dealing with them is dealing with straw men. There are plenty of good and realistic explanations for the draconian policies that countries around the world are taking in the fight against corona without entering the subject of plots and so on… It’s puzzling to me that you raise that at all.
You’d have to be stupid to think a sentence like this makes sense: “I’m vaccinated and therefore I need to defend myself from the unvaccinated.”
1. If you believe you’re vaccinated, what are you afraid of?
2. It’s already known that the vaccinated also infect. The gaps are not large and do not justify a difference in fear.
3. The unvaccinated are lax about the guidelines, and presumably they’ve already been infected, in which case they are much more immunized than those who injected themselves with the vaccine.
Which raises the question: does the vaccine impair cognition?
Based on the statements of most vaccinated people, it seems that it does.
A new study was published showing that vaccinated people carry the Delta virus in their bodies just like the unvaccinated.
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n207
So please start being precise in the English language and stop saying “vaccinated,” and start saying “sheep dancing to the tune of companies that profit from human disease.”
The correct link:
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2074
With God’s help, 11 Elul 5781
To The Last Decisor—hello,
Vaccines are a procedure whose effectiveness has been well known for more than two hundred years. You introduce into the body something whose danger is small (a weakened virus in the older vaccines, and something resembling part of the virus’s outer shell in the corona vaccines), and in this way stimulate the body to produce antibodies to the virus, essentially stimulating the natural immune system to resist the virus.
Obviously, one must be very careful to monitor side effects that may endanger part of the population, and it may be that because of the acute need to deal with the corona disease, whose dangers are many and terrible, it was not always possible to tie up every loose end fully. But on the face of it, the dangers of corona appear to be far greater than the dangers of the vaccine.
On the face of it, one who does not get vaccinated endangers himself and his fellow unvaccinated people more, since the vaccinated person, in most cases, even if infected, will experience the virus in a milder and much less dangerous way. Therefore it is appropriate for a person, especially an older or elderly person, to get vaccinated and thereby strengthen the resistance of his body’s immune system.
All protective measures and vaccination, even if they do not seal things hermetically, still contribute to reducing the risk of harm. Just as when driving a car—even someone who drives carefully, wears a seatbelt, and wears a helmet is not hermetically protected from an accident, but significantly reduces his chances of being harmed.
Here too it is worthwhile to go in every possible direction: get vaccinated, avoid crowding, wear masks and ensure ventilation, and maintain healthy nutrition and lifestyle and fill oneself with positive feelings, all of which contribute to the body’s immunity.
We cannot hermetically close off every concern. But we are able to make the reasonable and accepted effort, and cast our burden on “the Lord protects the simple,” who will complete what we cannot.
With blessing, Amiuz Yaron Schnitzler
mRNA is not a vaccine, and not a weakened virus and not any such trivial thing—it’s much more than that. It’s genetic code with which you can do to the body whatever you want, just as with computer code you can do to a computer whatever you want.
What they decided to do now is to copy the corona spike code so that the cell will produce it in order to create an immune response.
But—and this is the danger—a malicious actor can come and replace the corona’s malicious code with much more malicious code.
And no one will ever know about it. And then people will start getting cancer or all kinds of strange diseases and won’t know why.
Even if you’re right in your fear and all the vaccinated die, who the hell wants to live in a world with all the crazy unvaccinated people?
To Tirgitz—peace and many blessings,
There is also a solution to the problem of not wanting to live with vaccine opponents. They should inject vaccine supporters with the genetic code of vaccine opponents, and then they will prolong their days in goodness and their years in pleasantness, in joy and gladness of heart, and we will no longer need tear gates; what tears did not achieve, joy will achieve :).
With blessing, The Genetic Decoder
I don’t know about you, but I prefer a world of crazies to a world of little dogs in human form—obedient and disciplined—who believe that injecting non-human Chinese bat genetic code is the purpose of their lives, and that anyone who opposes this purpose is crazy.
The fundamental dispute is not the vaccine and its ethical problems, but whether dictatorship is legitimate. In that context—worth watching:
Good week, Rabbi,
You wrote: “I assume you know that I am far from thinking that the establishment is always right, but I also do not tend to accept conspiracy claims that the overwhelming majority of experts do not accept. At least so long as I haven’t seriously checked for myself and don’t have full professional knowledge (and it doesn’t seem important enough to me to undertake such a comprehensive investigation. I’ll only say that if you do make such an investigation, it’s worth taking into account that not the whole world—and certainly not professionals—is stupid). That’s all.”
And I (again…) am rubbing my eyes…
This issue, which dramatically affects all our lives—it doesn’t seem important enough to you to undertake a comprehensive investigation?
No full professional knowledge?—everything is available online, studies and position papers from here to eternity.
And more importantly—what about objective observation? Are you saying there is no longer any weight at all to what we see with our own eyes, and that we must relate to reality as presented by professionals?
Just one example—until corona, it was agreed (as far as I know…) that a person is defined as sick if he has one of two things: symptoms (a subjective sensation that cannot be measured, such as pain or fatigue) or signs (objective, quantifiable measures such as fever or blood pressure).
Then corona came and crowned as “sick” even someone who has neither signs nor symptoms (only tested positive on a test that everyone agrees is dubious).
Do you need a master’s degree in medicine or a doctorate in physics to ask hard questions about this extreme innovation?
Has common sense been thrown in the trash?
And why are you once again explicitly hinting that anyone who opposes the establishment position is a conspiracist, if to this day you haven’t really delved into the issue?
Where is the integrity?
I of course agree with your clarification regarding the authority issue.
As for your last paragraph—I’m just surprised that, being someone who doesn’t rush to think the establishment is right, you also testify about yourself that you haven’t checked.
Your claim seems strange to me, because in my view it is one-directional when it should be two-directional: if you haven’t checked and don’t know, why does one side of the story sound reasonable to you and the other side sound like conspiracy theories?
With all due respect, did you look at the link I sent about who the people are who claim the approach has to change? These aren’t just random people; they simply aren’t given a platform, so it sounds as though they are a minority.
That’s it, I won’t continue if you’ve had enough…