In March 2021, a Pennsylvania newspaper reported that the Amish had achieved herd immunity against Sars-CoV-2 without taking any of the extreme measures common around the world. There were no lockdowns, no church closings, no school closing, and no mask wearing. And almost no vaccinations.
In short, the Amish achieved herd immunity the old-fashioned way, by everybody being exposed to the virus and then developing natural immunity. It turns out that the Amish take the Sacrament with everybody drinking from the same cup, so almost all of the Amish got COVID when the pandemic began.
Exact numbers are difficult to come by in the Amish world, but there is no evidence of a massive number of deaths of Amish in Lancaster County in the last 18 months. Of course the number of cases was very high, but measuring by cases has always been problematic because what really matters is how many people get hospitalized or die from a disease. And there is simply no evidence of that among the Amish.
Since the pandemic began, there have been 1258 reported deaths from COVID in Lancaster County, PA, out of a total population of 550,000. This is about the same as the U.S. death rate of about 734,000 deaths out of a population of 331 million. So, I want to repeat this point: The county that the Amish live in had about the same death rate while relying on natural immunity than the rest of the U.S. did relying on masks, lockdowns, school closures and vaccines.
Now, let’s imagine that the Amish policy had resulted in a massacre of the Amish, which is what the COVID hysterics believe would have happened without all of the lockdowns and mandates. Don’t you think we would be seeing daily news stories from Amish country telling us: this is what happens when you don’t “follow the science?” Instead, we have gotten almost no news reports from Amish country, because the truth is that the Amish approach appears to work.
What about the variants, you say? It turns out that natural immunity actually works better than the vaccines at preventing people from getting the variants, which is why highly vaccinated locations went through a massive spike caused by the delta variant. The numbers from Lancaster county show an increase in cases, but deaths are relatively low.
If you want to know why so many of us have opposed the lockdowns, the masks and the mandates, it is because we have long known that these measures *do not make a difference.* It is not that we are callous about the lives lost to COVID — we are concerned about the number of lives lost and disrupted by measures that will not work. And the experience of the Amish shows we were correct.
There is an excellent five-minute video discussing COVID and the Amish. Click here for the video version.
Here is the transcript of that video.
Here is a story indicating that more than 29 recent studies show that natural immunity is at least as good and in some cases superior to the COVID vaccines.