Amish Covid | Full Measure

when it comes to actions taken to address the covet 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 or christian group that emphasizes the virtuous over the superficial they don't usually drive use electricity or have tvs and during the covet 19 outbreak they became subjects in a massive social and medical experiment so it's safe to say there was a whole different approach here in this community when coronavirus broke out than many other places absolutely calvin laugh is amish mennonite there's three things the amish don't like and that's government they won't get involved in government they don't like the public education system they won't send their children to education and they they also don't like the health system they 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 kovat is after a short shutdown last year the amish chose a unique path that led to covid19 tearing through at warp speed it began with an important religious holiday in may when they take communion they 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 so if one person has a friend of ours the rest of church is going to get credit of ours first time they went back to church everybody got corner of ours laps says they weren't denying coronavirus they were facing it head-on it's the worst thing to quit working than dying but to shut down and say that we can't get a church we can't get together with family we can't see our old people in the hospital we got to quit working you're working it's going completely against everything that we believe and you 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 so are you saying as of about may of 2020 things kind of went back to normal in the amish community yeah it's kind of by by the middle of may it's sort of like back to a typical behavior again that also meant avoiding hospitals i know of some cases in which amish people like 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 the population had been infected with covid19 and become immune some outsiders are skeptical and solid proof is hard to come by even those who who believed that they had coveted tended not to get tested um their approach tended to be uh i'm sick i know i'm sick i don't have to have someone else tell me i'm sick uh or um a concern that if they um you know got a positive test they would then be asked to really dramatically limit what they were doing in a way that um you know might be uncomfortable for them so so we don't have that testing number 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 did most of the community at least the adults get the kovid 19 vaccine again we don't have uh data on that but um i i think it's uh pretty clear that um that in percentage terms uh relatively few did well we're glad all the english people got their coveted vaccines that's great because now we can do we don't have to wear a mask we can do what we want so good for you thank you we appreciate it we us no we're not getting vaccines of course not we all got the coded so why would you get a vaccine by staying open the amish here have one tangible 2020 accomplishment few others can claim we we have this joke when everybody else stopped 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 yeah every all the amish know we got hurt immunity of course we got hurt in unity when the whole church gets chronovirus we know we got credit of ours yes we think we're smarter than everybody i mean shouldn't be bragging but we think we did the right thing knowlt the scholar is publishing a paper on the amish social response to government mandates and covit 19.

Channel: Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson

Views: 3,076,060

Keywords: Investigative, Journalism;, News;, Politics;, Sharyl, Attkisson;, Government, Accountability;, Sinclair, Broadcast, Group

Id: O1DgWYdukZU

Length: 5min 38sec (338 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2021