Unsurprisingly, the Amish were a social and medical control group for choosing preindustrial methods to combat COVID-19 in their communities. And also unsurprisingly, they had better results from a health perspective than the US government who locked the country down and funded a leaky vaccine while denying effective treatment. Sherryl Attinson documents the Amish in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and how they dealt with coronavirus.
The Amish communion ordinance involves everyone sharing the same wine. So essentially, the Amish had a COVID party, like a chickenpox party, and achieved herd immunity early on in the process. Steve Nolt, a scholar on Amish and Mennonite culture, describes how the Amish typically didn’t self-report COVID cases via mass testing. They also often refused hospitalization believing that having loved ones around you was more important. Additionally, very few Amish have been vaccinated. The Amish described their 2020 as an economic success.
The herd immunity approach proved to be an overwhelming success for this major Amish community, and it appears that the Amish are not the backwards group that people make them out to be.
