You probably didn’t see it on CNN, but New York has apparently solved violent crime, homelessness, illegal immigration, failing schools, the affordability crisis, and subway stabbings while simultaneously neutralizing that guy who was running through Manhattan even nakeder than the Naked Cowboy. Thusly perfected, the state can now pour its energy into the real menace threatening public safety: the Amish. Yes, those notoriously reckless hooligans with their bonnets and barn raisings and suspiciously minuscule carbon footprints.
In a display of audacious evil, the Empire State has fined three tiny Amish schools a combined $118,000 for allowing unvaccinated children to sit in single-room schoolhouses with other unvaccinated children. The schools—Dygert Road, Pleasant View, and Shady Lane—have accumulated $52,000, $46,000 and $20,000 in penalties, respectively. Under New York law, each breach carries a fine of up to $2,000, and the state considers each day an unvaccinated child attends school a separate violation. In this case, however, officials graciously calculated the first two schools’ penalties using just one day of violations per child. (If they were counting every day, ten pureblood kids showing up for a single school week could theoretically add another $100,000 to the tab.)
While the sane half of the twittersphere is ready to draw and quarter Governor Kathy Hochul over the whole thing, in reality she inherited this bit of authoritarian lunacy from Andrew Cuomo. In 2019, in the wake of a measles outbreak in an Orthodox Jewish community, then-Governor Cuomo signed a law completely eliminating New York’s religious exemption from mandatory childhood vaccinations. The law applies not only to public schools but to private and parochial schools as well—all the way down to learning facilities with the infrastructure of a broom closet. And while Hochul didn’t invent this particular wheel, her administration is more than happy to run over the Amish with it.
The three schools in question aren’t sprawling state campuses where kids are being bussed in from fourteen zip codes. These are mostly one-room, Little House on the Prairie-style classrooms serving a dozen or two kids from the surrounding community. They sit on private land. They get no public funding. The families keep to themselves. They aren’t asking taxpayers to pay for their healthcare, their kick scooters, or their beard oil. All they’re asking is to be left alone.
Apparently, this is an impossible ask.
When the fines were first imposed, the Amish sued. They lost in federal district court. Then they lost at the Second Circuit. Then the Supreme Court vacated that judgment and told the appeals court to reconsider in light of its recent religious-liberty precedent. So the Second Circuit reviewed the case and basically said “Yeah, still no.”
One has to wonder what grave threat a self-sufficient, self-isolated, charmingly old-timey community presents to the region at large. I mean, if the rest of the state is all juiced up on the full glorious regime of immune-boosting jabs, how are the Amish a danger even if they hitch up their buggies, breach containment, and storm the closest Target?
Oh, right.
They’re the control group.
Not a perfect one, to be fair. You can’t randomly assign 10,000 babies to Group A: iPads, Doritos, SSRIs, and fluorescent-lit cubicles, and 10,000 to Group B: goats, gardens, manual labor, and no TikTok, and then definitively declare it’s the ultra-processed cheese-flavored chips that’s doing in Group A. (Side note: I would absolutely read that study.)
But America has been running something remarkably close to a real-world case study for generations.
On one side, you have the overwhelming majority of Americans who aren’t Amish. We spend more on “health care” than any other wealthy nation. We test obsessively. We medicate relentlessly. We have sub-subspecialists. Apps track our sleep while our watches tell us we’re stressed, which sends our cortisol screaming and pushes our blood pressure through the roof. (Don’t worry, there’s a drug for that!) We are the most medically supervised collection of human specimens in all of history. And we are profoundly, chronically sick.
Tucked among us, across quiet stretches of rural America, are the Amish. They rarely rely on conventional medical care. They have dramatically lower vaccination rates and take exponentially fewer prescription drugs. Their children spend their days around questionable creek water, barnyard bacteria, and an impressive assortment of animal feces, and the moms aren’t chasing them around with hand sanitizer and Clorox wipes. They walk, they work, they grow food, and they have ridiculously tight communities. Inconveniently, despite all of this, they refuse to collapse.
In fact, the rate of diabetes in the Amish is 3.3 percent versus over 13 percent nationally. Hypertension is 12.7 percent versus 37.8 percent. High cholesterol, 26.2 percent versus 35.7 percent. Cancer among Amish adults is 40 percent lower than the surrounding population.
And that’s just the grownups. Asthma hits 5.2 percent of Amish children versus 8.4 percent of their peers. Hay fever? 0.6 compared to 12.7 percent—meaning the average American kid is twenty times more likely to spend spring chained to a box of Kleenex than some Amish young’un who’s been rolling in hay all day. Allergic sensitization of any kind: 7.2 percent in the off-grid crowd, while roughly half of the iPad generation is hyperreacting to something before kindergarten. And while 10-15 percent of American kids are scratching themselves raw at any given moment, eczema in the Amish is practically a rounding error.
But the big, fat elephant in the exam room is the autism spectrum. One in 31 American children is now labeled autistic—up from 1 in 10,000 in the 1970s. Meanwhile, physicians with decades of experience treating largely unvaccinated Amish populations report that regressive autism is functionally nonexistent in the horse-and-buggy cohort.
The late Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, whose Chicago-area practice cared for over 30,000 children—thousands of them never vaccinated—stated plainly: “I don't think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines.” Dr. Paul Thomas, whose Oregon clinic oversees more than 15,000 patients, reports zero new autism cases among 1,176 children who followed his delayed vaccination protocol. Among the Amish of Middlefield, Ohio, Dr. Heng Wang—medical director of the DDC Clinic for Special Needs Children, which treats all special-needs children in that community—found a rate of 1 in 15,000 [not a typo], compared to 1 in 166 nationally at the time. The one autistic child he identified had, you will not be shocked to learn, received routine immunizations.
Obviously, as much as anyone might like to, we can’t automatically attribute every outcome on either side to the childhood vaccine schedule. The Amish are unlike the rest of America in approximately eleventy billion ways: diet, exercise, environmental exposures, social cohesion, technology use, alcohol consumption, health-care dependency, genetics, and certainly the number of hours per day spent arguing with strangers named @TrustTheScienceMD on X.
But the very dangerous question the Amish raise merely by existing is this: if America’s hyper-medicalized lifestyle is the key to superior health, shouldn’t the people opting out of it be an absolute freaking disaster?
The problem is, they’re not. Far from it. And the establishment’s answer is to try to force-vaccinate them until they’re as sick, miserable, and dependent on the system as the rest of us.
The frustratingly absurd part is when you consider the folks allowed to roam America from sea to shining sea without ever rolling up their sleeves. The CDC explicitly states that refugees are not required to receive routine vaccinations before entering the U.S. Millions of ordinary foreign visitors can land at JFK, grab a train into the city, and visit museums and shops and restaurants—licking every available surface should they so choose—without first demonstrating they’ve complied with New York’s school vaccine requirements. Yet little Amos can’t sit beside little Levi in a privately funded one-room schoolhouse surrounded only by other kids whose parents share the same religious convictions.
Make. It. Make. Sense.
The families behind the three Amish schools being fined into submission are preparing to ask SCOTUS to hear Miller v. McDonald, their challenge to the state’s refusal to grant them a religious exemption from school vaccine mandates. Their attorneys—a group that includes vaccine badass Aaron Siri—say if the Court won’t intervene, some of New York’s roughly 25,000 Amish may round up their buggies and skedaddle.
“We, as a peace loving religious group, are sincerely sorry that we are causing the state a prob [sic],” lead plaintiff Ezra Wengerd wrote—by hand, of course. “Our Almighty God wants us to fully put our faith and trust in Him. Which is in conflict to put our trust in vaccines. We are also commanded to not be conformed to this world.”
And you can’t blame them (although you are free to feel righteously furious that they’re being run off their own land and forced to deal with our corrupt institutions at all). What you can be concerned about is the part where their most likely destination is… Pennsylvania.
Guys. I realize Pennsylvania is home to the largest Amish population in the U.S. and presumably you have friends there. But this is a huge country! Idaho is stunning. Missouri has lakes! Florida is lovely if you don’t mind humidity, the occasional hurricane, and cockroaches the size of oven mitts. And Pennsylvania happens to be in the midst of its own Amish-adjacent measles freakout (which you probably didn’t hear about on account of shunning technology entirely, bless).
In case Jenna’s Side readers missed the drama, PA Governor Josh Shapiro recently announced his state’s first two measles deaths in 35 years—and then went absolutely ballistic with the news, blaming RFK Jr. for sowing vaccine “confusion” before refusing Kennedy’s offer of federal assistance and declaring the deaths absolutely preventable. All while, naturally, urging mass vaccination.
Unfortunately for Shapiro, the Lancaster County coroner came forward and announced that his office had recorded no deaths from measles at all. It was aware of just one death with measles: a newborn who died tragically from a ruptured spleen (who later tested positive for measles) and was too young to have received the MMR shot in the first place.
The governor promptly apologized, corrected the record, and sent Bobby a fruit basket.
Hahahahahaha just kidding. Faced with a coroner’s report that directly contradicted his headline-grabbing claims, Shapiro whipped out the Classic Covid Cause-of-Death Shell Game™ and shifted the linguistic goalposts from “measles deaths” to “measles-associated deaths.” Which is well-known public-health speak for a person who tested positive for measles died of something else but calling it that wouldn’t be beneficial to our agenda.
At this point, it’s only a matter of time until we’re arguing whether the patient died with an overdue library book or of an overdue library book.
As for the second fatality, what we know as of this reporting is [*checks notes*] virtually nothing. Not the deceased’s age, underlying conditions, clinical course, or cause of death. The state has released zero information—with the exception that the individual was unvaccinated, naturally. It’s a weird single bit of information to possess, and a pretty remarkable level of opacity for an administration simultaneously demanding that the public regard the announcement as conclusive proof of a nationwide public-health emergency caused by one Cabinet secretary’s brain-worm injury.
In case you missed the plot, it took the local coroner exactly four minutes to blow the whistle on Shapiro’s carefully worded presser. Then the brilliant 2nd Smartest Guy in the World did an impressive deep dive into the governor’s cozy relationship with pharma and turned up some curious nuggets. It seems Pennsylvania manufactures more than half of all vaccines administered in the U.S., and Shapiro’s administration has backed more than $5.5 billion in “life sciences” investments. Just two months before his breathless press conference, Shapiro personally announced a $10.6 million grant to vaccine giant Sanofi Pasteur. Oh, and Lancaster County is home to the massive GSK vaccine plant that supplies vaccines to one in four Americans. In other words, saying the governor’s got some skin in the vaccine game is like saying a toddler has a passive interest in an unattended sheet cake.
While Shapiro has been busy peddling measles fear, his administration is simultaneously stealth-rewriting the state’s health code to grant itself permanent, near-absolute authoritarian powers. The terrifying 502-page proposal would effectively claw back many of the sweeping COVID-era powers Pennsylvania voters stripped from the governor in 2021, allowing unaccountable bureaucrats to enter private homes and schools without a warrant, interrogate students in private, and maintain a statewide vaccine database. The latter includes detailed information about individual schools across Pennsylvania—including rates of religious, philosophical, and medical exemptions at each. Nothing like having a handy map of where all the pesky vaccine-refusers are and all the legal muscle in the world to make them regret it.
All of which makes the theatricality over two measles-adjacent deaths easier to understand—albeit harder to excuse. Consider that seasonal flu kills anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 Americans in a typical year. At the low end, that’s 200 per state (and PA, ranking fifth in the U.S. in population, would expect far more). Now imagine the governor holding a press conference over two people who tested positive for influenza after dying in a car crash. Someone would demand a psych evaluation.
But the public-health apparatus has done a brilliant job swaddling measles in polio blankets and persuading people that we’re one inoculation season away from The Plague 2.0—even though lots of us are old enough to remember when your parents sent you to measles parties on purpose and an official diagnosis meant a few days of staying home and watching The Price is Right in your pajamas.
The Pennsylvania measles “outbreak” is precisely why the Amish fight matters beyond a few single-teacher schools in rural New York. Once public health decides it knows what’s best for any segment of the population, facts are negotiable, definitions are adjustable, and your deeply held religious convictions are about as binding as the dress code at Walmart.
The fate of the Amish lawsuit is anyone’s guess at this point. But if America can’t find room for the Amish—when cities are enthusiastically rolling out prayer mats for noonday Muslim worship—exactly how robust is our vaunted religious liberty anyway?
Maybe SCOTUS will decline to hear the case, and New York will succeed in exporting 25,000 peaceful, taxpaying citizens who build things, grow food, repair machinery, and don’t require a referral for a therapist who specializes in climate grief.
Or maybe the Court will finally ask the obvious question: What compelling public purpose is served by financially annihilating a handful of cloistered religious schools whose students are, by design, living and learning entirely among people who share the same beliefs and accept the same risks?
Either way, well done, New York. Really. You’ve got crumbling infrastructure, crushing taxes, and guys wandering your flagship city in their birthday suits, and you decide public menace number one is the peaceful, preternaturally healthy community begging to be left alone.
Thank God someone’s finally figured out how to keep that place safe.
We should NEVER need exemptions for a medical intervention, especially when the maker of the product has no liability for injury. Clown world
Unlike 90% of the rest of society, the Amish have a backbone and something they actually believe in. Bring it on, politicians. You're finally messing with people who don't care about your "yummy free hamburger" or indeed your krispy kremes or even your travel bans.