@daas-yochid He lied about what? That masks are ineffective? Or that masks are effective? The guy made a public announcement that he made a mistake and after reviewing the evidence he’s changed his mind. Why would someone lie about that? And why wouldn’t you believe him?

I think there’s a lot more truth to that statement then, say, the claim that masks can cause people to have potentially fatal breathing problems. The former is backed by documented evidence, the latter is a dangerous fabrication being pushed on social media.

Masks work. Wear them.

New York State accounted for nearly half the US COVID deaths during April 2020. Why isn’t Cuomo held accountable for that?

@Yt I’m not sure if using your visible name links to your profile, so I went with both.

Do you want to know why “lots of people are against them”? Same reason why lots of people are anti-Semites, or why lots of people think that the Earth is flat, or why lots of people think Joe Biden is a lizard in disguise. People get their information from less than legitimate sources and aren’t educated enough to know better to look for something a little more verifiable.

Do you know what’s worse than the unknown side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines? COVID-19.

I believe Rav Shlomo Wolbe ZT”L went to the early 20th century German equivalent of public school until he was old enough to go to Yeshiva.

L’Havdil, Rav Malkiel Kotler SHLIT”A went to Betzalel, a non-frum Jewish school in Lakewood.

Public schools back then did not teach the pritzus they do now. They were much worse. Most secular schools in the 20th century were very into Atheism and openly anti-Semitic. There was no accommodation for religious lifestyles and Jewish students were actively encouraged to discard their old fashioned dress and religion.

@torahvaluesoverparty 5% was what the Henry Ford Clinic reported. I think they were the only large medical group to prescribe HCQ+Zinc on a big scale to treat pre-symptomatic COVID-19. The 80-90% number reported from the Kiryas Yoel clinic is misleading. It was based on patients who had or had some symptoms of COVID-19 were prescribed HCQ+Zinc were not hospitalized. That is perfectly consistent with how COVID-19 reacts normally without medication. Furthermore, this was at the beginning of the pandemic, without testing, so it’s likely that most of the patients didn’t even have COVID-19.

There were several double-blind studies on HCQ. Several repeated Dr. Zelenkos drug cocktail. The most positive outcome was a 5% decrease in hospitalizations for COVID-19 patients. Dr. Zelenko himself never performed a proper peer reviewed study.

There exists multiple medications and procedures to help with COVID-19 and the medical establishment is scrambling for anything. If HCQ+Zinc worked as well as people on here claim it does, it would have been standard months ago.

There are a lot of frum people with an extremely dangerous mindset. They believe that the vaccines are more dangerous and less effective than HCQ+Zinc when the reverse is true. This means that COVID-19 will continue to spread and endanger our oilom if we don’t educate people on the matter.

@ujm Relying on rich parents for money shows a chisaron in emunah. If an individual requires a life where he doesn’t have to work and neither does his wife, then he should have the emunah that Hashem will give it to him. How do you think so many kollel families in Eretz Yisroel manage? What if the father-in-law makes a bad business decision and loses his money, leaving the man stuck with no prospect for a job and a wife he needs the finer things? Money disappears, Torah is l’Netzach Nitzachim.

So are Republican Jews responsible for terrorist attacks that come because of the lack of peace between Israel and the Palestinians?

@CharlieHall “New York can be doing worse” isn’t exactly a shining endorsement of Cuomo. After botching the initial COVID-19 response causing nearly half the initial deaths in the US. Then encouraging vaccine distributors to throw out extra doses by threatening anyone who dared vaccinate someone who isn’t in the nebulous “Group 1A”. He will have to do a lot better than 33rd percentile before you will get people to stop bashing him.

Not endorsing Biden’s plan or anything, but I would like to ask a question for everyone here. What’s Israel’s endgame?

I mean it makes sense to say that you can’t negotiate with terrorists, but it also makes no sense to keep the West Bank in a state of permanent limbo. Do you want the West Bank to be completely part of Israel and give all of its residents citizenship? Or do you want to give the whole thing back to Jordan? There has to be some sort of plan, right? We can’t just keep pretending that everything is fine just as long as the terrorism is kept to a minimum.

Sorry to sound so much like a smolani, but it just bothers me that no one seems to be thinking long term about what needs to happen.

Rav Aryeh Carmell ZT”L wrote at length about how “ecofriendliness” is part of the Torah and we cannot disrespect our environment. I suggest we all read his essays on the matter before proceeding further.

Though I do admit that modern “green” movements are mostly about making people feel better about themselves. Even if everyone in the US would use reusable shopping bags, the impact on the environment would be minimal. The main things we need to worry about are big governments and companies that account for 90% of the world’s pollution.

As a side note, there is one Yid that was pardoned who is being mistakenly referred to in the media as an Orthodox Jew.

Edited – I am not sure that information fulfills the requirements for posting

@daas-yochid I don’t want to put you on the spot, I just like to know where people stand on certain issues when having a discussion with them. If you don’t want to answer, that’s fine and good day.

There were literal Nazis and other anti-Semites at the Charlottesville rally. Instead of condemning them, Trump just kind of gave a wishy-washy response about how there were good people there too.

@commonsaychel I am unaware of any aveiros that Dr. Levine publicly flaunts. And if you can list any, I’m certain I can find an equal or greater number of Jewish Trump appointees that have also committed aveiros.

@commonsaychel According to @health, the only criteria we should be looking at when discussing a goys morality is whether they are oiver on mitzvos B’nei Noach. I don’t believe Dr. Levine has been, at least not publicly (unless there’s some eating the leg of a live cow I’m unaware of) so there’s not a problem in that regard.

@avram-in-md Avereimele, you are pulling the same old schtick of ignoring my main point to focus on some narische technical inaccuracies. Fine I was wrong about Eretz Yisroel. Nu, what about the vaccination program?

@Health At this point it’s a cry wolf scenario. The hard-core Trump believers have been saying for months that any day Biden will be forced to concede. Now we are down to one day and we’re talking literally a neis niglah to prevent…. what exactly? These goyim from having control as opposed to the other goyim?

@syag-lchochma Research shows that 10% of people who get COVID experience severe symptoms and about 10% of people who get the vaccine experience mild symptoms. If the millions who got the vaccine had instead gotten COVID, there would have been a few thousand vaccine deaths already, plus hospitals overrun with vaccine injuries. Instead, look at Eretz Yisroel. For the first time in weeks, the strain on the hospitals is easing up. Because so much of the country has been vaccinated.

I don’t believe there are two sides to this issue anymore than I believe in their being two sides to flat Earth theory or whether Donald Trump is a reptile. What I believe in is the Torah. And everyone I know and know of who is a Talmid Chacham is promoting getting a COVID vaccine. So either stand on the side of Torah, or stand aside.

@syag-lchochma Even if you’re healthy there’s very good reasons to get vaccinated. Vaccines, like masks and social distancing, are more about preventing others from getting the virus than yourself. Sure you may not mind a week long fever followed by months of coughing, fits, and loss of smell, but it’s unfair that immune compromised people should have to perpetually lock down and suffer because of that.

@ujm While I understand the concern, you are starting off with a false assumption. We aren’t the guinea pigs. There already were guinea pigs. Tens of thousands of people have tested the vaccine, and after many months the worst side effects were a few weeks of feeling bad. On the flip side, an equal number of people did not get the vaccine (the control group) and many more of them fell ill in a much more severe manner (COVID-19).

I agree with @charliehall. Although all the effects may not yet be known, it is a near-certainty that the dangers of not taking the vaccine far outweigh the dangers of taking it.

As for demographics that may be in danger, such as kids and people with certain illnesses, the vaccine isn’t approved for them and they won’t be taking it until it is.

@health Mishkav Zachar is a mahlokes if it’s a mitzvas bnei Noach. Same with a married man being mezaneh. There is no question that the latter is morally wrong, even for goyim, both according to the Torah and according to the current secular social systems. So I don’t see why we are making a fuss.

@ujm I believe that Rav Moshe ZT”L wrote in Iggors Moshe that abortion is bad, but sometimes necessary for medical reasons so we should not oppose building abortion clinics because it may endanger pregnant women who are in a state of sakonos nefashos. While not explicit endorsement of RvW, it’s certainly not the Xtian or OANN approach to the matter either.

@ujm and @jude You are missing something big when it comes to currency value. A dollar is valuable because billions of people assign value to it. I can walk into any store in the US and my dollar bill will be accepted there. Crypto doesn’t have that value. The vast majority of people do not accept payment in Etherium or Dogecoin in exchange for goods or services. It’s value comes almost entirely from the fact that people like to invest, buy, and sell it. (The few people who do accept it as currency are overwhelmingly drug and gun dealers, relying on the inherent anonymity of blockchain.) That alone makes it an extremely volatile system who’s value is very unstable.

I know a bit about it.

Essentially it’s gambling. All crypto investments are extremely high risk and subject to massive peaks and valleys on any given day. There’s no guarantee even the most stable of cryptos won’t crash tomorrow or if the most popular, like BTC, will have another skyrocket increase in price. There are “farms” that own massive percentages in certain cryptos and they could at any point decide the price by either buying or selling a massive amount.

As for their price themselves, cryptocurrencies never really became useful currencies and are still essentially only valued at what people will pay for them, not at what they will buy. Like BTC can take hours to approve a transaction (“get your transaction signed and on the ledger” in crypto speak) and it’s so volatile you won’t find many vendors willing to take that sort of risk. You can buy something for $100 with 0.001 Bitcoins but by the time the transaction goes through, the vendor will receive 0.001 BTC but it’s now worth only $75.

And there are a lot of con artists out there making bank off of it. It’s how the old adage goes, in a gold rush the only ones making money are those selling shovels.

What I’m trying to say is that you shouldn’t invest in crypto. Maybe if you have a few hundred or thousand dollars you don’t mind potentially losing, it’s not the worst idea. But definitely don’t view it as a good investment.

@syag-lchochma True. But the fact that there are precious few Republicans that believe that Trump won the election makes him the lone voice of insanity shouting in the wilderness.