Andrew Cuomo, sanitary dictator

Yesterday, Ari Hoffman tweeted:

EXCLUSIVE: NYC officials only targeted Jewish schools with citations & inspections during COVID

After 4 years a FOIL request finally revealed that NYC Democrats specifically targeted Jewish schools in Brooklyn in fall 2020

No non-Jewish private or charter schools were listed

The tweet was accompanied by this document plus others (Substack doesn’t allow embedding tweets — you’ll have to go here to see the whole thing).

Even before the lockdown (I began noticing at least as of 2014, crescendoing to the 2016 election), parents who didn’t allow any or even some vaccines to be given to their children were getting a lot of pushback that honestly began to seem orchestrated. On some days, reading Twitter seemed like a script had been handed out to commentators regarding shots.

The anti-"anti-Vaxxer" rhetoric was in full force, a sample of which can be found here, with Bethany Mandel’s choice of words in her peroration reflecting the template: “Choosing not to vaccinate is not yet another anodyne trend in personal parenting. It’s not a quirk; it’s a menace—and a growing one at that.”

This basic thought was repeated over and over, as if she and the rest were determined to convince themselves, to whip themselves into a righteous frenzy. The idea of others “menacing” ones’ (or one’s children’s) health is the trope; it’s so satisfying to feel one has a cause, even though it’s illogical: If the vaccines protect you, why are you menaced? If they don’t, then why take them, since they do carry risk one might not want to incur, outweighing an uncertain outcome, as even a quick bit of research will show?

Not to mention the fact that not all shots are the same — some don’t even target communicable diseases. And many outbreaks are due to the vaccinated (especially measles, against which public panic was directed before Covid — and then, Covid). The story might be that the unvaccinated were sick, but the cause is often unreported: someone or even whole population, had a shot and didn’t follow the manufacturer’s warning to self-quaranitine. Oh, you didn’t know about that?

But just aggressively stating over and over, “you’re a health menace” without discussing risks and benefits became the rigid paradigm for the response to anyone attempting to bring up the issue.

The “outbreaks” of measles in the headlines amount to a few cases. This year, as of March, cases — cases, not deaths, of which there are always zero in the US— reached… wait for it… 64. In 2023, there were 58 cases. This doesn’t even rise to the level of a rounding error in disease reporting in a country where “more than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur each year. More than 35,000 people die as a result, according to CDC's 2019 AR Threats Report.” But do the headlines hysterically warn us against irresponsible antibiotic use? If you are alert, you’ll notice that measles panic is ratcheted up by pivoting to world-wide statistics, because in our country, it’s simply not an issue at all.

Hasidic Jews in particular were being attacked for not vaccinating. Watching these attacks for years, I have concluded that they occurred for two reasons — first, because this religious group sticks closely together, which is something that just angers many people (homeschoolers incite a similar reaction); second, because they are identifiable by their appearance, especially in a crowded city like New York. You can’t always tell if a person is a Jew, but you can always tell he’s a Hasidic Jew. If homeschoolers had the same dress and hair (proverbial denim skirts notwithstanding) and tended to live in Brooklyn, they would have been targeted too, and actually, even so, they were and are.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s powerfully prophetic “sanitary dictatorship” statement when churches were locked down comes to mind. The phrase neatly conveys the power of fear, backed by a mob stirred up to a pitch, the state can use to take away people’s freedom. The very idea of contagion works as a thought-stopping means of take away people’s rights. In effect, to impose a dictatorship without a political revolution. Instead, the value of health becomes an excuse to wield force.

Every once in a while I remember that Andrew Cuomo relentlessly attacked the Hasids, even as he was criminally shunting the infected elderly to nursing homes to die in loneliness (not his own mom, though, whom he first moved).

If you go here, you can watch him in full “sanitary dictatorship” mode. (Again, sorry, would love to embed.) Listen to him closely, as he uses the language of someone who is grooming his audience for his lawlessness and exertion of power: “You can attack that small cluster”… “rush in with resources to make sure we stamp it out”… “We're now having issues in the Orthodox Jewish community in New York -- where because of their religious practices, etc. we're seeing a spread.” Ah, got it.

The words are all aimed at rationalizing and inciting an attack-mob, and indeed Hasids were attacked: “Antisemitic Incidents Rose 26 Percent in New York State in 2019; NY Leads the Nation for Acts of Hate Against Jews.”

People have a human right to bodily integrity, whether that makes you feel menaced or not.

As Pope Pius XI said in 1930, “Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects; therefore, where no crime has taken place and there is no cause present for grave punishment, they can never directly harm, or tamper with the integrity of the body, either for the reasons of eugenics or for any other reason.” (Casti Connubii 70)

Not surprisingly, where the government appropriates this power, things go very wrong. The shots turn out to be dangerous and the threat turns out to be negligible or not what we thought it was. But people become more compliant and more liable to faction.

I hope this is a lesson we can finally learn.