The Claim:
An old claim is getting new life: that Amish people don’t vaccinate and their children are the healthiest people in the world.
The Facts:
While the Amish as a population might be under-vaccinated, they are by no means unvaccinated. In a 2011 study, of those who responded, only 14% said their children received no vaccines. This 2021 study indicates that about 25% of the Amish respondents would get vaccinated against COIVD.
But were the Amish protected from COVID? The “study” that claims that COVID death rates among Amish communities are an “incredible 90 times lower than the rest of fully-vaxxed and boostered, mask-wearing and locked-down America” was simply tech millionaire Steve Kirsch inserting himself into an Amish community and asking them to name people who died. He “did some calculations and thought there might have been a few, maybe five, Amish individuals who had died. . . this implies that the Amish died at a rate 90 times lower than the infection fatality rate of the rest of the United States.”
Of course, having a discussion with one community and doing some back-of-napkin calculations isn’t a study. Both the information gathering and the math are inadequate to draw any conclusions. And we are left with nothing supporting Amish children being the world’s healthiest people.
Lastly, according to news sources, the Amish were actually hit hard by COVID.
Disclaimer: Science is always evolving and our understanding of these topics may have evolved since this was originally posted. Browse the latest information posted in Just the Facts Topics.
Just the Facts Newsletter:
Correcting this week's disinformation
Sign up to get a weekly look at the latest vaccination facts as we debunk the latest false vaccination claims making the rounds on the internet.