Covidiot News - Loopy Homophobic Rabbi's Paranoid Vaccine Claims

Rabbi Daniel Asor, "Covid-19 vaccine can make you gay"

Popular rabbi warns followers COVID vaccine 'could make you gay' - www.israelhayom.com

A Jewish Rabbi, Daniel Asor, popular in Israel amongst the Orthodox Haredi community, is talking impressionable followers out of having the Covid-19 vaccine, claiming it is part of a plot to turn them gay. He is also promulgating the ludicrously nutty QAnon conspiracy theory that the vaccine is part of a plot to implant microchips in people. A plot that includes the ultra-right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, apparently!

According to this report in Israel Hayom:

In addition to purporting a false link between vaccines and homosexuality, Assur [sic] also advocates various conspiracy theories about the coronavirus, claiming, among other things, that both the virus and the vaccines are the work of a "global malicious government," comprising the Freemasons, the Illuminati, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and others, who are "trying to establish a new world order."

In a recent surmon he told his followers:

...any vaccine made using an embryonic substrate, and we have evidence of this, causes opposite tendencies. Vaccines are taken from an embryonic substrate, and they did that here, too, so ... it can cause opposite tendencies.

None of the vaccines approved so far are made from 'embryonic substrate', but Asor appears to have little interest in the factuality of his claims. Like religious fundamentalist of other faiths, he seem keen to disuade people from being protected against a deady pandemic that has, according to Johns Hopkins University, infected almost 96 million people world-wide, killing over 2 million of them (as of 19th January, 2021)

Undetered by facts, Asor brands the World Health Organisation and Pharmaceutical compnaies like Pfizer as "criminal organisations".

The Haredi community has seen especially high levels of morbidity from Covid-19, caused mostly by a refusal to comply with social distancing rules.

Yaakov Litzman, Israeli Health Minister
"I am sure that the messiah will come by Passover and save us..."

Back in the first wave in Spring 2020, the then Israeli Health Minister, Rabbi Yaakov Litzman, a member of an Orthodox Hasidic sect, tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus after disobeying his own department's advice on social distances and, in particular, limiting the distance one could travel from one's home, in order to attend a place of worship. As Health Minister in Netanyahu's shaky coalition government he had told his followers that:

I am sure that the messiah will come by Passover and save us the same way God saved us during the exodus and we were freed. The messiah will come and save us all.

Covid-19 Daily New cases - Israel

Source: Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Centre. (19 Jan, 2021).

As events subsequently showed, not only did the Messiah fail to show up and save the Israelis but the pandemic raged especially strongly amongst the Orthodox Jewish communities who listened to him.

Litzman was replaced as Israeli Health Minister but remained in Netanyahu's coalition government as Minister of Housing and Construction. He later resigned from that post in protest over a three-week nationwide coronavirus shutdown over the Jewish holidays, Rosh HaShanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot, but was re-appointed to the same post a few weeks later.

Last November, with the help of Trump's right-wing Christian fundamentalist puppet on SCOTUS, Amy Coney Barrett, two New York Orthodox synagogues, together with the Catholic Church, managed to get the Supreme Court of the USA to overturn a regulation intended to limit the number who could attend a place of worship in areas where the number of Covid-19 cases was high. This effectively scuppered Mayor Cuomo's plan for combatting the pandemic in New York, which had been especially hard-hit in the first wave.

According to Johns Hopkins University, as of today, Israel has reported 558,249 Covid-19 cases, and 4,044 deaths since the first recorded case there on 21 February, 2020.

There seems to be something strange, amounting to malevolence, in fundamentalist religions, which provokes a knee-jerk reaction against measures to protect people from these pandemics. It's almost as though fundamentalists actually want as many people made sick and dying as possible and see it as their god's will and their god as needing their help to ensure its will is carried out. Many of these same fundamentalists also hypocritically oppose a woman's right to choose in matters of family planning and pregnancy, claiming to be pro-life.

Perhaps it's the usual self-validating need to feel like martyrs that induces them to see everything as part of some nefarious plot against them. Whatever it is, it's a powerful argument against inflicting religious fundamentalism on children.

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