Is it Mutar to Take the Covid Vaccine?

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Is it Mutar to take the Covid Vaccine? Join the debate in this week’s segment of the Headlines show.

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This week’s discussion addresses the COVID vaccine and whether it is mutar to take it from a halachic and hashkafic perspective. HaRav Shmuel Kamenetsky Shlita will be joining this week’s segment to discuss the vaccine.
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27 COMMENTS

  1. The vaccine has not yet been shown to prevent transmission, as per Pfizer and Moderna executives. This means it is not known if the vaccine will prevent someone from not passing on the virus to someone else if they get infected despite vaccination.

    This Pfizer vaccine has not been tested in children under 16, and the Moderna vaccine has not been tested in children under 18. No covid vaccines have been tested in pregnant women or nursing mothers.

    The FDA has alerted medical professionals to watch out for Bells palsy in vaccine recipients because of cases that occurred during the clinical trials in the vaccine group but not the placebo group.

  2. Four Chicago hospital personnel had “tingling and elevated heart rate” after vaccination, two Alaskan health workers at the same hospital needed emergency treatment (one requiring hospitalization) after vaccination, one nurse in Tennessee fainted during a live interview shortly after she got vaccinated, and two Britons developed anaphylactic reactions after vaccination.

  3. The efficacy rates for the covid vaccine were based on a tiny fraction of trial participants – 196 for Moderna, 170 for Pfizer. Google: “Moderna says new data shows covid vaccine is more than 94% effective, plans to ask FDA for emergency clearance later Monday” and “Pfizer and biontech conclude phase 3 study of covid-19 vaccine candidate, meeting all primary efficacy endpoints.”

  4. If all vaccines are safe, why do the vaccine manufacturers not want to be liable for their vaccines although they are liable for their other medical products?

    And why is the usual government compensation court (VICP) not being used for any damage or death from this covid vaccine, and instead a different court is being used (CICP), which has more limitations (such as you cannot sue for damages or death more than a year after vaccination, you cannot appeal the decision to another court, and you have to pay your own legal fees)?

      • Not sure of your point, but are you saying that if a person has a peanut allergy it is not a problem if they have an anaphylactic reaction as long as they don’t die from it?

  5. If the vaccine MAY be dangerous, why is there not more talk about using the many medical treatments available today for coronavirus instead?
    Ivermectin, hydroxy/zinc/azithromycin/ steroids/anticoagulants/ convalescent plasma therapy, etc.

    • Because a vax can be given to 7 + billion people & meds can only be given to those with symptoms. As a savvy businessman, which would you try to sell to the public?

    • Why don’t they want to use other treatments? Because for one thing, a lot of people invested millions of dollars (or other currency) in this vaccine, and they don’t want to just throw it away now. They have to inject it into everyone in the world, one way or another, no matter what, so they make their profits instead of taking a big, big loss.

  6. Both Moderna and Pfizer will be offering covid vaccines to those who got the placebo during the trials. This will negate any long term health comparisons between those who got the placebo and those who got the vaccine.

    Google the FDA document: “CBER plans for monitoring covid-19 vaccine safety and effectiveness” On page 16, you will see listed 20 “possible adverse event outcomes” (subject to change) including autoimmune disorders, encephalitis, anaphylaxis, Guillain Barre syndrome, convulsions/seizures, stroke, heart attacks and death.

  7. In the United Kingdom, pregnant women are told not to take the vaccine, and women are told not to become pregnant for three months after taking the vaccine. In the United States, ACOG says you should not withhold the vaccine from a pregnant women if she wants to take it (even though the vaccine has not been tested for safety in pregnant women – nor in nursing mothers for that matter).

    In the United Kingdom, citizens are told not to take the vaccine if they have severe allergies to food or medicine, but in the United States, the FDA says you CAN take the vaccine if you have severe allergies to food or medicine.

    Does this make sense?

  8. This headline is misleading to suggest that the assumption is that it is assur and one needs to look for a heter to take it. The actual topic is “Should you take the Corona 19 vaccine?”

    • When asked if you should listen to your doctor if he tells you to take the vaccine, “Normally, one should unless he has a reason not to.”
      The Rav also said, if I understand correctly, that it takes a year to see if a vaccine is safe.

  9. To all those people trying to spread information that isn’t accurate, you are putting people’s lives at risk. Look at the safety data that the FDA released, not at google searches. Better yet, ask medical experts that know how to read the data, and don’t rely on your own limited knowledge.

  10. The Pfizer vaccine has not been studied for safety in pregnant women or immunocompromised people. However as a “condition of emergency use authorization” Pfizer must study the vaccine’s effect in pregnant women, immunocompromised individuals and others. Google: FDA letter to Elisa Harkin (December 11, p. 7)

  11. It is a booshah to Am Yisrael that some of these posters belong to us. No one has critical thinking skills anymore? For the sake of brevity I’m just going to address the first comment under the article. The transmission they are referring to when they say “not shown to prevent transmission” is when a vaccinated person acts as a fomite (google that word) Anyone can be a fomite for any pathogen. Anytime, anywhere despite any vaccination. While technically a fomite is inanimate, the concept is the same. You can have and move the virus around on your clothing, skin, briefcase. The KEY issue with the vaccination is whether you can be INFECTED, and made SICK, then replicate the virus and spew it out in your sneezes and coughs. Please….people… I’m begging you read some literature by QUALIFIED people.

    • Not sure I follow your point but the FDA said in a report that it not yet known if the vaccine keeps the disease from being transmitted (someone gets the infection despite being vaccinated, has no symptoms, and passes the virus on to others). Google ” Pfizer vaccine’s effect on transmission still unknown, FDA says.

  12. This is Moderna’s first vaccine released to the public. And it is a type of vaccine never used before in the known history of the world. Instead of using dead corona virus, it consists of injecting RNA into a person. DNA is like every cell’s internal Torah – it is the book Hashem gave it for knowing how to go about its life. Every cell contains its own copy of the book about how to make you, and it reads it within itself. Initially they taught in the public schools that our DNA is more than 99% the same as a monkey, and they taught that this means we’re basically monkeys. Years later, they realized that they were only looking at the chapter titles of the DNA book – there are billions more bits of information they can see now that they couldn’t see before, and it is not like the monkey’s. And we don’t know how to read the DNA book – it is in a “foreign” cell language. Humans genetically engineer DNA by trial and error. Imagine if chas v’sholom someone changed some letters in the Torah to see how it would affect the way they live. Could they POSSIBLY know all the effects this would have, especially over generations? No. So DNA is a book… What is RNA? It is like the equivalent of an article. Synthetic RNA is a copy-and-paste article put together by us in a language we don’t know. In the pioneer covid vaccine, this synthetic RNA goes into the DNA of a person’s cells, inserting information into the cells’ book that Hashem did not put there. They say it is temporary. Even if it is, how is it okay for us to do this? And if they are wrong and the cells begin to copy the synthetic vaccine RNA in the DNA when they replicate, I suppose the vaccine companies will simply say, “Oops.” And like one commenter pointed out above, no one can sue if this is only noticed more than a year from now. And the person would be genetically modified permanently, for all their generations – never again to have purely Hashem-made genes.

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