
The weirdest part of an Orthodox anti-vaccine conference here was probably when the emcee, a rabbi wearing a black hat and white beard, quoted the Gospel of Luke.
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” he cried, reciting the Gospels nearly verbatim in referring to advocates of vaccination.
The rabbi might have been talking about the 200 people gathered in the basement of a Charedi Orthodox wedding hall in Brooklyn to hear about the dangers of vaccines.
While the scientific consensus supports vaccination and regards it as a historic boon to public health, the crowd and the emcee, Rabbi Hillel Handler, do not put much stock in that science. In Handler’s version of reality, doctors, rabbis and politicians are all hoodwinked by a massive conspiracy orchestrated by drug companies and the Centers for Disease Control to make money off of vaccines.
Handler and the other speakers charged the CDC and its purported stooges with hiding the dangers of vaccines and destroying evidence that they are harmful. They cited no credible evidence.