Defending Rabbi Epstein from the Illiteratti
Rabbi Hoffman gets every fact wrong in his attempted rebuttal
I was recently forwarded an article (reproduced below in full) written by prominent Jewish columnist Rabbi Y. Hoffman by multiple individuals, which was attempting to defend the Rabbis of Baltimore & 5-Towns from Rabbi Epstein’s contretemps. Thus, a rebuttal is necessary.
(By way of background for anyone unfamiliar with the back and forth here, Rabbi Epstein is a prominent Rabbi who is staunchly anti the covid vaccines. Recently, groups of Rabbis in both Baltimore and the 5-Towns made videos where they exhorted everyone to get vaccinated, dressing it up as an obligation derived on both religious and common sense medical grounds. Rabbi Epstein blew them to smithereens, so Rabbi Hoffman attempted to respond to what he thought were Rabbi Epstein’s arguments.)
(Emphases not mine)
The 5 Pronged Attack on Rabbi Bender and the 5 Towns Rabbis
By Rabbi Yair Hoffman
There is a video circulating that is, essentially, attacking Rabbi Yaakov Bender of Yeshiva Darchei Torah. The person doing the attacking, Rabbi E., is an eloquent and well-spoken talmid chochom (great sage). The truth is that the video attacks pretty much all of the Five Towns Rabbis, but Rabbi Bender has been singled out. The problem is that the Rabbi doing the attacking has made some very serious errors which can mislead the masses and Heaven forbid cause deaths, rachmana litzlan (Heaven forbid). Indeed, all five prongs of the attack are wrong.
Dead wrong, as we shall see.
RABBI E.’s FIRST ATTACK
Rabbi E. points out is that Rabbi Bender made a mistake regarding the percentage of doctors who have been vaccinated. The true AMA study showed that 96% of doctors have been vaccinated. Rabbi Bender said that it was 99%.
I believe that Rabbi Bender did err slightly here in confusing two very different studies. One study was of doctors who were vaccinated (96%) and the second study was of current serious COVID victims who were unvaccinated (99%). Rabbi E. is correct in that Rabbi Bender confused the study that showed 99% of the current COVID victims were those who had not received the vaccine with the doctor study. That’s right. It is a fact that of all of the victims of COVID only 1 percent of them received the vaccine. 99% were unvaccinated.
There is no “fact” of 99% within any covid metric being the unvaccinated in any meaningful jurisdiction. Rabbi Hoffman does not even know the parameters of this stat he’s quoting, a striking deficiency that is disqualifying. Public Health England data show quite clearly that even at peak vaccine efficacy, the vaccinated made up something like 30-40% of the various metrics (which was admittedly still vastly disproportionate to their share of the overall population, but is also not the contention here). The 99% canard was jury rigged by including cases all the way back to January, which just happened to be the biggest peak of recorded covid metrics since the beginning of the pandemic, and where everyone was unvaccinated. This in addition to the differing standards for positive test results between vaxxed/unvaxxed and massive disparities in testing volume to boot. Who needs science when you can employ such empty heuristics?? Even the idolatrous heathens of old had better dialectic standards!
Rabbi E. makes no mention of this statistic when he attacks Rabbi Bender. This is disingenuous. It is clear that Rabbi Bender was thinking about this specific statistic when he used the number 99%.
Rabbi E. doesn’t mention it because it is an absurd lie.
In any event, Rabbi Hoffman is exaggerating almost tangential observation by Rabbi E and trying to portray it - inaccurately - as a major tentpole ‘prong’ of his position. It was a throwaway line, nothing more.
It would actually be rather humorous if the underlying issues were not so serious and significant. Rabbi E. is essentially saying, “Rabbi Bender, you misrepresented! It’s only 96% not 99%! So you are lying!” But the statistic it came from is even more devastating to Rabbi E’s point.
Look at the victims. 99% of them did not vaccinate. This actually makes the argument to vaccinate even stronger. To make the point even clearer let’s go to an analogy.
Rabbi E was literally just pointing out that Rabbi Bender had made a mistake in his quotation of the stat. And it is far from obvious that it ever occurred to Rabbi E. that Rabbi Bender mixed up these two stats, it certainly didn’t occur to me until I read Rabbi Hoffman’s article a second time more closely after watching the video of Rabbi E.
THE TAX ANALOGY
Imagine there is a software that analyzes your tax return with the goal of making sure that you do not get a tax audit. The software is marketed all over the country and half of the country uses the software. The results are compared with those who were actually audited by the IRS.
Of those who were audited, 99% of them did not use the software. 1% did use the software. Would anyone in his right mind not use the software?
If we would certainly do this in regard to avoiding a tax audit why wouldn’t we do it to avoid severe illness or death?
Um, even if we accept the 99% efficacy, what if 1/1000 users of the software were hacked by malicious Nigerian prince scammers who wiped all their data from the cloud and their hard drives?? Horse of a different color, don’t you think?
RABBI E.’s SECOND ATTACK
Rabbi E’s next point is to say that the AMA study just surveyed its own members. AMA members, he says, have already been indoctrinated. He is claiming that the doctors were cherry-picked. This might have been a valid point if it was true.
I would just like to interject that this is indeed true.
Rabbi E., however, misrepresented this point. The AMA just designed the survey. They didn’t administer it. It was given to WEBMD doctors – who do represent a broader cross-section of doctors.
WebMD is an American corporation which is an online publisher of news and information pertaining to human health and well-being. It also includes information pertaining to drugs. It is one of the top healthcare websites by unique visitors. It has nothing to do with the AMA. It was founded in 1998 by internet entrepreneur Jeff Arnold.
Rabbi Hoffman is delusional regarding the state of political encroachment upon the medical community, especially its institutions and platforms. WEBMD happily spouts the most deranged lunatic nonsense about transgender madness, sexual health, and so on, making sure to toe the political doctrinal lines to a “T”.
Furthermore, Rabbi Hoffman is misrepresenting Rabbi Epstein’s attack on the survey so egregiously that it beggars the imagination just how he could have misunderstood the information so badly. Rabbi Epstein was essentially arguing that the survey had innate, implicit bias in respondent selection, because it is precisely the sort of brainwashed, brain-dead, establishment cultist doctor who would tend to respond and fill out such a survey in the first place. Critically, doctors are also already under tremendous peril for their careers and social lives should they exhibit even the tiniest bit of skepticism, and face direct and open threats from the hospital systems that are their sole source of income should they go unvaccinated.
His second point, then, is an absolute misrepresentation. Sadly, Rabbi E. is using his powerful eloquence to highlight a fabrication. True, it could be that he missed the part about WEBMD when he read the study, but still, before you attack someone, do them the courtesy of double-checking your information.
Often, and sometimes even unintentionally, characterizing one’s ideological opponent as “articulate” or “eloquent” is a great way to reframe “convincing argument” as being just powerful style and prose, as seems to be the case here.
The “part about WEBMD” is wholly irrelevant.
Rabbi Hoffman omits entirely a central point of Rabbi E’s argument - which is inexcusable, and rather shocking for someone of his stature - that the AAPS conducted their own version of this survey that found almost 60% of doctors being unvaccinated. Obviously, this puts the “96%” foolishness to bed easily, as it lays bare the fact that both of these surveys suffer from the same self-selection biases. To claim that there is no bias in the “WEBMD survey”, Rabbi Hoffman would need to characterize the demographic of its users, and more specifically, its survey respondents to various types of issues, something which I kind of suspect he has no idea about whatsoever.
Regarding the % of doctors who are anti the covid vaccines, I am part of a group that has around 2,000+ doctors, almost all of whom are anti to some degree. The notion that the overwhelming majority of doctors are genuinely pro the covid vaccines is as asinine as it is unpredicated.
RABBI E.’s THIRD ATTACK
Rabbi E also claims that there are one million doctors in the United States and that the study only surveyed 304 doctors, and 11 eleven were not vaccinated. he claims that 304 is nothing compared to the amount of doctors in this country.
The truth is that there are 620,520 US MD’s in this country and that the number 304 from a statistical vantage point will produce a 95% confidence rate with a margin of error of 6%. 95% confidence rate is the standard usage.
You can check this out with a statistics expert. Just ask any actuary.
Rabbi Hoffman’s statistical argument here is sheer nonsense, and he clearly does not understand the subject of statistics. Statistical significance means only that the results are not due to random chance. In other words, we can confidently assume that there is a common factor shared by the subjects in this study - the doctors who took the survey - that correlates to the results of 96% being what we’ll just refer to as “pro-vax”. What this survey cannot do is reveal the specific factor responsible for the correlation, because there were no controls in place to try to vet out confounding factors and biases that are fairly routine. In other words, what is the commonality among the survey respondents that is responsible for them overwhelmingly being “pro-vax”? Is it them being doctors, as Rabbi Hoffman would have us all believe, or is it something else entirely, such as being a registered Democrat, or being a lazy follower of the vaccine positions of the CDC/NIH/et al. who doesn’t think critically (a widespread phenomenon among many in the medical profession). 304 doctors out of >620,000 from a statistical vantage point is easily thoroughly skewed by even a mildly powered selection bias. 304 doesn’t remotely approach the threshold necessary to control for the one innate bias of doctors who are pro vaccine to be more willing to fill out such a survey versus doctors who are among the vaccine hesitant. There is a reason that RCT’s with subject sizes orders of magnitude greater are nonetheless still rigorously propensity score matched to curate as evenly balanced study arms across numerous variables as possible. Such methodology would be laughed out of first year college, let alone facing peer-review standards. This is obvious to anyone with a smidgen of sense about statistical analysis.
RABBI E.’s HALACHIC ERROR AND FOURTH ATTACK
I’m going to skip this one, as it is entirely about religious doctrine.
RABBI E.’s FIFTH ATTACK
In his third point, Rabbi E. lays the claim that all the studies regarding the vaccine for pregnant women are based upon only one study from the CDC. He attacked the Rabbis for giving false medical advice and said that he hopes that they are prepared to face the consequences for this.
Accurately summed up.
Yet, this point is also not true. Way back in August, Dr. Ashley Roman from NYU published an article in the American Journal of Obstretrics & Gynecology – Maternal Fetal Medicine from his own institution.
According to the NYU website: “Studies continue to reinforce the importance of vaccines during pregnancy and their power to protect two lives at once by preventing severe illness in both mothers and babies,” says Ashley S. Roman, MD, director of the Division of Maternal–Fetal Medicine and the Silverman Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at NYU Langone Health, and one of the study’s principal investigators. “If babies could be born with antibodies, it could protect them in the first several months of their lives, when they are most vulnerable.”
The CDC consistently asserted that vaccines should not be withheld from people who are pregnant and want the vaccine. Dr. Roman and colleagues confirm the strong evidence that the mRNA vaccines are safe during pregnancy in a study published August 16 in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology—Maternal–Fetal Medicine, titled “COVID-19 Vaccination in Pregnancy: Early Experience from a Single Institution.” The study found no increased risks during pregnancy, birth complications, or identifiable risks to the fetus among those who received the vaccine.”
So this is a fair critique of Rabbi' Epstein’s argument as he articulated it. Therefore, I will forego for this article rebutting this study.
ANOTHER POINT
We can also ask, what about the babies? In Brazil, 1300 babies died of COVID. True, in America, it is much rarer in that only ¼ of one percent of babies get COVID, but why not give them the opportunity for antibodies too? The NYU study showed that 100% of pregnant women that are vaccinated give their antibodies to their fetus. Why not give it to them?
How about because they don’t need them, and the risks from the vaccine are far greater than the statistically insignificant risk to babies from covid?? Not a single healthy child has been confirmed to have died because of covid in the entire US, or UK. The naked fearmongering about kids is beyond depraved. Clinicians really need to get ahold of themselves, and overcome their own personal trauma from seeing so many covid patients at the beginning in March 2020 in NYC.
THOSE WE KNOW
Let’s point out one more thought. We all know someone or a few people who passed away from COVID. Rachmana litzlan. I know of twelve. But does anyone out there know of anyone who died from the vaccine? I don’t. Nor do I know anyone who knows someone who died from the vaccine.
I know of a few, where I managed to make contact with a family member and get the details. And, yes, there are stories everywhere, which are backed up by excess death data, pharmacovigilance databases, and clinical experience of thousands of doctors who have seen the widespread devastation wreaked by these vaccines. I suspect that there are likely people who died from the vaccine that Rabbi Hoffman knows, but cannot fathom that they were killed by the vaccine, a victory for the diabolical propaganda machine falsely saying that numerous common causes of death - like heart attacks, strokes, clotting, etc - either cannot or are a 1 in a million shot to be from the vaccines.
CONCLUSION
The attack on Rabbi Bender and the other Rabbis is, plainly and simply, wrong. All three of Rabbi E’s points are misrepresentations. Rabbi E is a known antivaxxer who also testified against the measles vaccination at the State of Connecticut’s Public Health Committee. Although this is conjecture, it is highly likely that had Rabbi E. been of age, he might also have tried to convince the world not to take the Polio vaccine.
So Rabbi Epstein was not really materially misrepresenting anything, and Rabbi Hoffman’s factual assertions about covid are all not just wrong but delusional. I am not familiar with Rabbi Epstein’s track record or previous activities, and I am personally staunchly pro the core vaccines such as polio or MMR (the latter which a couple of studies have shown might be very helpful in reducing covid disease severity). We might also conjecture that Rabbi Hoffman would have accepted the governments denial of the Holocaust for most of WWII if we play his ridiculous game of assuming current servile acceptance of government propaganda is dispositive to transpose directly within a different era. We might presume that Rabbi Hoffman is against Ivermectin and the now flood of cheap and effective covid treatments, considering where he gets his information from, which directly leads to people needlessly suffering and dying from lack of proper treatment when they are so ill informed, or worse, encouraged to think of treatments such as Ivermectin as somehow dangerous.
I encourage the reader to think critically about one of Rabbi Epstein’s points unaddressed by Rabbi Hoffman, that the vast majority of doctors are blindly accepting whatever the CDC says without ever analyzing it and coming to an independent judgement on the data from themselves.