One Saturday in mid-April, a group of Orthodox Jewish leaders held a conference call with a Minnesota doctor as they grappled with spiking coronavirus cases in their New York area communities.
Dr. Michael Joyner of the Mayo Clinic is leading a nationwide study on the use of blood plasma to treat patients with severe COVID-19. On the call that afternoon, he told the religious leaders he needed something for his research: more blood from people who have survived the virus.
“Do what you can,” Joyner said, according to Yehudah Kaszirer of Lakewood, New Jersey, one of the rabbis on the call.
About 36 hours later, Kaszirer boarded a private jet with roughly 1,000 vials of blood stored in coolers. It had been drawn from members of the community through a blood drive organized with military-like speed.
The blood would be taken to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and tested for antibodies.
“It felt like being on a godly mission,” Kaszirer said.
And, as it turned out, a very successful one. Roughly 60 percent of the plasma samples were found to contain antibodies.
Since that overnight flight, Orthodox Jews in Kaszirer’s community and others across the country have provided an extraordinary quantity of antibody-rich plasma for the U.S. government supported COVID-19 expanded access program, accounting for roughly half of the supply used to treat 34,000 people, Joyner said.
“There’s no way we’d be able to treat so many people without them,” he told NBC News. “They were the straw that serves the drink in a lot of ways.”
An Orthodox Jewish community in New York is turning tragedy into hope by donating plasma to battle the coronavirus. @CynthiaMcFadden takes a closer look. pic.twitter.com/szVZXmS006
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) July 13, 2020
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6 Responses
How wonderful! We are using our acquired immunity for the benefit of mankind. Please repay our generosity and altruism with the treatment we deserve. Our communities are herd immunized. There were no COVID positive results without concomitant antibodies in Boro Park for the past two months. Why are we being subjected to the same restrictions as the antibodies- negative districts?! We need to be recognized as the herd immunized community which we are; and treated as such!
A new study by researchers in the United Kingdom debunks the theory of herd immunity to the coronavirus as the study found that recovered coronavirus patients usually lose their immunity within a few months, The Guardian reported.
from ywn article today.
the UK research report Is most probably fake news, so the orthodox community doesn’t get the credit they deserve. fact is that after Pesach , which is over 3.5 months we haven’t had any new corona cases, regardless of what that professor claims
The proof is in the pudding. There are no new cases in Boro Park for a while. Nothing is forever. Let us take advantage of our herd immunity now. By the way, vaccines do not confer immunity forever, either.
This does not make sense scientifically and seems like another tactic to bring people to take the vaccine. And to prove my point. Why did they davka say a few months? Cuz that is when a vaccine will most likely become available. Don’t let yourself be fooled. IF you can lose your antibodies after having the real virus then how in the world wont you lose antibodies after a vaccine?
Actually, other studies suggest 50% of the population had something close to immunity to COVID-19 years before it came on the scene. This was based on blood samples looking for “memory” T cells. The way immunity is quantified now doesn’t cut it. There is a much bigger picture.