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A COVID 19 ‘mitzvah’ Orthodox Jews Donate Blood Plasma by the Thousands

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.”

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19 comments

    1. Ego non Cogito

      Well I don’t think we are better than non Jews. We believe that we have a different mission to keep the Torah and so on. Everyone has his own mission. There is no higher race or ethnicity 😀

    2. PlasmaBurns

      “The sole purpose of non Jews is to serve Jews. Why are Gentiles needed? They will work they will plow they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat. That is why Gentiles were created. Gentiles were born only to serve us, without that, they have no place in the world, only to serve the people of Israel”
      — Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the most influential Rabbi of Israel.

  1. PlasmaBurns

    “The sole purpose of non Jews is to serve Jews. Why are Gentiles needed? They will work they will plow they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat. That is why Gentiles were created. Gentiles were born only to serve us, without that, they have no place in the world, only to serve the people of Israel”
    — Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the most influential Rabbi of Israel.

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