Measles at the Amish Donut Stand

Common courtesy used to be common

Delicious.

This weekend my mother and my sister and I were standing in line at a local farmer’s market waiting on the best donuts in the county when my sister (who is a doctor and therefore ruins every outing with medical facts) leaned over and quietly said look they all have measles. She wasn’t talking about one kid with a sniffle in the back of the tent because half a dozen members of the Amish family running that table had the rash. Every single one of them was bagging up pies and cakes and fall produce and handing warm donuts across the table to a line of customers that included my mother.

The donuts were the whole reason we were there. Amish donuts are insanely good and they’re lighter on sugar than anything you’ll find at a gas station. My mom buys them as the one treat my diabetic parents can actually pig out on without slipping into a coma. We did not buy the donuts that day (my mother is still a little sad about it and so am I).

Nobody at That Table Can Claim They Didn’t Know

The NY State Department of Health has been showing up at their community centers for the last three months urging people to get vaccinated and teaching them how measles spreads and what to do to keep it from spreading. That means somebody stood in a room with these folks and explained in plain language that a family covered in measles should stay home. Then that family turned around and loaded up the buggy and drove to the busiest public place in town to handle food with their bare hands.

Measles is one of the most contagious diseases on the planet. It travels through the AIR and it can hang around in a room for up to two hours after the sick person has left. Roughly nine out of ten unprotected people who get close to an infected person will catch it. The real kicker is that people are contagious for about four days before the rash ever shows up. So by the time you can see the spots on the kid handing you a pumpkin pie they’ve already been passing it around for most of a week.

I want to be clear that I’m not a fan of forced vaccinations and I never will be. But I also believe the Black Death wouldn’t have wiped out somewhere between a third and half of Europe if people had bathed more and washed their bedding and stopped letting the rats run the place like a homeowners association. You don’t need a mandate to stay home when you’re covered in spots. You need common sense and a little bit of common courtesy for the people standing in your line. That used to be the one thing you could count on from the Amish of all people.

Hey you behind the pie table. Your customers have grandparents too.

Maybe They Needed the Money

I’ll give them this much. Lord knows a lot of the Amish around here have been buried in legal trouble for selling raw milk ever since the state cracked down on it. A few Amish farmers even went to jail for the crime of selling milk in its natural state. I think pasteurization is unnatural and it kills off the active cultures that raw milk folks swear make it easier on the gut. Watching the state treat a dairy farmer like a cartel boss makes my blood boil. If the milk money dried up I kinda get why a family would feel like they can’t afford to skip a market weekend.

But needing rent money doesn’t give you the right to hand your neighbors a disease along with their change. There’s a lot of difference between selling milk the government doesn’t like and selling donuts with measles hands.

The Seniors Are the Ones Who Should Worry

This is the real reason I’m writing this because some of you live in Amish country and some of you never got vaccinated at all. If you’re young and you got both MMR shots you’re probably fine since two doses are about 97 percent effective. The folks I’m worried about are our older readers. If you were born before 1957 you almost certainly had measles as a kid and you’re considered immune. If you got your shot between 1963 and 1967 there’s a decent chance you got the old killed vaccine that didn’t work very well. The CDC says those folks should get vaccinated again. And if you only ever got one dose (which was standard until 1989) you’re sitting at about 93 percent protection. That’s good but it’s not donut stand full of measles good. Ask your doctor about a booster or a blood test that checks your immunity.

The telltale signs start out looking like a nasty cold with a high fever and a cough and a runny nose and red watery eyes. A few days later tiny white spots can show up inside the mouth and then the rash breaks out at the hairline and spreads down the face and body. If you see that on the people selling you food then walk away. Better to go find somewhere else to get your donut fix.

Never Again Bossman

And finally I’ve been trying to get Lily on camera for the last year. I managed to get exactly ONE video out of her when we launched our YouTube channel and when it was over she looked me dead in the eye and said never again bossman. Ever since then I’ve been hunting for somebody to be the face of some of our YouTube Shorts.

The YouTube stuff we do is a lot different than what we do here. YouTube is basically clickbait garbage I would never publish on Substack. I tried doing it the Substack way for three months and gained a grand total of 20 subscribers. Then I pivoted our strategy to full clickbait and we pulled in 2.2 million views in the last week alone. That was enough to get me to commit a few hundred bucks to hire an actress from New York City who I’ll call Kitty (not her real name) to shoot an hour of Shorts footage for us in various cosplay costumes. I found her on Fiverr and she works for relatively cheap and looks professional and actually answers her email the same day I want to hire her. Most of the others wait three weeks and then tell me a 30 second clip will be 300 bucks upfront please.

The video below is the one I made with her last night inspired by my Amish measles encounter. We’d really appreciate your feedback on it and on her.

WARNING: This is deliberately designed, clickbait slop using a clip from a horror movie to represent a bad bacterial infection. It’s pretty gross. Do not watch it if you cannot handle ‘pretty gross’.

We’re trying hard to crack the YouTube code because every day on Substack we’re losing paid subscribers. I honestly don’t know if people are offended by our reporting on AI tech bros trying to take over the government or if Substack is quietly unsubbing people the same way Instagram was doing a few years back. Either way we need other sources of revenue. If the views keep coming like they have the last two weeks then within six months Lily and I should be pulling in about 50 to 100 bucks a day from YouTube. That would be enough for me to finally hire Lily full time at a respectable living wage.

So if you’ve got 30 seconds then watch the video and subscribe to The Wise Wolf Club on YouTube. I appreciate it and Lily appreciates it and Kitty could probably use the extra income too considering theater is a dead end for about 90 percent of the people doing off Broadway musicals. Every subscriber gets a wolf one step closer to a newsvan and gets Lily one step further from waiting tables. It also gets my mother one step closer to a measles free donut.

Thanks for reading and as always:

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

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