We're Trying to Make a Living, Leave Us Alone

Hutterite Ben says government's role is to inform, not mandate.

Part 1: Hutterite Hospitality

Ben with his family. Screen capture from the documentary film, Unacceptable? (click image)

"I would've never dreamed that a vaccine could separate families inside of our Christian home," Hutterite Ben Hofer said in an interview recorded in March 2022. "And when I say home, I mean the Church. Would have never believed it. And I still can't understand why. If you want to inject yourself with diesel fuel, go ahead. I don't want to."

As a farmer, Ben knows how things normally work. "We have to wait years for drugs," he says. "To get an animal drug out takes years...That's how much testing is done."

He used to feed high-protein hemp heart screenings - agricultural byproducts - to his livestock. "It makes awesome animal feed," he says. But "they came out and told us we can't feed it anymore." The position of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) was that "it's not a registered feed ingredient. And I would've had to spend millions of dollars to do...hundreds of thousands of tests and trials to prove to the CFIA that it's not going to harm the pigs or the chickens or the turkeys."  

Pointing out that hemp hearts are a human grade food product didn't help, he remembers."Human beings are eating it. They're ingesting it, and it's not killing them. [Yet] I can't take that product and feed it to livestock" because it's not recognized by the government.

Where were these strict rules when COVID vaccines came along, he wonders. "Here they make a vaccine inside of a month and inject the world's population with it. That's basically what I can't...wrap my head around. And that's the long and the short of it...If you can explain that to me, then yeah, maybe I'll take it."

Ben says friends of his have experienced vaccine side effects. He points out that even the fully vaccinated were still required to mask and social distance. The never ending boosters are another concern. "First dose, second dose. Booster one, booster two." he laughs, "You might as well get a...live [intravenous] line in there. Because that's where it's at."

Being an unvaccinated person at the time the interview was conducted meant he wasn't able to visit family in the United States. "It's nobody's business what my health status is," he says. "And you come to the border and they outright ask you if you're vaxxed. Why don't they ask me if I have HIV? That's a deadly disease, isn't it? There's many of them."

He continues,

I had COVID. I fought it off...the immune system works...Some people it takes a week. I was sick for a week. I didn't stop working. But we were sick, we were sweating...And some people still don't have their - in our community - have their taste back yet, or sense of smell.

...All's we're trying to do is make a living. Leave us alone. We don't need a vaccine...Government's job is to tell you about it, not to mandate it. Not to stick it in your arm...[or] for crying out loud, go to communities, to schools, to churches, and set up clinics to push this into people. It's sad.

In his view, politicians went rogue. "Taking people's rights away?" he says. "You can't go there. It's so wrong."

final installment: We Couldn’t Stop