For Orthodox women, vaccines and variants create confusion and fear

For much of the past year, young mothers in Lakewood, New Jersey, have experienced the pandemic as much as a nuisance, as much as a matter of life and death.

This does not mean that the community has not experienced its share of epidemics; he has. Or that families have not lost loved ones; they have. But to hear the young mothers of the large Orthodox community tell it, the crisis part of the pandemic was over. Most people have recovered from the virus, they believed, and only the elderly and at high risk should continue to stay at home. And to watch Instagram videos of the frequent weddings inside the city, where few, if any, guests wear masks, the dark days of last March have all but been forgotten.

For many, a lockdown that kept the city’s thousands of yeshiva students at the home of the Beis Medrash Gevoha, the largest yeshiva outside Israel, for months, was not a prize they were. willing to pay. With children and youth at relatively low risk of death or serious illness from COVID, keeping children at home after school seemed to be far more harmful than the virus itself.

That has changed in recent weeks, as news of the death of a previously healthy 37-year-old woman swept through WhatsApp groups as misinformation took hold over the potentially threatening new coronavirus vaccines. fertility. In a community where motherhood and motherhood are status marks for women, the two developments have brought out the seriousness of the pandemic for many young mothers in the city.

“These stories don’t worry us to say the least,” said a 30-year-old Lakewood resident who is pregnant. She was eager to receive the coronavirus vaccine until her own COVID-19 test came back positive last week, rendering her ineligible for now.

Lakewood, with a Haredi Orthodox community that makes up more than half of the population of over 100,000, is by far the most fertile city in New Jersey. In 2015, it recorded 45 live births per 1,000 population – a rate more than four times the state average and among the highest in the world. So, when rumors began to circulate about the effect of COVID-19 vaccines on fertility, residents were alarmed.

The rumors started just as New Jersey started offering vaccines, and they took hold on Instagram and WhatsApp, the social network and messaging platform that is popular among Orthodox women.

In a WhatsApp group organized by Orthodox Jews to discuss COVID, a woman said she was considering moving to Israel but was reconsidering after the mayor of the Israeli city of Lod said he would demand that parents be vaccinated before their children can go to school.

In another group, women compared Israel’s recommendation that pregnant women be vaccinated with torture of Jews by Nazi doctors. “Disgusting !! They’re really experimenting with Jews !!” a woman wrote.

Several people have shared information about a drug cocktail created by a Hasidic doctor, Vladimir Zelenko, which Donald Trump touted but which subsequently proved ineffective and even harmful in some cases. Someone else shared a video of Zelenko in which he said that young and healthy people do not need to be vaccinated. He suggested taking zinc to inhibit ‘viral replication’ and said ‘in my medical opinion no one needs the vaccine’.

In early January, Michal Weinstein, an Orthodox Instagram influencer who lives in Long Island and has more than 21,000 followers, posted a live Instagram feed of Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, a well-known pediatrician and anti-vaxxer who spoke at the event. ‘A 2019 symposium on anti-vaccine campaigners attended by hundreds of Orthodox Haredi Jews in Monsey, New York. In the video, Palevsky suggested that vaccines were a profit movement for pharmaceutical companies – and that they could contribute to infertility.

Tova Herskovitz, a 30-year-old mother of four living in Tom’s River, New Jersey, a large Orthodox community near Lakewood, said many of her friends were confused about the vaccine and didn’t know who to trust.

“It’s scary to know that there are women who say whatever they want about this vaccine,” she said, noting that Instagram influencers popular in the Orthodox community have been spreading publicity. vaccine misinformation. “A lot of my friends follow these people.”

Dr Mark Kirschenbaum, a pediatrician with a practice in Borough Park and Williamsburg, two Hasidic communities where weddings and other social events resumed their pre-pandemic rhythm months ago, said he believes around 20% of his patient families are “vaccine-skeptical. “Most vaccinate their children against other illnesses because of school requirements, he said, but COVID-19 vaccines are currently optional if you can get one. Their rapid development and novelty make them ‘he expects even more skepticism.

“People are more afraid of the vaccine than of the virus,” Kirschenbaum said.

To combat this fear, orthodox health professionals who have spent the past year urging their communities to take pandemic guidelines seriously are now turning to building confidence in new vaccines.

The Jewish Orthodox Women’s Medical Association, an organization for Orthodox female doctors and medical students, debunked the misinformation in a fact sheet and podcast it produces. And a group of Orthodox Jewish nurses are holding a weekly call to discuss vaccines, which will take place on hotlines accessible to women who do not use the internet for religious reasons and both, 9 p.m. on Thursdays, when most children are in bed and women often cook for Shabbat.

“Even if you are not on the internet, there is a barrage of information and misinformation to try to dissuade people” from getting the COVID-19 vaccine, said Tobi Ash, a nurse in Miami and the one of the founders of EMES, an organization promoting scientific medical information in the Orthodox community, which organizes the appeal. “It is very difficult to filter out exact information.”

Orthodox doctors said they had received dozens of phone calls about vaccine safety over the past two months, many of which questioned whether the vaccines are safe for young women or for women who are already pregnant.

Rabbi Aaron Glatt, chief of infectious diseases and hospital epidemiologist at Mount Sinai South Nassau on Long Island and assistant rabbi of the Young Israel of Woodmere, a large Orthodox synagogue in Nassau County on Long Island, said he had received questions of parents of young women who are starting dating and who will want to conceive soon after marriage, wondering if the vaccine could be a problem.

“If anyone asks me, I absolutely recommend that they take it,” Glatt said. “You face a real risk of dying or having serious complications from COVID versus a theoretical risk when there is no real theoretical reason why it should be dangerous.”

He added: “There is no evidence to suggest that there is a risk of infertility.”

In Lakewood, a health clinic called CHEMED sounded the alarm bells about COVID cases in younger women and said some of those cases resulted in miscarriages.

“Unlike the start of the pandemic, when most seniors and men were at risk, we are now seeing multiple hospitalizations of women aged 35 to 45,” they wrote in a message posted by The Lakewood Scoop. They advised pregnant women to speak to their doctors about whether they should be vaccinated, “regardless of whether you have ever had Covid or not. Pregnant women can get the vaccine in New Jersey since January 15 and will be eligible in New York City from February 15.

Education campaigns can be stimulated by multiple unfortunate stories, in Israel and at home in Lakewood. In Israel, six pregnant women hospitalized in serious condition were infected with the new UK variant of COVID, prompting the Israeli government to prioritize pregnant women for vaccination.

And in Lakewood, residents were stunned to learn that Basha Rand, a 37-year-old mother of three who lived in neighboring Tom’s River, died of COVID last month. Rand was not pregnant, but she was an archetype of an Orthodox mother, having moved from Nevada to New Jersey shortly before her death so her children could attend the yeshiva and her eldest could attend Orthodox high school.

“Bashie was my daughter’s speech therapist for the past few months,” one person commented on a local news site article about a fundraiser for Rand’s family, which raised more. of $ 450,000. “I have never met someone so kind, caring and dedicated as she is.

Local volunteers from the Covid Plasma Initiative, which connects people who test positive for COVID to hospitals and outpatient clinics administering monoclonal antibody treatment, have encouraged pregnant women to consider treatment if they become ill. But even some project volunteers, like Chedva Thuman, say they don’t know if the vaccine makes sense for everyone.

Thuman, a high school teacher, and her husband, who is at high risk of complications, got vaccinated last week. “If I thought this was something really dangerous, I wouldn’t have it myself,” she says.

But she’s not sure she’ll do the same math for her daughter, 20, living in Israel where she works from home and her husband has already had COVID. (Israel is currently vaccinating anyone over the age of 16). Thuman had heard rumors that the vaccine was causing fertility problems and was unsure of what to believe, especially because the vaccine is so new.

On the flip side, she said, regarding her community of Lakewood, Thuman said she had heard of two or three other pregnant Orthodox women who fell seriously ill with COVID over the course of the last week alone. She hopes the women will be more careful.

“I had a 22-year-old girl last week with double pneumonia,” she says. “There have been a lot more, so we’re trying to get the word out to be very careful.”