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Rabbi Mordechai Shain is not sure of vaccines.
Nearly all of the 400 children in the school he runs, aged between 3 months and 8 years, are vaccinated. About eight or ten are not. But he is skeptical about the effectiveness of vaccination.
"My doctor in Shul said that everyone should be vaccinated against the flu, so a lot of people went there," said Shain, director of the school at the Tenafly Chabad Academy, in the North New Jersey, about 13 km from Manhattan. "Ninety percent of people who got a flu shot got the flu and 10% did not get the flu. … I talk to so many doctors and they say quite the opposite: the vaccines are good, but they introduce in the vaccine different methods that expose you to more danger than the vaccine saves you. "
Later, he added, "In the vaccine, there are things that make you run a higher risk."
>> Read more: Unvaccinated children sentenced to a ban on public space in New York ■ Rabbis send healthy women painful fertility treatments – and doctors accept them
(According to the Centers for Disease Control, influenza vaccines reduce the risk of contracting the disease by 40 to 60%.)
The Shain School, located in the center of the Jewish population of the suburbs of Bergen, is the only one among a dozen orthodox schools to still accept unvaccinated children, according to L & # 39; via Weisinger, a nurse who runs a group of nurses in Bergen Jewish. schools.
The vaccine issue has become particularly urgent as measles has spread to neighboring Orthodox Orthodox communities where vaccination rates are low. On Tuesday, Rockland County in New York, which borders Bergen County, banned unvaccinated minors from gaining access to public places. The county has had 153 confirmed cases of measles since October.
Despite institutional pressure, haredi communities have consistently voiced their opposition to vaccines, saying vaccines are ineffective at best and harmful at worst. A brochure circulating among Orthodox communities, published by an orthodox anti-vaccine group called "educating and defending parents for child health", falsely claims that doctors are obscuring evidence that vaccines are harmful and vaccines with swelling of the brain, paralysis and death. (In fact, the long-term negative effects of vaccines are extremely rare.)
The group also holds regular conference calls featuring anti-vaccine doctors, according to Gothamist.
"[S]Part of what we are told about vaccines is simply wrong, "reads the brochure. "From our research (and, for some of us, from our personal experience) many more" lives on a million "have been ruined by vaccines. We do not want people to be injured unnecessarily. "
Weisinger, a former board member of the Orthodox Jewish Nurses Association, said the anti-vax movement had settled among some Jewish haredi because of a lack of children. 39, education and mistrust of authority.
"There is a lack of confidence in the government going back a long time," she said. "You have other people who really care about their children who are not educated. … They are not in the real world hearing a real science. They have not been taught to discern between conspiracy theories and true science. "
(The New Jersey Department of Health has information on measles prevention and reporting of these cases here.)
In late February, Bergen County witnessed a measles case, highly contagious, which can stay in the air for hours after an infected person coughs.
"We say our community is supportive of the vaccine, but then we leave an anti-vaxxer in our school. Measles is present and our immunocompromised children are exposed, as are our pregnant women, "said Weisinger. "These people are all likely to have Rockland County residents enter our community."
The Jewish institutions of the county urged their members to vaccinate. A December statement signed by more than 40 Bergen County rabbis and Orthodox school officials said Jewish law required vaccination.
"Vaccination is not only an obligation to protect the health of our children and ourselves, but a responsibility we have towards others," the statement said. "Those who do not vaccinate can potentially transmit life-threatening diseases to other vulnerable people. We urge all parents to vaccinate their children in accordance with the recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics. "
Shain School does not allow parents to exempt their children from vaccines for religious reasons. But he accepts the notes of doctors exempting children from vaccines. Other schools will process doctor's notes with a local board of health for verification.
"I always checked with the board of health before accepting a medical care exemption because they were not all legitimate," said Weisinger. "Unfortunately, there are rogue doctors who are anti-vaccine and support the anti-vaccine community, and there is a lot of pseudoscience there."
But Shain says that he accepts the doctors' recommendations as they are.
"If they have a doctor and the doctor can give a letter stating that for this child, it is not good to get vaccinated, then it is under medical supervision, so the Torah says that you follow the doctor, "said Shain. "The doctor does not have to tell me why. The doctor can say that I have a doctorate in medicine and, according to my observations, they should not take the vaccine. "
Several schools in the region accepted religious exemptions for vaccines, but did not do so anymore. Guardian Anshei Lubavitch in Fair Lawn, a town in Bergen County, had one child unvaccinated in more than 300, according to Rabbi Levi Neubort. But it ended this year because Neubort feared that the school would become a magnet for anti-vaxxers.
"I received several calls from parents who wanted to place their children in a school that still had a religious exemption," he said. "God keep us, we would end up with a concentration of unvaccinated kids, which I would not allow."
Children with legitimate medical exemptions also depend on "group immunity" – that is, they are part of a population where other people are vaccinated.
Schools located in Brooklyn's haredi neighborhoods have taken steps to curb the measles outbreak. In December, the New York City Department of Health banned non-vaccinated children from Brooklyn yeshivas, after borough haredi neighborhoods experienced 39 cases of measles in the space of two months. month.
Schools also independently banned unvaccinated children, leading in one case to prosecution. After their child was held away from Oholei Torah, a Brooklyn yeshiva, Sholom and Esther Laine last year requested an injunction that would compel the school to accept their religious exemption from vaccines. .
By phone Thursday, Sholom Wool would not comment because the legal battle is underway.
Joseph Aron, a Brooklyn lawyer specializing in religious and constitutional issues, said that under New York State law, the school was well within its rights.
"There is no obligation for a school to accept a religious exemption," he said. "The school has total autonomy. The school does not have to bend back and accept me if I have a medical reason not to get vaccinated. "
In New Jersey, the state government is introducing a bill to remove the religious exemption. Shain says that most parents are happy that the school no longer accepts religious exemptions. But he says he has news from the parents on the other side as well.
"Most parents want us not to accept religious [exemptions] and we should be vaccinated, "he said. "Some parents say why do we have to vaccinate?"
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