For orthodox women, vaccines and variants generate confusion and fear

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

This is not to say that the community has not experienced its share of outbreaks; have. Or that families have not lost loved ones; they have. But in order to hear the young mothers in the large Orthodox community tell, the critical part of the pandemic had passed. Most people have recovered from the virus, they thought, and only the elderly and those at high risk need to remain at home. And to watch Instagram videos of the frequent closed weddings held in the city, where few or no guests wear a mask, the dark days of last March were almost forgotten.

For many, the blockade that kept thousands of students from the city’s yeshiva at home, coming from Beis Medrash Gevoha, the largest yeshiva outside Israel, for months on end was not a price they were willing to pay. With children and young people at a relatively low risk of death or serious illness due to COVID, keeping children at home away from school seemed to many to be more harmful than the virus itself.

That changed in recent weeks, when news of the death of a previously healthy 37-year-old woman swept through WhatsApp groups at the same time that misinformation spread over new coronavirus vaccines potentially threatening fertility. In a community where having children and mothers are status marks among women, both events brought the seriousness of the pandemic to many of the city’s young mothers.

“These stories are not making us any less concerned to say the least,” said a 30-year-old Lakewood resident who is pregnant. She was looking forward to receiving the coronavirus vaccine until her own COVID-19 test was positive last week, making her ineligible for the time being.

Lakewood, with an orthodox haredi community that represents more than half the city’s population of over 100,000, is by far the most fertile city in New Jersey. In 2015, it registered 45 live births per thousand inhabitants – a rate more than four times higher than the state average and one of the highest in the world. So when rumors started circulating about the effect of the soon-to-arrive COVID-19 vaccines on fertility, residents were alarmed.

The rumors started right around the time New Jersey started offering vaccines and took root in Instagram and WhatsApp, the social network and messaging platform popular with 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 she would require parents to be vaccinated before their children could go to school.

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

Several people shared information about a drug cocktail created by a Hasidic doctor, Vladimir Zelenko, which Donald Trump touted, but was later found to be ineffective and even harmful in some cases. Another person shared a video of Zelenko in which he said that young, healthy people do not need to get the vaccine. He suggested taking zinc to inhibit “viral replication” and said “in my medical opinion, nobody needs the vaccine”.

In early January, Michal Weinstein, an orthodox Instagram influencer who lives on Long Island and has over 21,000 followers, posted a live stream on Instagram from Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, a pediatrician and well-known anti-xxx who spoke at an anti – vaccine activists who counted on the presence of hundreds of haredi orthodox Jews in Monsey, New York. In the video, Palevsky suggested that vaccines were a profitable move by pharmaceutical companies – and that they could contribute to infertility.

Tova Herskovitz, 30, a mother of four and a resident of Tom’s River, New Jersey, a large orthodox community near Lakewood, said many of her friends are confused about the vaccine and don’t know who to trust.

“It is scary to know that there are women who are saying what they want about this vaccine,” she said, noting that Instagram influencers popular in the Orthodox community have spread misinformation about vaccines. “Many of my friends follow these people.”

Dr. Mark Kirschenbaum, a pediatrician with practice in Borough Park and Williamsburg, both Hasidic communities where weddings and other social events resumed their pre-pandemic rhythm months ago, said he thinks about 20% of his patients’ families are “skeptical about vaccine. “Most vaccinate their children for other illnesses because of school requirements, he said, but COVID-19 vaccines are currently optional, if you can get one. The speed of his development and his novelty mean that he expects even more skepticism.

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

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

The Medical Association of Jewish Orthodox Women, an organization for orthodox medical women and medical students, has unmasked misinformation in an informational and podcast it produces. And a group of orthodox Jewish nurses is holding a weekly call to discuss vaccines, to be held on hotlines accessible to women who do not use the internet for religious reasons and on time, at 9:00 pm on Thursdays, when most children are in bed and women often cook for Shabbat.

“Even if you’re not on the Internet, there is a flood of information and misinformation to try to dissuade people” from being vaccinated against COVID-19, said Tobi Ash, a Miami nurse and one of the founders of EMES, an organization promoting scientifically based medical information in the orthodox community, which is organizing the call. “It is very difficult to filter out accurate information.”

Orthodox doctors said they have received dozens of phone calls about vaccine safety in the past two months, many of them with doubts about whether the vaccines are safe for young women or for women who are already pregnant.

Rabbi Dr. Aaron Glatt, chief of infectious diseases and epidemiologist at Mount Sinai South Nassau hospital on Long Island and assistant rabbi to Young Israel of Woodmere, a major orthodox synagogue in Nassau County on Long Island, said he received questions from parents. of young women who are starting to date and who will want to get pregnant soon after marriage, asking if the vaccine might be a problem.

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

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

In Lakewood, a health clinic called CHEMED raised the alarm about cases of COVID among younger women and said that some of the cases resulted in spontaneous abortions.

“Contrary to the beginning of the pandemic, when most of the elderly and males were at risk, we now see several hospitalizations for women in the 35-45 age group,” they wrote in a message published by The Lakewood Scoop. They advised pregnant women to talk to their doctors about whether to get the vaccine, “regardless of whether or not you had Covid before.” Pregnant women are eligible to receive the vaccine in New Jersey since January 15 and will be eligible in New York from February 15.

Education campaigns can be driven by several unfortunate stories, in Israel and at home in Lakewood. In Israel, six pregnant women who were hospitalized in serious condition were found infected with the most recent British variant COVID, which led the Israeli government to prioritize pregnant women for vaccination.

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

“Bashie has been my daughter’s speech therapist for the past few months,” commented one person in a post on a local news site about a fundraiser for Rand’s family, which raised more than $ 450,000. “I’ve never met anyone as kind, caring and dedicated as she is.”

Local volunteers with the Covid Plasma Initiative, which connects people who test positive for COVID to hospitals and outpatient clinics that administer treatment with monoclonal antibodies, have encouraged pregnant women to consider treatment if they become ill. But even some project volunteers, like Chedva Thuman, say they are not sure whether the vaccine makes sense for everyone.

Thuman, a high school teacher, and her husband, who is at high risk for complications, got the vaccine last week. “If I thought it was really unsafe, I wouldn’t have understood it myself,” she said.

But she is not sure if she would do the same calculation for her daughter, who is 20 years old and lives in Israel, where she works at home and her husband has had COVID. (Israel is now vaccinating anyone over the age of 16). Thuman had heard rumors about the vaccine causing fertility problems and was not sure what to believe, especially since the vaccine is very new.

On the other hand, she said, when it comes to her community in Lakewood, Thuman said she heard of two or three more pregnant Orthodox women who became seriously ill with COVID just last week. She expects women to be more cautious.

“I had a 22-year-old boy last week with double pneumonia,” she said. “There has been a lot more of that out there, so we are trying to spread the word to be extremely careful.”