For Orthodox women, vaccines and variants lead to confusion and fear

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

This is not to say that the community did not experience its share of the outbreaks; it 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 is over. Most people have recovered from the virus, they think, and only the elderly and high risk had to continue to stay at home. And to see the Instagram videos of the regular indoor weddings in the city, where few or no guests wear masks, the dark days of March last year were almost forgotten.

For many, a blockade that kept the city’s thousands of yeshiva students at the local Beis Medrash Gevoha, the largest yeshiva outside of 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, it seems to many people to be more harmful than the virus itself.

That has changed in recent weeks as news of the death of a 37-year-old woman was previously healed by WhatsApp groups, while misinformation surfaced about the new coronavirus vaccines potentially threatening fertility. In a community where pregnancy and motherhood are a sign of status among women, the two developments have brought home the severity of the pandemic for many of the young mothers in the city.

While doctors there and around the Orthodox world are campaigning to convince women to be vaccinated when they are eligible, and to be more careful if they are not, some mothers in Lakewood are considering their family’s approach to COVID. safety.

“These stories make us no less anxious to say the least,” said a 30-year-old Lakewood resident who is pregnant. She was looking forward to getting the coronavirus vaccine until her own COVID-19 test came back positive last week, making her provisionally incompetent.

Lakewood, with a Haredi Orthodox community that makes up more than half the population of more than 100,000, is by far the most fertile city in New Jersey. In 2015, 45 live births per 1,000 inhabitants were recorded – a rate more than four times the state average, and one of the highest in the world. So when rumors started spreading about the effect of the COVID-19 vaccines that would soon come on fertility, the residents were worried.

The rumors started just as New Jersey started offering vaccines, and they took to Instagram and WhatsApp, the social networking and messaging platform popular among Orthodox women.

In a WhatsApp group organized by Orthodox Jews to discuss COVID, a woman said she was thinking of moving to Israel, but reconsidered it after the mayor of the Israeli city of Lod said he will require parents to be vaccinated before their children can come to school. .

In another group, women compared Israel’s recommendation that pregnant women get the vaccination to the torture of Nazi doctors against Jews. “Disgusting !! They are really doing experiments on Jews !! Wrote one woman.

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

In early January, Michal Weinstein, an Orthodox Instagram influencer who lives on Long Island and has more than 21,000 followers, posted an Instagram live stream of dr. Lawrence Palevsky, a pediatrician and well-known anti-vaxxer who spoke at a 2019 symposium on anti-vaxxer. vaccine activists attended by hundreds of Haredi Orthodox Jews in Monsey, New York. In the video, Palevsky suggested that the vaccines are profitable by drug companies – and that they could contribute to infertility.

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

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

Dr Mark Kirschenbaum, a pediatrician with a practice in Borough Park and Williamsburg, both Hasidic communities where weddings and other social events resumed their pace pandemic months ago, said he thinks about 20% of his patient families’ vaccine skeptics ‘is. He vaccinated most of their children against other diseases due to school requirements, but the COVID-19 vaccines are currently optional if you can get one. The speed of their development and their novelty means that he expects even more skepticism.

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

To combat this fear, the Orthodox health workers who last year urged their communities to take pandemic guidelines seriously, are now focusing their attention on building confidence in the new vaccines.

The Jewish Orthodox Women’s Medical Association, an organization for Orthodox gynecologists and medical students, unraveled misinformation in a fact sheet and podcast that produces it. And a group of Orthodox Jewish nurses offer a weekly call to discuss the vaccines, on hotlines accessible to women who do not use the Internet for religious reasons, and on Thursday at 9 p.m., when most children are in bed and women regularly cook for Shabbat.

“Even if you’m not on the internet, there’s a wealth of information and disinformation to try to dissuade people from being vaccinated against COVID-19,” said Tobi Ash, a nurse in Miami and one of the founders of EMES. an organization. the promotion of scientific medical information in the Orthodox community, which organizes the call. “It’s very difficult to find accurate information.”

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

Rabbi Dr. Aaron Glatt, chief infectious disease and epidemiologist at Mount Sinai South Nassau Hospital on Long Island, and an assistant rabbi at the Young Israel of Woodmere, a large Orthodox synagogue in Nassau County, Long Island, said he had received questions from parents of young women who were starting to date and who shortly after they were married wanted to get pregnant and asked if the vaccine might be a problem.

“If anyone asks me, I absolutely recommend it,” Glatt said. “You have a real risk of dying or have serious complications due to COVID versus a theoretical risk, if there is no real theoretical reason why it would be dangerous.”

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

In Lakewood, a health clinic called CHEMED sounded the alarm about COVID cases among younger women, saying some of the cases lead to miscarriages.

“Unlike at the beginning of the pandemic, when mostly the elderly and men were at risk, we now see several hospitalizations of women aged 35-45,” they write in a message published by The Lakewood Scoop. They advised pregnant women to talk to their doctors about whether they should get the vaccine, “regardless of whether you have had Covid before or not.” Pregnant women have been able to get the vaccine in New Jersey since January 15 and will be eligible in New York from February 15.

The education campaigns can get a boost from several unfortunate stories, in Israel and back home in Lakewood. In Israel, six pregnant women admitted to hospital in a serious condition have been found to be infected with the newer British COVID variant, which has asked the Israeli government to prioritize pregnant women before vaccination.

And in Lakewood, residents were surprised to hear that Basha Rand, a 37-year-old mother of three children who lived in the surrounding Tom’s River, died of COVID last month. Rand was not pregnant, but she was an archetype of an Orthodox mother. She did not move from Nevada to New Jersey long before her death so that her children could go to a yeshiva and her eldest could go to an Orthodox high school.

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

Local volunteers with the Covid Plasma Initiative, which connects people who tested positive for COVID with hospitals and outpatients administering monoclonal antibody treatment, encourages pregnant women to consider treatment if they become ill. But even some volunteers with the project, like Chedva Thuman, say they are not sure if the vaccine makes sense to everyone.

Thuman, a high school teacher, and her husband, who are at high risk for complications, received the vaccine last week. “If I thought it was really unsafe, I would not have gotten it myself,” she said.

But she is not sure if she would make the same calculation for her daughter, who is 20 years old and lives in Israel, where she works from home and her husband already had a COVID. (Israel vaccinates someone now older than 16 years.) Thuman heard rumors about the vaccination causing fertility issues and was not sure what to believe, especially since the vaccine is so new.

“I have definitely heard from doctors that one should not get pregnant immediately after the vaccination,” she said. “You’re not saying that about a flu shot.” (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that “women who want to get pregnant do not have to avoid pregnancy after receiving a mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.”)

On the other hand, she said, as far as her community in Lakewood is concerned, Thuman said she had only heard from two or three pregnant Orthodox women over the past week who had become seriously ill with COVID. She hopes women will be more careful.

“I had a 22-year-old with double pneumonia last week,” she said. “There’s a lot more of this going on, so we try to be extra careful with the word.”

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