Fertile rumour about vaccines scares Orthodox

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

That’s not to say the community hasn’t experienced its share of outbreaks; it has. Or that families haven’t lost loved ones; they have. But to hear the young mothers of the large Orthodox community tell it, the crisis part of the pandemic had passed. And to watch the Instagram videos of the frequent indoor weddings held in the town, where few if any guests wear masks, the dark days of last March were nearly forgotten.

That has changed in recent weeks, as news of the death of a 37-year-old woman understood to be previously healthy swept through WhatsApp groups at the same time that misinformation took hold about the new coronavirus vaccines potentially threaten fertility. In a community where childbearing and mothering are marks of status among women, the two developments brought the pandemic’s seriousness home for many of the town’s young mothers.

Now, as physicians there and across the Orthodox world mount a campaign to convince women to get vaccinated when they’re eligible and be more careful if they’re not, some mothers in Lakewood are reconsidering their families’ approach to COVID-19 safety.

Lakewood, with a haredi Orthodox community that makes up more than half the town’s population of more than 100 000, is by far New Jersey’s most fertile town. In 2015, it recorded 45 live births per 1 000 residents – a rate more than four times the state average and among the highest in the world. So when rumours started circulating about the effect of the soon-to-arrive COVID-19 vaccines on fertility, locals were alarmed.

The rumours began right around the time New Jersey began offering vaccines, and they took root on Instagram and WhatsApp.

In one WhatsApp group organised by Orthodox Jews to discuss COVID-19, a woman said she had been thinking of moving to Israel, but was reconsidering after the mayor of the Israeli city of Lod said he would require parents to be vaccinated before their children could come to school.

In another group, women compared Israel’s recommendation that pregnant women get the vaccine to Nazi doctors’ torture of Jews. “Disgusting! They are really making experimentation on Jews!” one woman wrote.

Several shared information about a drug cocktail created by a Hasidic doctor, Vladimir Zelenko, that Donald Trump touted but was later found to be ineffective and even harmful in some cases. Someone else shared a video of Zelenko in which he said that young healthy people don’t need to get the vaccine. 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 on Long Island and has more than 21 000 followers, posted an Instagram livestream of Dr Lawrence Palevsky, a paediatrician and well-known anti-vaxxer who spoke at a 2019 symposium of anti-vaccine activists that was attended by hundreds of haredi Orthodox Jews in Monsey, New York. In the video, Palevsky suggested that the vaccines were a profit move by drug 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 neighbouring Lakewood, said many of her friends were confused about the vaccine.

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

Dr Mark Kirschenbaum, a paediatrician with a practice in Borough Park and Williamsburg, both Hasidic communities where weddings and other social events resumed their pre-pandemic pace months ago, said he thinks about 20% of his patient families are “vaccine sceptical”. Most vaccinate their children for other diseases because of school requirements, but the COVID-19 vaccines are optional if you can get one at all.

To combat this, Orthodox healthcare professionals are turning their attention to building confidence in the new vaccines.

The Jewish Orthodox Women’s Medical Association, an organisation for Orthodox women doctors and medical students, has been debunking misinformation in a fact sheet and podcast that it produces. And a group of Orthodox Jewish nurses are hosting a weekly call to discuss the vaccines to take place on hotlines that are accessible to women who don’t use the internet for religious reasons.

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

“If somebody asks me, I absolutely recommend that they take it,” said Rabbi Dr Aaron Glatt, the chief of infectious diseases and hospital epidemiologist at Mount Sinai South Nassau on Long Island. “You’re dealing with a real risk of dying or having serious complications from COVID-19 versus a theoretical risk when there’s no real theoretical reason why it should be dangerous.

“There is zero evidence to suggest there’s any risk with infertility.”

Some cite changing guidance from health authorities as a cause of confusion.

The new coronavirus vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna haven’t been tested on pregnant women, leading the World Health Organization (WHO) originally to advise that only pregnant women who were at high risk for complications from COVID-19 get vaccinated. But over time, consensus has emerged that pregnancy itself represents a risk factor, and the WHO has changed its advice, though it still doesn’t advise the vaccine for all pregnant women and recommends that women speak to their doctors. New Jersey includes pregnancy in a list of conditions entitling people to early vaccines. New York just added it as well.