5 Towns rabbi: It’s a mitzvah to be vaccinated

A widening measles outbreak in Brooklyn is being blamed on the refusal of some members of the borough’s Orthodox Jewish communities to vaccinate their children.

The city’s Department of Health issued an alert on May 21, announcing 34 cases of measles, 27 in Borough Park and seven in Williamsburg.

“It’s a mitzvah to get vaccinated,” Aaron E. Glatt, M.D., assistant rabbi at the Young Israel of Woodmere, told his congregation on Shabbat. “It’s protecting your life.”

Refraining from getting inoculated is “not religiously motivated,” Rabbi Glatt told The Jewish Star. “It’s a mishigaas (craziness).”

More than 700 people have been exposed to the highly contagious disease, according to the Department of Health. All 34 of the victims were unvaccinated when exposed to the virus — five were too young to have been vaccinated, 23 refused vaccine, and six delayed vaccination; they range in age from newborn to 32 years, including five infants, 21 children and eight adults.

So far, a case of pneumonia, a miscarriage and two hospitalizations resulted from the infection. Some of the symptoms include bloodshot eyes, cough, fever, light sensitivity, rash, runny nose, white spots in the mouth.

In the Five Towns and Far Rockaway, most parents are careful to vaccinate their children, routinely going to their pediatrician’s office for the recommended line-up of vaccines, with the first dose of the vaccine for MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) at the age of 12 months.

So why is there a measles outbreak in Orthodox communities, not only in Brooklyn but also similar problems in Monsey, England and Israel?

Many studies have proven the MMR vaccine to be effective and safe, but the taint of a fraudulent study published in the Lancet medical journal in 1998 has lingered on in the minds of misinformed parents.

“Unfortunately, it’s hard to retract even though it’s false,” said Glatt. “It gets into the ideas of people and stays.”

Glatt suggested that rabbanim issue a kol korei (an announcement to the public) on this issue, to reduce illness and its complications and save lives.

“I don’t think that it is urged enough by the rebbes to get vaccinated,” he said, noting that if everyone in shul and the rebbes would call for it, it would be done. “It’s most important for everybody to get vaccinated,” he said.

Halachic support for vaccines can be traced back to the 1700s and Rabbi Abraham Nasich in response to the scourge of smallpox.

Rabbi Glatt quotes Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, who maintained that “routine immunizations are an essential personal obligation in order to maintain good health (shmirat haguf) … that it is incumbent upon parents to assure that their children are vaccinated because immunizations are the accepted and standard medical practice.”

Glatt, an infectious diseases specialist, delivered a medical and halacha shiur, “What Every Parent and Grandparent Needs to Know Medically and Halachically about Vaccinations,” between Mincha and Ma’ariv on Shabbat. He collaborated on a paper published in the spring issue of the Journal of Halacha and Contemporary Society that traces a 2009 mumps outbreak in upstate New York to an unvaccinated child from England.

Glatt is chief administrative officer for Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Centre and a spokesman for the Infectious Disease Society of America.

The Lancet retracted its 1998 article after it was found that the research cited was fraudulent and that evidence failed to link the MMR vaccine and autism. Medical researcher Andrew Wakefield, the article’s author, lost his license to practice medicine.

Wakefield’s study was called “an elaborate fraud” by the editor of the British Medical Journal, but it wasn’t fully discredited until 2011 — and by then the damage was done: In 2008, measles was endemic in England and Wales, and throughout the world people believed in an MMR-autism link.

In 2003, a Nigerian Muslim cleric and physician claimed that the polio vaccine distributed by the World Health Organization contained anti-fertility substances. World efforts to eradicate polio have been, overall, successful, but these false rumors persist in certain areas and polio is easily spread through travel. It has been eliminated from most countries but is still endemic in Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“The key is vaccinating,” Glatt told The Jewish Star. “The trick is to make everyone vaccinated according to appropriate common childhood viral illnesses.”

He noted that there are some extremely rare side effects to the MMR vaccine, none related to autism, but the benefits of the MMR and other vaccines heavily outweigh the risks, especially since measles and other viral illness have devastating and sometimes fatal effects.

The larger the vaccinated population, the less likely it is for these viruses to infect and spread. “It’s the concept of herd immunity,” explained Glatt.

United States law has decided, going back to the early 1900s and predating the eradication of smallpox, that enforcing vaccinations is legal and mandated, deeming that beneficial to the common good and society and important to prevent the spread of serious illness to a large population. Smallpox killed 300 million people in the 1900s and has since been eradicated through a world wide vaccine campaign, with only two stores of it left for possible study or vaccine production in secure labs in Russia and the U.S.

U.S. law mandates the vaccine and it has withstood the test of legal challenges. Schools have the legal and halachic right to say that students can’t enter school unless they are vaccinated; it is for the common good. Not getting vaccinated doesn’t just put yourself at risk, but it also potentially endangers all of the other students and their families, said Glatt.

“If people oppose it, the government doesn’t carry through even though they have the legal power to do so. The government has the power to do it and the people shouldn’t make up religious exemptions,” Glatt said.

“No poskim (halachic decisor) forbid vaccination, and to state one has religious objections (and hence an exemption to mandated vaccination) is sheker (falsehood). The last paragraphs of Shulchan Aruch Choshen Mishpat describe the importance of protecting one’s self from harmful conditions or situations, and the halachic obligation to do so. The vast majority of poskim strongly urge or require vaccination.

“People need to protect themselves, their children and grandchildren. The more people who are vaccinated the safer the community becomes.”