The U.S. has broken a 25-year-old record for measles cases
this year with more than
New York City has been hit particularly hard and fake news is playing a huge role.
Since October 2018, over 400 people have come down with measles in the city.
The message today for all New Yorkers is to take measles seriously.
We cannot allow this dangerous disease to make a comeback in New York City.
We have to stop it now.
Some members of the Orthodox Jewish community
The reasons for this vary but it's largely due
City officials have declared
if vaccinations orders are ignored.
The Orthodox community overwhelmingly believes in vaccination.
This community, like most other communities in the United States
vaccinate their children.
[The] vast majority of people vaccinate their children.
But some community members recently interviewed distrust measles vaccines.
[It's] true that a lot of people have measles and measles is not a very good thing,
but the vaccine is also not a very good thing.
And it's everybody's option to do what he wants.
People are beginning to question why I should subject my three-year-old
to toxins when it's not going to protect him or her.
While these are a minority of views in the community, they have City Hall worried.
The only way to stop this outbreak is to ensure that those who
that those who have not been vaccinated get the vaccine.
But when community vaccination rates
I think the people themselves should do it on their own.
They should realize that the children are up
to hazard conditions if they don't do it. That's all.
Solomon Feuerwerker is a former Hasidic Jew.
He says that while there are factors within
Orthodox Jewish communities
that allow for measles outbreaks to take place, community members that
don't vaccinate aren't any different than people in other areas.
I don't think there's anything super unique about
the people who end up not vaccinating.
It's driven by the same kind of fears and the same misinformation.
At the same time, community insularity has
played a big role in the spread of the disease.
Children spend a lot more time together and around a lot of
other children whether it's at school where they spend
more time at school daily
which always increases the chance for transmission.
in Orthodox communities.
There's certainly misinformation.
People, for the most part, are pretty unplugged
from the larger media system.
They have their own newspapers in Yiddish, they have their own magazines.
is targeted at the Hasidic community.
Its pages spread debunked claims about vaccinations causing autism.
The magazine provides commentary by rabbis from the point of view of Jewish religious law.
Some members of the community have said they get the majority
of their news from WhatsApp groups.
There are a lot of these groups and people spend a lot of time
a lot of time sending around information there, and again, there's no one vetting
this information, there's no one running these groups,
it's a just a random group that people got added to.
And the misinformation
In 2017, the Somali community in Minnesota was a
whose parents had concerns about autism.
Faith leaders in the community pushed members to get vaccinated
and the following year, vaccination rates improved.
But misinformation has continued to spread in other communities.
Meanwhile, the state of New York has responded to the misinformation
by producing its own magazine.
Tzim Gezint urges Hasidic parents to vaccinate their children.
It's often the only resource available to the community advocating this position.
There's a level of fear and mistrust.
Not of the government specifically, but of any sort of outside coming
and tell us information.
There's a fear that people will receive information that is
harmful to their belief system in some way.
continue in the hopes that more people will get vaccinated.
There's no question that we've had a respectful, highly communicative
engagement with the community.
But the bottom line is to recognize that this is something that's now become
even more urgent and we have to take additional steps.