What a Grand Rabbi’s request might teach us about combating vaccine hesitancy
As a neurologist whose patients return to see him year after year, Dr. Robert Brown Jr., of Mayo Clinic, hears about plenty besides strokes and aneurysms. His older patients pull up smartphone photos of grandkids and great-grandkids; his farmer patients talk of rough winters, rainy spells, fluctuations in the price of corn. While investigating memory loss and personality change, he hears about dogs, football games, vacations, and funerals.
But in November, someone he’d met in the clinic sent him a question he wasn’t expecting. The man was in Rockland County, N.Y., a leader in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. He was concerned about a measles outbreak there, and was wondering how to address parents’ hesitations about vaccines.
The question is an important one, puzzled over by pediatricians and psychologists alike, and it’s taken on a new urgency in 2019, when the number of confirmed measles cases in the United States — 764, as of last week — is the highest it’s been in 25 years. How that question arrived in Brown’s inbox, it turns out, might just help inform the answer.
When the illness began to spread in the last were occurring within outbreaks in New York: one in Brooklyn, the other in Rockland County, both places with substantial ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Apparently, when some travelers returned stateside from Israel, and its spread was aided by an anti-vaccine tract circulating among some religious families. But some in these communities felt that, because of a small minority within their ranks, attention was unfairly focused on the group as a whole.
