Booster Shot for Jewish Values

Jewish teaching and public health agree: Vaccinate your kids. What should be done about the opt-outers?

By Marjorie Ingall for Tablet

Last week, we got an email, two printed letters, and a phone call from Josie’s public school, all informing us that unless she got a tetanus booster in the next six days, she would not be allowed to attend classes. I called the school in a panic: Josie had just turned 11 and hadn’t had her annual checkup yet. Too bad, I was told. Rules are rules. No shot, no school. I quickly called the pediatrician’s office, and they assured me that there were a couple of hours every day in which I could bring Josie in to see a nurse, and they’d provide all the paperwork I needed to prove my child was not a tetanus-laden disease vector. And so it came to pass. But I had to miss a morning of work, and Josie had to miss school, just so she could get inoculated at an arbitrary time the school had laid out instead of a month later at her scheduled checkup.

Compare this rigmarole to what goes on in private schools, including Jewish ones. They often allow kids to opt out of vaccines entirely. (Forty-eight states allow religious exemptions from vaccines, and 18 allow “philosophical” exemptions.) A recent survey found that at one Waldorf school in the Bay Area, 84 percent of students were unvaccinated. There have been increasing numbers of major measles outbreaks around the world, including in Orthodox communities. (The one thing a Mill Valley mama in Lululemon leggings and a Bnei Brak matron in shapeless layers and a headwrap may have in common is an aversion to inoculation. Well, that and a tendency to raise backyard chickens.) Measles cases in the United Kingdom have risen by a factor of 10 since 2010, and rates of measles and rubella in the United States are skyrocketing.

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