30% of American adults are still not fully vaccinated, seriously weakening our efforts to crush COVID-19. The resistance to vaccination has been super stubborn and our President and many governors are exasperated. Addressing holdouts’ concerns and outright bribery have been among the main methods tried in vain. Complicating matters is the fact that there are a million reasons why people don’t get vaccinated. Saying that most holdouts are right-wing believers of outlandish conspiracy theories oversimplifies the diversity of the holdouts and their reasons for holding out.
Rather than endlessly debating which persuasion methods are the most effective, we should instead turn our gaze to an improbable vaccination success story in Israel. Over 80% of Israel’s ultra-orthodox Jewish community have been vaccinated, which is a remarkable number considering that members of this group indulged in massive, unmasked weddings at the height of the pandemic and is led by rabbis who were originally dead set against their minions (minyans?) getting vaccinated. How Israel’s ultra-orthodox went from being vaccine skeptics to vaccine believers is an instructive tale for this country, which is stuck in a vaccination ditch.
The Israeli situation had similarities to the situation we currently face in the US. Both countries have had to contend with influential figures speaking out against the vaccine. In Israel, the rabbis who lead Israel’s ultra-orthodox community were initially against it. In the US, while many religious leaders have urged their flocks to get vaccinated, albeit with varying degrees of success, the voices of anti-vax secular influencers like media personalities and politicians have often drowned out clerical voices. And social media has given anti-vaxxers a prominent platform from which to spout their lies. The social media that many ultra-orthodox rely on are old-school telephone news hotlines called nayes, which were once filled with all manner of lies and conspiracy theories about the vaccines. The more outlandish the information provided by the nayes, the more callers they got, which put more shekels in the pockets of content providers. I think we’ve heard this one before here in the States.
Fortunately, the Israeli government didn’t throw up their hands and say a phrase that appears often in the Jewish Torah, “woe is me!” The government relentlessly answered each lie uttered by anti-vaxxers with the truth. (Let me pause to note that there are also many people afraid to get the vaccine in the US due to legitimate concerns about their safety and efficacy rather than a belief in nutty theories.) Also, Netanyahu’s government hired an ultra-orthodox PR guy to counter-message his community. In addition, the government kept the lines of communication open with ultra-orthodox rabbinic leaders, convincing the rabbinic council responsible for protecting the community from nayes containing sexual content to also put the kibosh on anti-vaccine hotlines.
Tragedy Strikes the Ben Sheetrit family
What finally sealed the deal, though, was a tragic story involving two members of the ultra-Orthodox community, a mom and her newborn. As NPR tells it:
Osnat Ben Sheetrit, 31, ran a wig and bridal salon for the ultra-Orthodox community and lived in the West Bank settlement neighborhood of Har Shmuel, near Jerusalem. In February, she was about to give birth to her fifth child. She remained hesitant about getting vaccinated, even after Israeli health experts and rabbis endorsed vaccines for pregnant women.
Her husband finally convinced her to make her a vaccine appointment that same month. But before she could get vaccinated, she was infected with the coronavirus and was hospitalized. She gave birth while sick, but her newborn survived only a few hours. Shortly after the baby died, Ben Sheetrit died too.
That is when the lies started to spread, her husband says. “Conspiracy theorists took advantage of our story. They decided to fight us, and it was like an organized army. They were claiming that my wife was vaccinated and therefore she died,” Yehuda Ben Sheetrit, 30, says. “It was like they were twisting a knife in our stomach.”
The family set the record straight in interviews with ultra-Orthodox and mainstream media. They emphasized that Osnat had not been vaccinated, and if she had been, she could have lived. A relative told Israeli public broadcasting he had been moderating his own anti-vaccine group on social media and shut it down after Osnat’s death.
The family received an outpouring of support from Israelis in a fundraising campaign to help them rebuild their lives.
Blumenthal [the ultra-Orthodox pr consultant] saw an opportunity to get people to listen. With the family’s permission, he organized a social media campaign with the message: “Get vaccinated to honor Osnat’s memory.”
It sparked a wave of vaccinations. The week after her death, one of Israel’s leading HMOs, Maccabi Healthcare Services, registered a 60% increase in vaccinations of pregnant women over the previous week, according to statistics provided to NPR by Maccabi. In Bnei Brak, where about half the residents are insured by Maccabi, several women tell NPR they and their friends were persuaded to get vaccinated after Osnat Ben Sheetrit’s death.
My Takeaway
My opinion is that the Israeli government’s campaign paved the way for Ben Sheetrit’s story to move people to finally get vaccinated. However, just as I don’t think the rational arguments made by the government and its outreach to the rabbis were sufficient by themselves to convince people to get the shot, I also don’t believe this tragic story in isolation would have been sufficient either. Appealing to both the head and the heart is what pushed the ultra-orthodox vaccination effort past the tipping point. We have to use every weapon at our disposal to make sure many, many more needles go into reluctant American arms and we have to do this fast as there are doubtless more mutations waiting in the shadows.
