THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 43
“Chany”—her surname was withheld—a
Hasidic mother in Borough Park who
was its purported founder; she’d got her
information from the Internet.) The pam-
phlet expressed alarm that, among other
things, some vaccines might contain trace
amounts of monkey kidneys, rabbit brains,
pork products, and aborted fetuses. Defi-
nitely not kosher. Rabbis pointed out that
this claim wouldn’t matter, since one does
not eat a vaccine. But the M.M.R. vac-
cine doesn’t contain those things. Even
the smidgen of each virus it contains is
so slight as to be negligible. “We’re talking
two hundred to three hundred antigens,”
Mulligan, of N.Y.U. Langone, said.
“That’s minuscule, compared to the mi-
crobiota we deal with on a daily basis.”
(Roald Dahl, whose eldest daughter, Ol-
ivia, died from measles, once wrote, “I
should think there would be more chance
of your child choking to death on a choc-
olate bar than of becoming seriously ill
from a measles immunisation.”)
Elisa Sobo, a medical anthropolo-
gist at San Diego State University, has
advanced the idea that saying no to vac-
cinations is as much an opting in as it
is an opting out—“like getting a gang
tattoo, slipping on a wedding ring, or
binge-watching a popular streamed TV
show,” she writes, in a recent paper,
“Theorizing (Vaccine) Refusal.” “This
kind of refusal is more about who one
is and with whom one identifies than
who one isn’t or whom one opposes.”
You could say that many of the parents
who send their children to Waldorf
private schools and choose not to vac-
cinate them—for example, at Green
Meadow, a Waldorf school whose im-
munization rate was so low that Rock-
land County officials banned unvacci-
nated students from attending—are
declaring an allegiance to an ethos, or
even bowing to peer pressure. They’re
going with a different flow, even if it’s
the one that says measles can be pre-
vented by breast milk and bone broth.
The Hollywood Reporter found that the
rates of vaccination in some of the pri-
vate schools in Santa Monica and Bev-
erly Hills—Marianne Williamson coun-
try—are roughly the same as in Chad
and South Sudan. Last year, at the West-
side Waldorf School, in the Pacific Pal-
isades, about four in ten kindergartners
were fully vaccinated. At the Garden of
Angels School, in Santa Monica, about
half were. “We perceive each growing
child as a precious cluster of unique
treasure,” the school’s Web site reads.“Our Garden Ideology aspires to accu-
rately mirror an environment where
students are limited by nothing and lib-
erated by everything.” Nothing says lib-
eration like pertussis.
In May, there was an ultra-Orthodox
anti-vaccination “symposium” in a ball-
room in Monsey—men and women
separated by a makeshift wall, Wake-
field present via Skype. A Satmar
rabbi, Hillel Handler, stood and sug-
gested that the measles outbreak was
an anti-Hasidic conspiracy concocted
by Mayor Bill de Blasio, as a cover for
diseases imported by Central Ameri-
can immigrants. Others equated what
they called “forced vaccination” with
the Holocaust.
A representative of the Church of
Scientology offered logistical help. The
state’s director of epidemiology, Debra
Blog, sat quietly near the front of the
women’s section, but after a while, dis-
mayed by the rhetoric of what McDon-
ald, of the C.D.C., had taken to calling
“the pro-measles movement,” she left.
“I knew it was going to be bad, but not
this bad,” she told me. “The speakers
were terrible. I realized that if I got up
to say something I was going to get
hauled out of there.”
By then, the health departments of
the state and the relevant counties were
deep into what you might call a counter-
insurgency campaign. There had been
emergency declarations, and decrees
prohibiting unvaccinated children from
attending school, no matter their par-
ents’ beliefs. The repeal of the religious
exemption was progressing in the leg-
islature. In the most affected counties
outside the city, the number of new vac-
cinations was up seventy per cent com-
pared with the year before. Zucker had
recorded a public-service announcement
in a playground. The city had launched
a campaign called “Don’t Wait. Vacci-
nate.” Rabbis, almost unanimously, said
that there was no religious reason not
to vaccinate.
In the health establishment, it is now
standard practice to differentiate between
diehard refuseniks and the vaccine-hes-
itant, and even to acknowledge that the
former aren’t really persuadable. Chanie
Sternberg, the Refuah C.E.O., said,
“Those who don’t want to learn do not.”
The latter are the softer target: the yes-
but set, whose heads are aswirl withon the grassy knoll, lined up
as neatly as hot dogs on a grill
and flipping to the same timer. Their
breasts filling out colorful triangles,
hoops still glinting in their ears as if
they might not swim at all or else were
not afraid to lose their silver to the filter’s
gaping mouth. Their mouths moved slowly
like they were underwater when
they spoke and I strained to read
their lips when they weren’t busy downing
popsicles, their mouths shaped around them
into perfect O’s. It’s not that I wanted
to kiss them so much as I wanted to be them,
and isn’t this so often how it goes?
Girl’s first desire not so much her own
but in relation to—wanting to be
the body he foams at the mouth
for. Beauty its own sun, slathered
in tanning oil, flipping over
and over, the one
we all angle our towels toward.—Jessica Lee