NYC infiltrates Orthodox Jewish communities to push COVID shots

Leaked recordings of a Zoom meeting involving the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYCDOHMH) reveal the city is recruiting an infiltration network to convince certain orthodox Jewish communities to get injected with the COVID-19 vaccine. 

New York City is currently over 77% fully vaccinated and has declared its vaccine mandate “indefinite”. While the city’s mandate has been one of the harshest in the country, some holdouts remain in orthodox and Hasidic Jewish communities such as Borough Park, Far Rockaway and Williamsburg. 

According to the city’s website, all three neighborhoods have lower vaccination rates and lower death rates than New York City or Brooklyn. 

But not content to leave anyone vaccine-free, the city is taking a different tactic which involves targeting the weaker-willed members of these communities and teaching them how to propagandize the vaccine to persuade their fellow community members. 

It has not yet been disclosed the amounts these individuals are receiving from the grants paid by the NYCDOHMH.

In the Zoom meeting, presided over by New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Assistant Commissioner Dr. Jane Zucker, some of those community members appeared to be stauncher advocates of the vaccine than Zucker herself. 

At one point, Zucker mentioned that although there is hesitancy regarding the COVID-19 vaccine in some Jewish communities, she is not seeing any data showing that the hesitancy is transferring to routine vaccinations. 

But Malky Rosin, a registered nurse who works at the Yeled V’Yalda Early Childhood Education Center, rushed to say that parents are now more hesitant than ever to inject their children. While she had conducted no surveys, and even quoted Yeled V’Yalda’s Dr. Jeffrey Teitelbaum who denied seeing a significant change in routine vaccinations, Rosin asserted there was. 

“For about a year already I’ve been speaking with a lot more moms than usual,” said Rosin. “The hesitancy has gone through the roof for regular vaccines.” 

“I talk and I talk and I talk to them,” she added, estimating that the percentage of mothers who are vaccine hesitant has quadrupled. 

Borough Park Jewish Community Council Consultant David Rubel then weighed in, saying that the holdouts are being duped by “misinformation”. He disclosed some of the infiltration tactics used to convince community members to get the shots, such as slipping information about the vaccine into Yiddish publications and inserting it into science curriculums for grades 5-8 in at least four different schools. 

Part of the large grant for this project – courtesy of NYCDOHMH – is to make healthcare workers (HCWs) available for any questions from community members – not just about vaccines, but about anything related to medicine or even social services. The purpose of this, explained Rubel, is so that the HCWs can build trust with the individuals in order to ultimately coax them into getting the shots. 

But no one loves vaccines more than Dr. Kristin Oliver, MD, a pediatrician at Mt. Sinai Hospital who also serves on the NYCDOHMA Bureau of Immunization. Oliver in fact started off by saying that she “loves vaccines” and then gave a presentation on how to propagandize the shot through psychological manipulation. 

The presentation was titled “Vaccine Confidence”, which she said was to put a positive spin on vaccine hesitancy. Certain slides contained techniques for the sales pitch, such as:

1. Ask open-ended questions (“What are your concerns about getting vaccinated?”),  
2. Reflecting back the person’s fears (“I understand that you want to make the best choice for yourself but are nervous”) 
3. Affirming strength and validating concerns (“It’s great that you’re starting to think about vaccines”),  
4. Ask-provide-verify (“So what do you already know about vaccines?” “Could I provide you with more information based on what you just shared?” “Given our discussion, how do you view things now?”) 
5. Summarize and describe action (“What this means to you is...” “Could I schedule a follow-up appointment soon?”) 

However, these individuals likely do not hold as much sway in their communities as they assume. Sources familiar with these individuals have referred to them as “kapos”, a moniker for Jews who collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust.

One name that was repeatedly mentioned to Frontline News is Blima Marcus. 

Marcus is a nurse practitioner and self-described “vaccine educator” who disregards many of the core beliefs shared by the orthodox community. She rails against guns, Republicans, and scientists who question the vaccine, even if they’re the most published cardiologist in the world like Dr. Peter McCollough.

In fact, the mere suggestion that there are long-term effects to the COVID-19 vaccine is enough to earn Marcus’ disdain. 

“There are no long-term effects,” she recently responded on Twitter to a vaccine-hesitant user. “Vaccines don’t have them.” 

It is unclear if the NYC Department of Health was aware of Marcus’ approach when they selected her to earn the community’s trust. 

But Marcus has earned a modest measure of fame during the COVID-19 pandemic as the medical establishment’s token “Hassid”. A cursory look at her Twitter profile shows that she consistently agrees with authority, even supporting the NYCDOHMA’s recent ad campaign "empowering” drug use. 

And while Marcus generally is against vaccine mandates when there aren’t any, she supports them when they are. 

“In general it’s bad policy to place a mandate on a population that is severely resistant. It won’t work and will stir up ill will. This is why I’m against mandatory HPV vaccination; the people are too resistant,” she tweeted in December. “That being said, in a pandemic all bets are off.”