Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

New York City Sees ‘Beginning Of Hope’ For Slowdown In Measles Infections

New York City health officials say there may be hope on the horizon for the ongoing measles outbreak in Brooklyn, the Daily News reported.

The outbreak is stilly “highly localized,” according to Dr. Oxiris Barbot, the city health commissioner, who said Tuesday that 80% of the infections are occurring in four zip codes that have large concentrations of ultra-Orthodox Jewish residents.

The city has seen 466 measles cases this year, with 43 reported last week. But health officials say that that number represented a downward turn in the infection rate, suggesting that the city’s efforts to combat the disease are working. In April, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a state of emergency for measles in the city, making vaccination mandatory in areas where the infections were most common. Rockland County, a suburban county north of New York City, had declared a state of emergency for its own measles outbreak in March.

Getting individuals and some ultra-Orthodox institutions to comply with the city’s measures to combat the disease hasn’t been easy. The city issued summonses to 12 people it said had defied mandatory vaccine orders. Multiple yeshivas in Williamsburg were found to have allowed unvaccinated children to attend classes. Some anti-vaccine sentiment in the ultra-Orthodox community has been driven by propaganda that opposes science on vaccines and governmental health institutions designed to appeal to the ultra-Orthodox community.

The outbreak may be getting better partially because two major Jewish holidays — Purim and Passover, which both revolve around large social gatherings — have come and gone in the last two months. Experts expected infection rates to spike around that time.

Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aefeldman

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.