HEALTH
Roll Up Your Sleeves! Doctors who are also rabbis recommend COVID-19 vaccines — “It’s a mitzvah.” LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
A
well-known observation: In medieval times, many rabbis worked as physicians. Less wellknown: In our own times as well, several Orthodox rabbis are also physicians. A few rabbi/ physicians told the Jewish News what Jewish law advises about COVID-19 vaccines. Aaron Glatt earned rabbinical ordination from Rabbi Avraham Tzvi Wosner at Machon LeTorah Vehora’ah and his medical degree from Columbia Rabbi University College Dr. Aaron of Physicians Glatt and Surgeons in New York. He is professor of infectious diseases and hospital epidemiologist at Mount Sinai South Nassau (N.Y.) and assistant rabbi at Young Israel of
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Woodmere (N.Y.). Rabbi Dr. Glatt strongly advises that people who are able to get vaccinated as soon as possible and rejects arguments for delaying or refusing. “Unfortunately, there are many misguided, not scientifically based patently incorrect high-quality glossy pamphlets that are being circulated,” he said. “I have not seen any that identify the names of the ‘expert’ physicians purportedly writing these statements, which are in total opposition to the true experts in infectious diseases who 100% support COVID vaccination efforts. “They misquote or misrepresent the true facts and unfortunately continue to propagate information that is outright 100% false, such as vaccines cause infertility or cause people to shed virus that infect other
people. Both are nonsense with zero evidence to support such falsehoods.” ‘GUARD YOURSELF’ Rabbi Dr. Shalom Schlagman earned rabbinic ordination at Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, affiliated with Yeshiva University in New York, and his Rabbi Dr. Shalom medical degree Schlagman at the University of Rochester (N.Y.) School of Medicine. He serves as a fellow in Hospice and Palliative Medicine at the University of Rochester. Schlagman takes questions about the COVID-19 vaccine personally. “My own uncle, my mother’s brother, who was a medically
fragile person, was taken from us last spring when he was infected in the first COVID-19 surge,” he said. “As a resident in a regional quaternary-care academic medical center, I cared for patients whom we could not save from the disease. I literally watched people succumb to the infection despite our most advanced and aggressive medical care, and I witnessed others who languished in our ICU for weeks or months and whose subsequent recovery was complicated by strokes, blood clots or infections from their prolonged bedbound state. “I cared for teenagers and children, who, with minimal other symptoms of COVID-19 infection, found themselves in the ICU weeks after initial recovery, now the victims of MIS-C, a complication of the
