With Israel's campaign to vaccinate children aged 5 to 11 now in full swing, opponents of the vaccine have launched a campaign of their own in an effort to intimidate parents into refusing to allow mobile vaccination units on school premises.
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Parents from around the country have reported receiving WhatsApp trying to convince them not to vaccinate their children in recent days.
According to Dorit, a mother from the southern city of Yavne, "They wrote to me in a message: 'Why would you push poison on children? Do you want to kill them?' They told me I was gambling with my children's health. It was a real intimidation campaign."
According to Dorit, these parents wrote that "up until now, no child has died of the coronavirus, but your child could be the first on the list because children will suffer damage from it."
Another mother of elementary-school-age children in Yavne said she received a message from vaccination opponents who asked her: "How can you lend a hand to such a thing? You are giving in to coercion. The vaccine is a biological weapon and as such murder."
Another message recently sent out to parents asserted the vaccination of students was "an invasive medical procedure, which is carried out with an experimental genetic component the likes of which has yet to be seen in Israel."
Yet another WhatsApp message called on parents to keep their children home. "In practice, as soon as your children enter the institution, you've lost control over everything that is being done to your children as well as your ability to extricate them from there.
One school principal from the center of the country said the parents behind messages were "a small and boisterous group that is creating a lot of disinformation and fake news as well as undercutting normative parents. They create hysteria and demand I promise the children won't be vaccinated against their will. There is a lot of anxiety on the issue, and conspiracy theories have arisen as if the children are being taken by force and vaccinated. Their imagination is working overtime."
Parental approval is necessary to vaccinate children aged 17 and under. Nevertheless, an error resulted in one sixth-grade student in the center of the country being vaccinated absent parental approval last week.
"This is a group of anti-vaxxers who are riding the wave of intimidation and sowing panic and fear, in particular among parents who have less access to information," National Parents Association Chairwoman Odelia Cohen-Schondorf said. "We see in this nearly every school group. There's a parent who sends fake news and asks whether the information is correct. The parents don't always manage to filter the information in time. Out of fear, there are those who call for protest guards."
Cohen Schondorf emphasized the need to differentiate between those who oppose vaccination and threaten other parents and those who want the vaccination units removed from school property so they can be there when their children are vaccinated.
"Most parents want to vaccinate," she explained, "but it's important to them to do it with the child, in the afternoon, and not when they are far from them."
In a statement, the Education Ministry responded by saying, "Every vaccine that the Health Ministry authorizes for administration at schools is administered only with parental approval and by trained medical professionals."
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