Cuomo Continues to Falsely Depict the Vaccination Rates in Heimish ZIP Codes as Among the State’s 25 Lowest

By Yehudit Garmaise

   Despite criticism from the Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council last week after a press conference at which Gov. Andrew Cuomo put up a misleading chart that listed Boro Park, Monsey, Monroe, Far Rockaway, Williamsburg, and Crown Heights as among the ZIP codes that have the lowest vaccination rates, today, Gov. Cuomo put up the same chart again, as he announced that the state is currently at a 69.9% vaccination rate: striking distance from the 70% at which he will release all COVID restrictions.

   The reason the chart is misleading is that unlike the New York City Health Department, which separates the vaccination rates of those under and 18 and those older than 18, a statistic that particularly affects the vaccination rates of heimish communities, which have much high birth rates and therefore much higher populations of teens who are younger than 18.

   In Gov. Cuomo’s own description today, the 12 to 18 group is vaccinating at a lower rate than adults for many reasons: they just became eligible recently, the idea of vaccination is new to them, and throughout the pandemic, young people were not considered at risk.

   So, in Boro Park, where the under 18 age group comprises 60% of the neighborhood’s population, as compared with the rest of New York City, whose under 18 age group only makes up 20% of the population, the governor again vastly miscalculated and underrepresented Boro Park’s vaccination rate of adults at 35.8%. 

    New York City, on the other hand, which measures for New Yorkers 18 and older, provides Boro Park’s adult vaccination rate at 50%, which mirrors the vaccination rate of white community, which is 52% and exceeds the 47% of Latino adults the 35% of black New Yorkers who have gotten vaccinated.

    In addition, last Wednesday, after BoroPark24 asked Mayor Bill de Blasio whether he would ask Gov. Cuomo to consider separating out the vaccination rates for the 12 to 18 category, to account for the different average ages in different ZIP codes, the mayor threw the question to Mitch Katz, MD, the CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, who genially said he would provide that he would provide that input to the state to provide more accurate vaccination rates.

    “I agree measuring vaccination as a percentage of the population is deceptive in any part of the city where the number of children is much larger, and we know that is true of the Chassidic population,” said Dr. Katz, as he responded to BoroPark24’s question. “I think the way the city reports its data is better and more representative of what’s going on in the Orthodox Chassidic community.

   “We can certainly give that feedback back to the state that focusing on the group that are adults and separately looking at the group of younger people, for whom there was just recent approval, makes sense to me.”

   BoroPark24 tried to explain to the mayor that when inaccurate vaccination data about Orthodox Jewish communities are released, other inaccurate and libelous claims about the community proliferate, such as that Orthodox Jews are vaccine-hesitant or vaccine-resistant to a greater degree than other communities.

Photo by: Kevin P. Coughlin / Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo