One Saturday in mid-April, a group of Orthodox Jewish leaders held a conference call with a Minnesota doctor as they grappled with the rise in coronavirus cases in their New York area communities.
Dr. Michael Joyner of the Mayo Clinic is leading a nationwide study of the use of blood plasma to treat patients with severe COVID-19. On the call that afternoon, he told religious leaders that he needed something for their investigation: more blood from people who survived the virus.
“Do what you can,” Joyner said, according to Yehudah Kaszirer of Lakewood, New Jersey, one of the rabbis on the call.
Approximately 36 hours later, Kaszirer boarded a private plane with approximately 1,000 vials of blood stored in refrigerators. It had been drawn from members of the community through an organized blood drive with military speed.
The blood would be taken to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and the antibodies would be analyzed.
“It felt like being on a godly mission,” Kaszirer said.
And it turned out that it was very successful. Approximately 60 percent of the plasma samples contained antibodies.
Since that night flight, Orthodox Jews in the Kaszirer community and others across the country have provided an extraordinary amount of antibody-rich plasma for the U.S. government-backed COVID-19 expanded access program, which It represents about half of the supply used to treat 34,000 people, Joyner said.
“There is no way we can treat so many people without them,” he told NBC News. “They were the drop that filled the glass in many ways.”
The role that Orthodox Jews have played in contributing to promising, but as yet unproven, treatment of the coronavirus has attracted far less attention than incidents of community members who ignore patterns of social distancing.
Police broke up several large gatherings in Lakewood during the month of April, resulting in criminal charges for violating quarantine orders. Near the end of the month, thousands of Orthodox Jewish men in Brooklyn gathered for the funeral of a beloved rabbi. And some in the Orthodox community made headlines last month as they entered a closed courtyard in Brooklyn, wearing few masks and no social distancing.
Dr. Israel Zyskind, a pediatrician in a Brooklyn neighborhood with a high concentration of Hasidic Jews, said the vast majority paid attention to warnings to stay indoors. He said the virus spread rapidly during the Purim holidays in early March.
“When Purim was around, we didn’t know anything about social estrangement, about wearing masks,” said Zyskind, who practices in Borough Park. “No one wore masks. No one knew how to stay home and not be with their families … There were very few cases in the United States. “
Borough Park was especially affected by the virus. The community has the fourth highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the city and the highest in the Brooklyn district, according to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The latest figures show 226 confirmed deaths in Borough Park, meaning there have been 243 deaths for every 100,000 residents in the neighborhood.
Other factors also likely contributed to the rapid spread of the virus within Orthodox communities in the Northeast. In places like Borough Park, Zyskind said, many families have six to eight children and live in small apartments in very tight buildings.
Communities are insular and some tend to maintain an old world way of life. Many families, said Zyskind, still live without televisions or computers.
Once the full scale of the crisis became clear, her community and others had a chance to turn high infection rates into something positive.
“Because COVID devastated us so early, we recognized that we had an opportunity to give back to the scientific community and to our brothers who are suffering,” said Zyskind.
“We don’t just care about ourselves,” he added. “We care about everyone and we will do what we can.”
The initial blood drive in mid-April came just hours after Saturday’s phone call with Joyner, Kaszirer said.
On Sunday, April 19, some 16 tents were set up with medical staff and volunteer nurses, many of them from the non-profit aid group Bikur Cholim in Kaszirer.
“Other people in the community found out and said, ‘Hello, I am a registered nurse,’ ‘I am a registered phlebotomist. Do you need a hand?'” She recalled.
It was 3 a.m. Monday when Kaszirer boarded a plane with blood samples to Minnesota. He said he had returned to New Jersey at noon, and emails with the antibody results began arriving shortly thereafter.
“We thought, ‘We thought this would take days.’ And here it was, literally, from idea to result, it was just over 36 hours, ”she said.
Blood campaigns were soon carried out in other Orthodox communities across the country, in places like Detroit, Baltimore and Michigan, and as far west as Los Angeles.
Joyner, the Mayo Clinic doctor, said he was amazed at the ability of the Orthodox Jewish community to mobilize its members and organize a complex medical project within hours.
“They had a high infection rate, which was terrible, but they decided to do something about it,” he said. “And they used their social cohesion and their organizational and logistical skills to make it happen.”
“I would be surprised if we didn’t do more projects with them,” added Joyner. “These individuals are problem solvers.”
The efficacy of convalescent plasma therapy in treating patients with COVID-19 has not yet been established in clinical trials, but Joyner said he is optimistic. An initial study has already shown that the treatment is safe for patients with COVID-19.
Plasma donated by Orthodox Jewish communities is not only used for transfusions. Some 8,000 vials of blood serum have been donated for use by scientists at 10 institutions around the world in their quest to discover why the virus is so deadly to some and not to others.
“I have never entered a scientific endeavor that has moved as fast as this,” said Dr. Avi Rosenberg, an assistant professor of pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Kaszirer said the community’s plasma donations reflect their commitment to doing good deeds, what the Jews call “mitzvah.”
“We live in a closed world for ourselves. That is the way of life, ”he said. “But wherever we can lend a hand, be a beacon of light, it is our mitzvah.”
