A New York City public school put on a holiday performance during which 5th through 8th grade students sang songs praising the vaccine.
According to a mother who attended the show at the Upper West Side’s M.S. 243 Center School, the students sang: “It’s safe to vax and if your friends don't vax then they ain’t no friends of mine,” Just the News reports.
Antigone Michaelides said her son knew “two or three” unvaccinated peers in December’s Theater Arts at the Center School show, which was written by teachers. Participation in the show was mandatory.
One video shows children holding signs for Pfizer and Moderna and singing a parody of the Men Without Hats song “Safety Dance,” which includes the parallel lyric “your friends don’t dance, and if they don’t dance, well they’re no friends of mine.”
Her husband said another recording captures the lyric: “Don't vax if you want to, if you don't nobody will.”
Another video shows two children holding signs that read “I fear God not COVID” and “I am not a science experiment,” apparently referring to families who have religious or medical objections to COVID vaccines.
Other children appear to be dressed as conservative caricatures: a box of Kool cigarettes, a man in fatigues with an American flag, Napoleon Bonaparte and the so-called QAnon shaman Jacob Chansley, who was sentenced to 41 months in prison for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Michaelides sent a letter on Monday to District 3 Superintendent Christine Loughlin and Michelle Chang, New York City Department of Education senior specialist liaison.
The letter includes several other allegations about December's show, which allegedly repurposed the Peanuts "meaning of Christmas" scene with Allen Ginsberg’s “Owl," an ode to the pagan god Moloch.
The parents know the Ginsberg reference but "still question the appropriateness of associating Christmas with a god to whom children were sacrificed" under the DOE's "inclusivity goals," they wrote.
"We sat on this for a while because I didn't know whether I wanted to make a big deal out of it," Michaelides told Just the News. "We're in this enclave of very homogeneous views."
