A New York City public school put on a holiday show in which 5th-8th graders sang “It’s safe to vax and if your friends don’t vax then they ain’t no friends of mine,” according to a mother who attended and shared her recordings with Just the News.
While the singing is hard to understand, the visual elements make clear the children at the Upper West Side’s M.S. 243 Center School are being taught to celebrate COVID-19 vaccines and single out unvaccinated peers
Antigone Michaelides said her son knew “two or three” such peers in December’s Theater Arts at The Center School (TACS) show, written by teachers, in which student participation is mandatory. New York City does not require public schoolchildren to be vaccinated against COVID.
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 David Porter said another recording captures the lyric “Don’t vax if you want to, if you don’t nobody will” (“We can act if we want to, if we don’t nobody will”).
Another video shows two children holding signs reading “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. It’s not clear what they’re singing.
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.
A member of the New York activist group Parents Protecting Childhood, Michaelides went public with her accusations in a tweet thread Friday. She shared other details about the enthusiasm of the “indoctrinated audience,” nearly all of whom “cheered and clapped.”
Michaelides and Porter gave Just the News their letter sent late Monday to District 3 Superintendent Christine Loughlin and Michelle Chang, New York City Department of Education (DOE) senior specialist liaison.
It includes many more allegations about December’s show, which allegedly repurposed the Peanuts “meaning of Christmas” scene with Allen Ginsburg’s poem “Howl,” 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.
Upper West Side Story
My son’s middle school holiday show featured a song where the kids, holding “Pfizer” and “Moderna” signs, were singing “if you’re not vaxxed you’re no friend of mine” to the tune of “Safety Dance.”
1 in 5 kids at that school are unvaxxed. pic.twitter.com/4H54pgGBhq— Antigone Michaelides (@oneantigone) February 4, 2022
The couple spoke with Just the News in a video call Wednesday after a virtual meeting with Superintendent Loughlin, who they say promised to refer the matter to a “special commissioner of investigation.”
The parents have enjoyed previous TACS performances, one of which included an octopus and pirate ship, but they were shocked by this one, which they estimated 200-300 people saw in afternoon and evening shows.
Authored by Greg Piper via Just the News
JusttheNews.com is committed to just reporting facts from journalists with a long record of public trust and excellence. In an era where opinion and supposition are too often substituted for fact and where journalists rush to get things first and hope their stories are correct, JusttheNews.com tries to stand out by returning to the bedrock promise of getting news first, but first getting it right. We try to deliver exclusive news you can trust.
