Posted on 08/25/2021 7:11:42 AM PDT by Red Badger
“I don’t want to frighten you,” Israel’s COVID czar Dr. Salman Zarka told parliament this week. “But… unfortunately, the numbers don’t lie.”
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JERUSALEM—The massive surge of COVID-19 infections in Israel, one of the most vaccinated countries on earth, is pointing to a complicated path ahead for America.
In June, there were several days with zero new COVID infections in Israel. The country launched its national vaccination campaign in December last year and has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, with 80 percent of citizens above the age of 12 fully inoculated. COVID, most Israelis thought, had been defeated. All restrictions were lifted and Israelis went back to crowded partying and praying in mask-free venues.
Fast forward two months later: Israel reported 9,831 new diagnosed cases on Tuesday, a hairbreadth away from the worst daily figure ever recorded in the country—10,000—at the peak of the third wave. More than 350 people have died of the disease in the first three weeks of August. In a Sunday press conference, the directors of seven public hospitals announced that they could no longer admit any coronavirus patients. With 670 COVID-19 patients requiring critical care, their wards are overflowing and staff are at breaking point.
“I don’t want to frighten you,” coronavirus czar Dr. Salman Zarka told the Israeli parliament this week. “But this is the data. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t lie.”
What happened?
The complex and sobering truth is that no single policy or event brought Israel to this crisis, Hagai Levine, a Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor of epidemiology, told The Daily Beast. A deadly set of circumstances came together to put Israel on the precipice, most of which can be summed up as: “We are still in the midst of a pandemic, and there is no silver bullet.”
“All the vectors have influenced the rise in morbidity,” he said.
But the principal causes of Israel’s current predicament are the dominance of the extremely infectious Delta variant, which was carried into the country by Israelis returning from foreign vacations during the weeks in which Israel dropped all restrictive measures—along with the worrisome decrease in vaccine efficacy after about six months.
Israel vaccinated its population almost exclusively with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which received full FDA approval on Monday and remains the gold standard for the prevention of severe illness due to the coronavirus.
But in early July, with citizens over the age of 60 almost completely vaccinated, Israeli scientists began observing a worrisome rise in infections—if not in severe illness and death—among the double-vaccinated.
Fully vaccinated people with weakened immune systems appeared particularly vulnerable to the aggressive Delta variant.
By mid-July, Sheba Hospital Professor Galia Rahav began to experiment with booster shots for oncology patients, transplant patients, and the hospital’s own staff. A group of 70 elderly vaccinated Israelis with transplanted kidneys were the first to receive a third dose.
The success of Rahav’s trials in boosting immunity at about the sixth-month mark contributed to the Centers for Disease Control decision, announced last week, to begin offering booster shots to Americans in September.
In order to keep severe illness and the number of COVID deaths down, and avoiding a fourth national lockdown, Israel has embarked on an aggressive effort to provide all adults with boosters in a matter of weeks.
As of this week, all Israelis over 30 will be eligible to receive booster shots. By the end of the month, they are expected to be universally available to anyone over the age of 12 who received their second vaccine five months or more ago.
Israel will then reconfigure its Green Passports, granting them only to the triple-vaccinated, and limiting their validity to six months. In anticipation of this change, the number of unvaccinated Israelis getting their first shots has tripled since the beginning of August.
The World Health Organization has asked wealthy countries to halt all third vaccines for a period of two months, hoping that a moratorium will allow poorer countries, where few citizens have received even a first inoculation, to catch up. The United States rejected the call and Israel has ignored it.
Asked what has brought Israel to peak transmission even as the country has already provided third doses of vaccines to 1.5 million citizens, Rahav, who has become one of the best known faces of Israel’s public health messaging, sighed, saying, “I think we’re dealing with a very nasty virus. This is the main problem—and we’re learning it the hard way.”
“It is a combination of waning immunity, so that inoculated people get reinfected, and at the same time the very transmissible Delta variant,” Rahav said, adding that Israelis lacked the discipline to revert to mask usage as the numbers began rising. “But it is not an Israeli problem,” she added. “It is everywhere.”
Her conclusion should give pause to American authorities, who face school reopenings as, at best, only 50 percent of eligible adults have been fully vaccinated.
Unlike New Zealand, which aims for zero community transmission of the coronavirus, and imposes lockdowns when even a single positive case is identified, Israeli authorities have opted for a model they are calling “living with corona.”
“Israel really is a pioneer,” Levine, the former chairman of the nation’s Association of Public Health Physicians, said, referring to the groundbreaking vaccination campaign and the country’s efforts, currently underway, to fully reopen schools on Sept. 1 while keeping in place measures aimed at preventing school-driven outbreaks, such as the one that closed the nation down last summer.
“We’ve achieved a plan that is not hermetic,” Zarka, the coronavirus czar, told a local radio station. “Clearly there will be cases of illness at schools… [but] shutting oneself up at home and closing the school system isn’t exactly the solution.”
He has asked the government to impose stricter limitations on the size of cultural and sports events until the incidence of the coronavirus declines.
“Each country has to assess its own epidemiology,” Levine said, “its culture, its public health, the public’s confidence in its health authorities.” Referring to New Zealand, he added that “we can all learn from other countries, but you can’t copy paste other countries’ methods.”
Israel was forced to make quick decisions and in a time of great uncertainty. Levine was among the public health officials who expressed doubts about the wisdom of Israel’s untested move towards nationwide booster vaccination, but he told The Daily Beast that the latest statistics, showing that only 0.2 of the first 1.1 million recipients of the third jab were infected with the coronavirus, proved it had been a “brave decision.”
The last week has shown a significant reduction in morbidity among triple-vaccinated Israelis over the age of 70—the first group to receive the booster.
Like the other experts, Rahav supports schools reopening, but noted that thanks to upcoming Jewish holidays, which will close schools in about 80 percent of the country, Israel will once again be uniquely positioned to serve as a huge laboratory.
EACH INDIVIDUAL SHOULD BE FREE TO DO THAT. That's what's being debated (among Statists and Constitutionalists)...
did they give the jews the placebo?
The flu basically fell due to masks, handwashing and social distancing. Covid is hanging on because people won’t practice social distancing. But almost everyone will eventually get Covid. It is that contagious.
This virus like others will morph, it already has. They say it helps against the Delta virus, but everybody vaxed is getting it. It will be the unvaccinated that will save the world. Getting everybody vaxed is a mistake, Israel is our example.
“Pathogenic priming likely contributes to serious and critical illness...”
“...In SARS, a type of “priming” of the immune system was observed during animal studies of SARS spike protein-based vaccines leading to increased morbidity and mortality in vaccinated animals who were subsequently exposed to wild SARS virus. The problem, highlighted in two studies, became obvious following post-vaccination challenge with the SARS virus [2]. found that recombinant SARS spike-protein-based vaccines not only failed to provide protection from SARS-CoV infection, but also that the mice experienced increased immunopathology with eosinophilic infiltrates in their lungs. Similarly [3], found that ferrets previously vaccinated against SARS-CoV also developed a strong inflammatory response in liver tissue (hepatitis). Both studies suspected a “cellular immune response”...”
The “vaccines” are working. They are a cure for Wuhan flu hysteria, not a vaccine for the flu. Hysteria sufferers who get the vaccine overcome their hysteria, drop their precautions and get the flu. The success of the vaccinations is measured by the number of vaccinated who get the flu.
FAIL!!!
Feb 27 , 2021
“Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla: ‘Israel has become world’s lab right now’”
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/297593
Corona viruses are well known to mutate at the s-protein.
The lesson, if anyone will learn it, is that viruses do what they do. All we can really do is let it burn through the population and treat symptoms.
“...there is no silver bullet.”
There are MANY! Hydroxy, zinc, C, D3, Ivermectin, Xlear, Quercetin, and many many more.
The problem is that you guys thought the ONLY silver bullet was vaccines. Then, you found out they were just lead.
So what is your answer??? MORE vaccines, BOOSTERS for everyone!
You all should watch this. Its an english health phd. who is challenging the new FDA approval. He is not the only one in England. The charge is that the FDA used data from the first month of vaccinations. And even though there is clearly more data that would undoubtedly show worse numbers for protection and higher numbers for adverse effects, those numbers were not used. Just the first couple months. He says in as kind a way as possible that the FDA report is sloppy at best. And this man supports vaccines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOtvpk9rZLs
I think the FDA will be in trouble after this. Its clear that their approval is a sham, based on a very small amount of data when a great deal of data showing the vaccine is less effective and in some cases dangerous is available and being ignored.
A high correlation between COVID-19 infections and vaccinations.
Hmmmm
Ivermectin
The government knows how to use it too and weaponize it like say putting it into the water supply of red states/counties I’m sure.
Look if they can abandon 10-20K AMERICANS in afbidenstan you think they care about American lives?
“The flu basically fell due to masks, handwashing and social distancing. Covid is hanging on because people won’t practice social distancing.”
I’m not trying to be argumentative. What you state is what we have been told.
However, since C19 and the flu virus(s) are the same size, why did masks and hand washing only work on one? I agree with you about distancing, but again - why one and not the other? Again, I don’t know - just asking.
Based on this premise, are we to believe that C19 ‘beat’ the flu virus to the victims? Did catching one keep you from catching the other?
It seems illogical to me. But the narrative is that we suppressed the flu somehow. We kicked it’s butt hard, and if we just do MORE of whatever they are telling us to do, we’ll stomp that darn CCP virus next time.
Herodians rejected the Messiah.
Strong Delusion. II Thessalonians
“…you should panic a great deal if you’ve been vaxxed, because covid ‘cases’ generated after being jabbed are totally life threatening, while covid ‘cases’ before vaccination are nothing at all and nothing to base mitigation policy on...
this is what I’ve learned here on FR.…..”
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LOL - yes, it is amazing what folks can “learn” if they follow the “it’s on the internet so it must be true” fashion.
Matthew 24:7
For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.
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