“Now is a critical time,” Israeli Minister of Health Nitzan Horowitz said as the 56-year-old got a COVID-19 booster shot on 13 August, the day his country became the first nation to offer a third dose of vaccine to people as young as age 50. “We’re in a race against the pandemic.”
His message was meant for his fellow Israelis, but it is a warning to the world. Israel has among the world’s highest levels of vaccination for COVID-19, with 78% of those 12 and older fully vaccinated, the vast majority with the Pfizer vaccine. Yet the country is now logging one of the world’s highest infection rates, with nearly 650 new cases daily per million people. More than half are in fully vaccinated people, underscoring the extraordinary transmissibility of the Delta variant and stoking concerns that the benefits of vaccination ebb over time.
The sheer number of vaccinated Israelis means some breakthrough infections were inevitable, and the unvaccinated are still far more likely to end up in the hospital or die. But Israel’s experience is forcing the booster issue onto the radar for other nations, suggesting as it does that even the best vaccinated countries will face a Delta surge.
This is a very clear warning sign for the rest of world,” says Ran Balicer, chief innovation officer at Clalit Health Services (CHS), Israel’s largest health maintenance organization (HMO). “If it can happen here, it can probably happen everywhere.”
Israel is being closely watched now because it was one of the first countries out of the gate with vaccinations in December 2020 and quickly achieved a degree of population coverage that was the envy of other nations— for a time. The nation of 9.3 million also has a robust public health infrastructure and a population wholly enrolled in HMOs that track them closely, allowing it to produce high-quality, real-world data on how well vaccines are working.
“I watch [Israeli data] very, very closely because it is some of the absolutely best data coming out anywhere in the world,” says David O’Connor, a viral sequencing expert at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Israel is the model,” agrees Eric Topol, a physician-scientist at Scripps Research. “It’s pure mRNA [messenger RNA] vaccines. It’s out there early. It’s got a very high level population [uptake]. It’s a working experimental lab for us to learn from.”
Israel’s HMOs, led by CHS and Maccabi Healthcare Services (MHS), track demographics, comorbidities, and a trove of coronavirus metrics on infections, illnesses, and deaths. “We have rich individual-level data that allows us to provide real-world evidence in near–real time,” Balicer says. (The United Kingdom also compiles a wealth of data. But its vaccination campaign ramped up later than Israel’s, making its current situation less reflective of what the future may portend; and it has used three different vaccines, making its data harder to parse.)
Now, the effects of waning immunity may be beginning to show in Israelis vaccinated in early winter; a preprint published last month by scientists at MHS found that protection from COVID-19 infection during June and July dropped in proportion to the length of time since an individual was vaccinated. People vaccinated in January had a 2.26 times greater risk for a breakthrough infection than those vaccinated in April. (Potential confounders include the fact that the very oldest Israelis, with the weakest immune systems, were vaccinated first.)
At the same time, cases in the country, which were scarcely registering at the start of summer, have been doubling every week to 10 days since then, with the Delta variant responsible for most of them. They have now soared to their highest level since mid-February, with hospitalizations and intensive care unit admissions beginning to follow. How much of the current surge is due to waning immunity versus the power of the Delta variant to spread like wildfire is uncertain.
What is clear is that “breakthrough” cases are not the rare events the term implies. As of 15 August, 514 Israelis were hospitalized with severe or critical COVID-19, a 31% increase from just 4 days earlier. Of the 514, 59% were fully vaccinated. Of the vaccinated, 87% were 60 or older. “There are so many breakthrough infections that they dominate and most of the hospitalized patients are actually vaccinated,” says Uri Shalit, a bioinformatician at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) who has consulted on COVID-19 for the government. “One of the big stories from Israel [is]: ‘Vaccines work, but not well enough.’”
“The most frightening thing to the government and the Ministry of Health is the burden on hospitals,” says Dror Mevorach, who cares for COVID-19 patients at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem and advises the government. At his hospital, he is lining up anesthesiologists and surgeons to spell his medical staff in case they become overwhelmed by a wave like January’s, when COVID-19 patients filled 200 beds. “The staff is exhausted,” he says, and he has restarted a weekly support group for them “to avoid some kind of PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] effect.”
To try to tame the surge, Israel has turned to booster shots, starting on 30 July with people 60 and older and, last Friday, expanding to people 50 and older. As of Monday, nearly 1 million Israelis had received a third dose, according to the Ministry of Health. Global health leaders including Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, have pleaded with developed countries not to administer boosters given that most of the world’s population hasn’t received even a single dose. The wealthy nations pondering or already administering booster vaccines so far mostly reserve them for special populations such as the immune compromised and health care workers.
Still, studies suggest boosters might have broader value. Researchers have shown that boosting induces a prompt surge in antibodies, which are needed in the nose and throat as a crucial first line of defense against infection. The Israeli government’s decision to start boosting those 50 and older was driven by preliminary Ministry of Health data indicating people over age 60 who have received a third dose were half as likely as their twice-vaccinated peers to be hospitalized in recent days, Mevorach says. CHS also reported that out of a sample of more than 4500 patients who received boosters, 88% said any side effects from the third shot were no worse, and sometimes milder, than from the second.
Yet boosters are unlikely to tame a Delta surge on their own, says Dvir Aran, a biomedical data scientist at Technion. In Israel, the current surge is so steep that “even if you get two-thirds of those 60-plus [boosted], it’s just gonna give us another week, maybe 2 weeks until our hospitals are flooded.” He says it’s also critical to vaccinate those who still haven’t received their first or second doses, and to return to the masking and social distancing Israel thought it had left behind—but has begun to reinstate.
Aran’s message for the United States and other wealthier nations considering boosters is stark: “Do not think that the boosters are the solution.”
Covid crimes against humanity and the coming war crimes tribunals
Reiner Fuelmich-
Nuremberg II.
https://www.brighteon.com/023d3fcc-620d-424f-a328-d5264f1d8fd2
This from Fox News. Despite the report’s extreme bias, and despite its extremely improbablei claims of near 100% effectiveness of the vaccine, attributed to the Kaiser Foundation, which conflicts with the recent Science article concerning infections among the fully vaccinated, the fact that a fully vaccinated governor has now ‘tested positive” is of interest.
174 cases per 100,000 total cases amounts to less than one in 500 cases being “severe.” Even for the unvaccinated, then, severe cases of cv2-19 are rare. We are clearly dealing with a flu-like ilolness here, both in terms of symptomology and the percentage of individuals who become seriously ill. And while we developed vaccines for the flu, the world community never panicked or went into lockdown because of it. This overreaction to what for most patients is a mild disease is sheer madness.
It is possible that an “exponential” increase in reported cv-2 cases might begin in September. But we should remember that the flu, “common” colds, non-covid pneumonia, and all other respiratory diseases always begin to increase “exponentially” in September, and the frequency of these diseases usually continue to be high until March, and sometimes through April and May in a colder-than-usual spring. So an “exponential” increase in cv-2 cases beginning in September, if in fact it does happen, will simply reflect the normal seasonal pattern in respiratory illness.
On the other hand, continued lockdowns and mass hysteria will wreck the world economy. And that will cause a massive increase in all diseases, both infectious and non-infectious, not to mention a dramatic rise in suicides and homicides. Most nations will be unable to afford functioning healthcare delivery systems, including open hospitals. Severe depression and stress caused by people losing their jobs or experiencing the failure of their businesses will make billions of people more susceptible to every kind of disease, not just cv2-19. Lockdowns are therefore a vastly greater threat to public health than this flu-like virus.
There is much, much more to be said on this subject, but I need to get some sleep.
@Reader
Agreed!
@peloni
Thanks for your response.
If it comes to some scandalous discoveries they will probably find a fall guy like Dr. Fauci (I am not saying he is innocent but there should be at least a couple of layers above him.
@Reader
They intentionally allowed a novel virus to spread while they employed a flawed experimental test(PCR) to inflate positives and treated the tested with a flawed experimental treatment(Remdisivir) which increased hospital stays without improving survival rates. This was followed up with a flawed experimental vaccine(4 of them) with unknown safety and efficacy while ignoring safe and effective drugs that are used as the standard of care in several other viral diseases. None of this was accidental, and none of this was unexpected. The impossibly flawed statistics, like the flawed epidemiologic model that promoted the shutdowns, were likely baked into this scheme with full intent of its consequence. If enough emails are ever exposed, this will likely become more certain, as these criminals fear no consequences of their crimes.
@peloni
Why? Haven’t we heard the excuses from the Nazi soldiers and state officials that they were just following orders?
Same here – the medical personnel are just following orders, except that their lives are not at stake here like those of the soldiers and state officials of the Nazi Germany who could be shot on the spot or sent to a concentration camp for disobeying.
I wonder how many real pneumonia patients have been murdered around the world by withholding medication from them since the beginning of the pandemic.
Also, I would dearly love to know how exactly they come up with their numbers because otherwise all the statistics here are meaningless.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-expert-optimistic-as-data-shows-cases-in-over-60s-slowing-after-booster/
Vaccines have very narrow target that are promoting mutations.
Catching the disease triggers a broader ant-viral response that provide more protection than the vaccines.
Among the terrible things that are going on with this Covid hysteria is that if you present for pneumonia they will immediately test you. They will then follow that up with routine testing, commonly on daily basis. If you are negative for Covid, you will receive treatment using normal protocols including antivirals/antibacterial meds. But, if at any point you test positive for Covid, all treatment will stop. You will be left to live or die as treatment is prohibited for Covid. This is the most savage political action I have ever heard of.
For starters
Many top notch scientists have stated that a mutated variant virus loses it’s potency as it branches off from the original!
Further,as I have already stated,India & over 40 other nations are not using any vaccine & are doing well with Ivermectin and/or
Hydroxychloroquine.
In many cases the vaccine itself is causing the fatalities.
The side effects from the vaccinations include causing cytokine storms that overwhelm the immune system & vital organs.
I assume that on the death certificates the cause of death will be the Covid 19 virus,
no mention will be made of inflammation & the destroyed immune system
This is like bad Science Fiction,
the hysteria rate is near the top! A visitor from another planet would think that the battle was against Small Pox or the Spanish Flu of 1919!
Meanwhile,over 40 nations & perhaps 25% of the worlds population
are not using any vaccines at all.
Not using a vaccine & doing very well beating this Wu Flu Virus
with Ivermectin and/or Hydroxychloroquine or both.
Worldometer.com is showing 47 deaths on 8/15 and 19 deaths on 8/16 for a total of 66 deaths in 2 days. The Israeli Ministry of Health has only 13 dead on 8/15 and none on 8/16 for less than 1/4 of the deaths in 2days – the update may be pending, but if these figures on Wordometer.com are accurate, they are devastating. The headlines in JPOST(Israel could see 150-250 COVID-19 deaths per week in August – HU) and Arutz Sheva(Experts warn of 1,000 new COVID deaths by end of September) each seem to suggest that Worldometer.com may perhaps be accurate.
Meanwhile
Deaths are surging, doubling time on cases is still 10days, and the state treatment of choice is finally recognized by some as not being the solution. Of course, the vax were never the solution, as this plague murdered millions of people around the world in 2020 while waiting for the vax cures and no treatment was allowed. With this in mind, perhaps it is time to simply treat the problem by finally treating the disease with established protocols of HCQ and IVM. Use these treatments and defeat the gloomy predictions of the headlines above. The longer they wait the more that will die.
and we still have thousands reported seriously injured or dead after their shots with no data on long term effects to the individual or community. yet compliant wealthy countries like Australia, are all in, still playing from the digital passport playbook with no way to remove their tyrannical leaders at state or national levels.