New Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is challenged by his own ministers over the management of the fourth wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
By Mazal Mualem, AL MONITOR July 29, 2021
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett speaks as he chairs the weekly Cabinet meeting, Jerusalem, June 27, 2021. – Maya Alleruzzo/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Less than two months since the “change government” was sworn in, it is rattled by the fourth wave of the coronavirus in its Delta variant, now striking Israel. Each day, the number of the infected and seriously ill increases, the effect of the vaccinations is waning, and this puts Prime Minister Naftali Bennett under scrutiny for allegedly mishandling the crisis.
Bennett has been criticized for failing to take action since the infection rates have begun to rise in the past month, and preferring a reactive strategy, claiming that he is in control of the situation.
Bennett has presented a contrasting position to the policy of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and has claimed that the vaccines aren’t as effective as they were and that the strategy must be different. Two weeks ago, he took a jab at Netanyahu, saying to the press, “Anyone who hoped that vaccines on their own would solve the problem — they won’t. We need a strategy that brings as many vaccines as possible on the one hand, but on the other also understands the limitations of the vaccines.”
Senior officials at the Ministry of Health were surprised at this statement, which they thought damages the continuing vaccine drive among teens 12 and up, who meet the criteria to be vaccinated, but refuse to do so.
Only a week ago, on July 22, Bennett sounded totally different. Following another increase in infections, he made a special declaration during television prime time, calling on the million unvaccinated Israelis to rush to vaccinate, and attacked them in an unprecedented manner. Bennett said, “Vaccine refusers are hurting all of us. If everyone gets vaccinated, everyone will be able to maintain their daily routine.” He also announced that sanctions will be taken against them, including requiring them to bear the costs of coronavirus tests, which right now are administered at no charge.
The “vaccine speech” garnered compliments on the one hand for taking a leadership stance, but was also criticized for its brutal fear- and shame-mongering against vaccine refusers.
Evidently, the “vaccine speech” did not convince the million unvaccinated Israelis to run and get vaccinated. Only a moderate increase in vaccinations resulted, which has since stalled.
In the meantime, a week has passed and infection continues to spread. Coronavirus wards that had closed reopened, and the number of seriously ill has increased. Although they only numbered 159 on July 28 — far from burdening the health-care system — this is a troubling number because it is not clear when the increase will stop.
The developing crisis has now exposed conflicts and exchanges of blame within the new government, which until now has taken care to market to the public an atmosphere of mutual praise and a down-to-business and accomplishment-oriented attitude — as opposed to the notorious infighting of the Netanyahu government.
This week, we can say that the honeymoon is over, and that Bennett has to handle not only a health crisis, but a political leadership test.
At the center of the muddle of the past few days is Minister of Education Yifat Shasha-Biton (New Hope party), whose relationship with Bennett is tense where it comes to the management of the fourth wave.
Shasha-Biton is known for her allegedly lax policy on the coronavirus, and for opposing the vaccination of children at schools, which she has called “criminal.” She has also clashed at every opportunity with the professionals at the Ministry of Health who have taken a stringent approach and warned of the spread of the disease. Shasha-Biton is apparently behind damaging briefings to the media opposing Director of Health Services Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, who has presented the Cabinet with worrisome data on the spread of the coronavirus and demanded that they make tough decisions on restrictions. Among other things, Shasha-Biton is said to have attacked Alroy-Preis as hysterical and sowing panic. On July 28, it came to light that Bennett reproached her and asked her to treat health personnel with respect. But Shasha-Bitton did not stand down and responded, “The public needs to be bothered by the fact that anyone who presents a different approach to the fight against the coronavirus is immediately tagged as a coronavirus denier.”
Another report stated that sources surrounding Shasha-Biton blamed Bennett for the briefings, saying he did so to bolster his leadership. This isn’t a promising sign for Bennett, because it shows his weakness as prime minister, lacking a political home front and broad public support.
What is happening to Bennett now is ironic. He presented the main and most prominent opposition to Netanyahu’s management of the coronavirus crisis and gained great popularity due to the public’s anger. Bennett convinced a large public that Netanyahu and his government are irresponsible, reckless and caused unnecessary death, sickness and economic collapse. Bennett even created a shadow Cabinet on the coronavirus crisis, and wrote a booklet, “How to win the pandemic.” He traveled around the country, visited hospitals and empty markets, and attacked the government from every stage.
Bennett’s campaign against the coronavirus battle management was very effective and ended up contributing to the downfall of Netanyahu. Now Bennett is learning the hard way that it is easy to criticize but hard to manage a crisis that has many elements of uncertainty, without political power and leadership authority. Again and again, quotes are cited from his booklet that make him look ridiculous — things he has demanded the government must do, but now fails to.
The first to ridicule him were of course members of the opposition. Knesset member Moshe Gafni of the ultra-Orthodox Yahadut HaTorah called him a “murderer” from the Knesset podium, and later softened it to “killing people” because of alleged failed management of the pandemic.
But the person drawing all the attention is Netanyahu, who is doing what Bennett did to him with his own embellishments. Netanyahu called Pfizer CEO Albert Burla behind Bennett’s back in order to discuss a third shot, publicized the call and embarrassed the prime minister. In recent weeks, Netanyahu has led the third shot campaign on his own, and called on the government and Bennett to immediately vaccinate the elderly population, since this is the only way to restore immune protection to them.
Prominent in his absence from the pandemic front — and not coincidentally — is Foreign Minister and Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid, who is focusing on his ministry’s affairs, and posts photos of his meetings with fellow foreign ministers daily on social media. On July 28, for instance, he met with the Croatian foreign minister. Lapid is letting Bennett manage the crisis not just to avoid overstepping his authority, but also because he is not interested in any potential failure sticking to him.
In April, the CDC stopped identifying or notating any vaccine breakthrough cases, they referred to them as minimal disease cases. Of course, April was when the breakthrough cases began to appear. They have left the surveillance of these breakthrough cases up to the states, and many of them only recently started tracking vaccine breakthroughs and many still are not. Furthermore, the states are not uniform in their definitions of breakthrough or in their reporting methods or timing in which they report these breakthroughs, as they have no federal requirement to do so. So this would be another failure of these institutions which every nation in the world looks to for guidance and accurate information. Simply criminal.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7696844/
This is a very important study and piggy-backs on previous data to show the use of Quercetin, a neutriceutical that was available over the counter til this past April when the FDA recoded it to be by prescription only, along with dozens of other over the counter products that could be very useful in treating SARS-Cov2 infection. They show that not only does Quercetin prevent prion disease, but it also helps prevent red blood cell damage, which could impact the clotting issues, or some of them, in any event. Furthermore, it helps in the bio-availability of the active form of glutathione. Quercetin has long been known as having protective properties regarding the brain cells, but in the past few years has this been scientifically investigated. It should be noted that Quercetin was, before ivermectine was found to be effective, the drug employed when hydroxychlorquine was unavailable due to complicating disease states which prevented its use.
@Adam
I was looking for this citation, as I was going to post it last week but lost the citation. Oddly enough, I just came across it while looking into the new data on Phizer. This is a very brief overview of some(actually only the major)criticisms of using masks for “source control” as the author labels it. She does discuss the Minimum Infectious Dose(MID), but does not explain it. The MID is very important and is specific to each infectious bacteria or virus or fungus. It is also called the ID50 or the Infective Dose that will cause disease in 50% of subjects who receive this dose. The MID for SARS-Cov2 virus is not known, as recent as April, due to varying findings, which are likely related to the use of inaccurate testing (useless PCR). The animal and cell culture studies show that the MID is likely very small, but this is very unreliable and we need better data with humans as the animal and cell cultures can vary wildly from humans as seen in other infectious agents. Overall, this article is not very detailed and it does not discuss things as obscure as the MID for the most part as I suspect this was intended for a more general audience. But if you have any questions, let me know.
Here is the link to the article:
https://rationalground.com/masks-are-not-source-control/
I do want to add one more observation on the mask usage. Masks are worse than not being the solution, as it ignores the fact that the CDC is encouraging the public to believe that relying on mask usage will offer a solution to address these outbreaks. The Covid disease is easily treatable, but even a mild disease can result in extended problems. The vaccines don’t work and are harmful. People really should be using prophylaxis measures as it has been seen to prevent 50% of disease in uninfected and unvaccinated people. Even if this is off by half and it only prevents 25%, that would be a huge part of the population that would avoid long term consequences of Covid disease and/or vaccine reactions. I believe this is especially true if they have had the vaccines, however there have not been any studies to support this idea of which I am aware, but it is likely helpful and it is definitely very safe, even if it is not helpful. Of course, the CDC has no intention of doing anything about treatment until their partners in Pharma have their new drug ready for testing on the public.
@Adam
The data going back decades does not support any mask usage to protect against viral outbreaks. If they did, masks would have been used to prevent the spread of influenza as the vaccines never seemed to prevent thousands, and sometimes many tens of thousands, of people dying from influenza. They looked at this very closely after SARS outbreak in 2003 and confirmed what had been looked at for decades. They again looked at this very carefully in 2012 and 2018 due to considerations of influenza.
There are papers that provide the highest level of review that do nothing but take a 30,000 foot view of all the data on a given subject, encompassing literally thousands of studies, and those reviews have all shown an enormous amount of data indicating masks will not save you from viral infection – which, if you think about it, should be obvious as if masks would work against viral infection, why would they use pressurized suits when conducting research on viruses (recall the photo of Chi Zenghli in the lab with a pressurized suit).
For a mask to work it would require a filtration system so dense that you would suffocate trying to draw breath through it, unless you could breath around it, like in all masks, at which point, how can they work. It is mindless babble talk to give people something to do so they feel that they are protected while we avoid treatment – and yes, still no treatments recommended for by CDC for the Covid disease. This is also why Pelosi and her nephew Cal. Gov Newsome, Biden, Harris, none of these people demanding that we all use masks adhere to this policy when off camera, and they are all taking HCQ, you can bet on it.
The other point that the 30,000 foot reviews showed was that on some occasions, the mask showed complications due to hygiene(viruses and bacteria buildup on masks in large clumps and are inhaled) and the issue of doing extreme workloads while masking was deemed counter indicated due to the increase need of oxygen consumption and the masks cause CO2 buildup. There are other concerns such as people using shirts of various materials(nylon is very bad as tiny pieces are inhaled and create serious consequences) or medical masks which were never designed or approved to be used all day, much less re-used for days on end. There is also the issue of people wearing masks under their nose where a contaminated mask acts to actually infect the person wearing it.
The best use for masks is if someone was sneezing or coughing profusely, the ejected sputum(yucky stuff that comes up occasionally when you cough) can be caught in the masks. I will caution you that there were some studies that were done post-Covid which miraculously showed what they were designed to show, ie that masks work splendidly, but the study is poorly understood, as was intended, while it makes sweeping assumptions and addresses none of the limitation that were created when the studies were setup – such tactics have been employed on a number of issues over the past 18months. It really would be good if the masks could save us or even help us, but the virus is small enough to walk right through an N95 mask and laugh all the way down the lung – and no one wears N95 masks, as everyone uses a surgical mask or their shirt. Meanwhile prophylaxis using cheap, safe drugs goes unemployed, even prevented by the use of govt sanctioned threats. Very disconcerting situation, to be honest.
This is from today’s Daily Mail (UK):
Not at all clear to me why the CDC would conclude that wearing masks is the solution when they found that the vaccine isn’t working. Pelota: is there any scientific evidence that wearing masks halts the spread of Covid?
A very important article (I don’t know whether to laugh or cry) [emphasis and notes in [] are mine]:
The poll shows Bibi has support of 43% and Bennett has support of 21%. That is quite a discrepancy, of course, however, the more significant number may be the more than 1/3 who did not offer a preference for either of these two men, each of whom are advocating, very strongly, vaccinations. Coincidentally, Shasha-Biton who is being labeled as a vax skeptic by some has a rating of 34% positive, which closely mirrors the 36% who held no preference between the two leaders. Something to consider.
The Jerusalem Post published an excellent editorial, signed only by “Staff,” a few days ago, in which pointed out that expert opinion was divided about the value of the vaccines and the value of travel restrictions vaccine “passports,” and lockdowns. I called free debate, some of it public and dialogue about these issues by genuine medical experts on both sides of these questions. It deplored oversimplified and vindictive declations by politicians accusing unvaccinated people of being responsible for the persitance of the virus, and the efforts of both government officials and journalists to impose an “orthodoxy” about these matters, and to belittle and shamethose who disagree with the official narrative about CV-2, accusing them of “spreading misinformation” and being “nut cases.
Everyone should calm down and discuss the varying approaches to ending the epidemic in a calm, mutually respectful way.
However, the editorial has completely disappeared from the JP site! And I couldn’t even locate it through Google’s vast internet library. All trace of it has disappeared from the web. Unfortunately, I failed to note down the URL for the page when I read the article, so I can’t even send a link to my fellow Israpundit readers. A very dramatic example of internet censorship and self-censorship.