World watches as Israel’s fast-tracked vaccination program delivers promising results
It paid a sky-high price to access one of the best coronavirus vaccines in the world and also agreed to share data on the accelerated rollout – but Israel’s expensive gamble seems to have paid off.
The small country in the Middle East was late joining the line for the Pfizer vaccine behind the US, Canada and Japan, according to The Times of Israel, but it still managed to gain fast-tracked access to millions of doses.
This was partly due to Israel paying a lot more for the vaccine – as much as double what the United States and United Kingdom signed up for per dose – but also because it agreed to share data on the results of the rollout with Pfizer.
“We didn’t quibble about the price,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters in January.
Mr Netanyahu also acknowledged that one of the selling points for Pfizer was that Israel “could serve as a world laboratory for herd immunity or something approaching herd immunity very quickly”.
Israel “can serve as a global test case” on the coronavirus vaccine and on reopening the economy, he said.
Two months since the vaccine began to be rolled out, experts are now watching closely to understand its effectiveness in the real world.
The program has been so successful that on Monday Mr Netanyahu’s government announced the reopening of some businesses.
“We’ll be the first in the world to get out [of COVID],” Mr Netanyahu told Israel’s Channel 12.
He encouraged 570,000 people aged over 50 who had not yet been vaccinated to get the jab, saying they would decide whether the current lockdown will be Israel’s last.
Israel has already provided the first of two jabs to more than four million people in just two months.
This has provided coverage to more than 40 per cent of its population of nine million. Of these, more than 2.6 million have also received their second jab.
Although the number of vaccinations is not as high as other countries, Israel’s smaller population makes it easier to assess the impact of widespread vaccination because a higher proportion of the population is potentially protected.
So what is the data saying?
So far there isn’t a clear answer on whether vaccinated people can still infect others but there is promising data suggesting vaccinations reduce viral load and this means people are less likely to infect others.
Analysis from DNA scientist Yaniv Erlich, who is MyHeritage’s chief science officer, and his colleague Ella Petter, found vaccinated people who still got sick with coronavirus had a viral load 1.5 times to 20 times lower than those who weren’t vaccinated.
This means they are less likely to pass on the virus to others even if they do get infected and provides some hope that herd immunity can be achieved.
“Whoever gets vaccinated not only protects himself but also his family, his neighbours, and his community. Therefore, it is important to get vaccinated,” Dr Erlich wrote in a Facebook post on February 8.
Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to US President Joe Biden, also spruiked the vaccine’s ability to reduce people’s viral load, seen in studies from Israel and Spain.
“The vaccine is important not only for the health of the individual to protect them against infection and disease, including the variants … but it also has very important implications from a public health standpoint, for interfering and diminishing the dynamics of the outbreak,” he said on Wednesday.
With any new vaccine there’s a risk that results seen in the trials won’t be replicated in the real world. This can happen for many reasons including the fact that people who sign up for trials tend to be healthier, more educated and open to new technology.
But so far the Pfizer’s results appear to be mirroring those experienced in the trial and it is protecting people from getting sick.
Israel has now announced a “green badge” system to re-open certain venues to those who have received both of their jabs.
From Sunday, those who have the badge, which will also be given to those who have recovered from the virus, will be allowed into gyms, cultural events, houses of worship and hotels.
“We are moving ahead with the responsible reopening on the principle of ‘you’re vaccinated – you’re in’,” Defence Minister Benny Gantz said on Monday.
Other facilities, like malls and museums, will open to all citizens, with or without a green badge, under a so-called “purple code”, with crowd size limits and other restrictions that have applied through much of the pandemic.
Hagai Levine, a public health professor and researcher at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, stressed Israel’s vaccination-dependent reopening plan required a “delicate balance” between public health needs and individual freedoms.
There is also “a right not to be vaccinated,” he told AFP.
“I think people should do it, but you cannot force them,” he added, noting that those who opt out inevitably risk being denied certain services.
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UK: No, patriotism doesn’t alienate ethnic minorities
The battle for the Labour Party’s soul is now in full flow. This once great party has been on the opposition benches for over a decade, and is now on the verge of being plunged into an internal culture war over matters of patriotism and tradition.
According to progressive activists, taking pride in the Union flag, respecting those who have served in the armed forces and being smartly dressed is pandering to extreme right-wing nativism.
But what is an especially questionable charge, made by the likes of Aditya Chakrabortty in the Guardian, is that embracing expressions of British patriotism would alienate ethnic minorities. According to this view, the imagined ‘BAME community’ has little to no sense of national pride or appreciation of British life. This assumption is both misguided and divisive.
The 2010 Ethnic Minority British Election Study, which remains the only full-scale survey on British ethnic-minority attitudes to date, showed that non-white people are far more likely to express satisfaction with the British democratic system than white Brits. This should come as no surprise. A notable section of Britain’s non-white population moved directly to the UK from unstable parts of the world with dysfunctional political systems and substandard public infrastructure.
Part of the reason my Bangladeshi-origin parents decided to set up their stall in Britain was because of the stable nature of British democratic society and the great educational opportunities on offer for their children. This feeds into a naturally positive orientation towards Britain – a country that provided them with an opportunity to start afresh and prosper.
The progressive-activist brigade, which lectures Labour on how to engage with Britain’s ethnic-minority people, fails to understand that patriotic sentiments and culturally traditional values run deep in many British non-white communities. Arguing that Labour should steer clear of expressions of patriotism and national civic pride, on the baseless grounds that it would alienate swathes of ‘BAME’ people, is nonsense-on-stilts.
It also amounts to the crass exploitation of non-white people, who are being used to stop Labour embracing patriotism and tradition. This is an attempt to ensure the party continues to indulge racial identity politics, and continues to support the kind of cultural liberalism that runs counter to traditional family-oriented values – values which often characterise South Asian and black communities across the home nations.
Britain’s progressive activists – who span various spheres of British life, from politics to academia to the media and entertainment – are far from ideologically in-sync with mainstream ethnic-minority public opinion.
While these progressive activists squirm at the mildest expressions of patriotism, a comfortable majority of non-white people attach importance to their British national identity. Following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union and the Conservative Party’s handsome victory in the 2019 UK General Election, some Labourites have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the outcomes produced by the UK’s recent democratic exercises. But many of Britain’s non-white people – who can trace their ancestral origins back to countries with autocratic regimes and rampant political oppression – simply do not share in this domestic progressive-liberal discontent. And while progressive activists look to ‘protect’ an imaginary BAME community from the forces of oppression, they fail to acknowledge that non-white people tend to be more satisfied with their life in the UK.
Progressive activists are either unaware of the culturally conservative attitudes in non-white communities or, worse still, they are fully aware of them but would still rather exploit ethnic minorities to promote their identitarian agenda. This tribe of left-wingers – instinctively hostile to expressions of patriotism, dissatisfied with the democratic system, and always keen to interpret a range of social issues through the prism of race – threatens to lock Labour in a position of neverending electoral misery.
If such people continue to wield considerable influence on the British left, Labour will only be left with offering a miserable form of grievance politics, which is likely to prove very costly at the ballot box. The lessons of the 2019 UK General Election are clearly still not being learned.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/03/no-patriotism-doesnt-alienate-ethnic-minorities/
*******************************IN BRIEF
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Soon-to-be President Kamala Harris is now taking Biden's head of state calls (Disrn)
Christian actor Kevin Sorbo gets deleted by Facebook (Disrn)
William Shakespeare ditched by more and more woke teachers over "misogyny" and "racism" (Fox News)
New York school encourages parents to become "white traitors," "white abolitionists" (Daily Wire)
Dumb and dumber: San Francisco school board delays talk of reopening classrooms — but keeps working on changing "racist" school names (Daily Mail)
National Guard mission in DC to finally conclude by mid-March, Pentagon claims (Examiner)
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Wharton School analysts concludes that Biden's proposed spending binge would actually lead to a smaller economy in 2022 (FEE)
We're shocked — shocked! Venezuela turns to privatization after being bankrupted by socialism (FEE)
It didn't start on January 6: A brief history of terrorist violence at the Capitol (Heritage Foundation)
Endangered bears being released into the wild start charging their rescuers because that's what bears do (Not the Bee)
Chick-fil-A worker wins car in company raffle, gives it to coworker who was biking to work (Not the Bee)
Policy: Biden should keep U.S. troops in Europe (Heritage Foundation)
Joe Biden rightly disappoints hard leftists on minimum wage hike and student loan forgiveness (Examiner)
Hypocritical Twitter allows grotesque hashtags to trend following Limbaugh's death (Daily Wire)
The U.S. is now administering average of 1.7 million vaccine doses per day (Disrn)
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Government seizes over 10 million phony N95 masks in COVID probe (AP)
Three North Korean military hackers indicted in wide-ranging scheme (Justive.gov)
U.S. retail sales rebounded sharply in January — up a seasonally adjusted 5.3% (Reuters)
Google and News Corp strike a deal: Google will start paying for the use of News Corp's journalism in the U.S., UK, and Australia (NBC News)
Baltimore activist suggests paying killers not to kill (Fox News)
Security camera catches LA County health inspector breaking into dance like a psycho moments after ordering bar to shut down (Not the Bee)
Karma: At least 30 Taliban terrorists blow themselves up during bomb-making class (Disrn)
Porch pirate attempts to steal a package and is met with a loaded rifle (Not the Bee)
Policy: Technology alone won't end poverty. We need savings first. (Mises Institute)
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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