Since January 2018, 4,115 Israelis have been infected with measles. According to the Health Ministry, many of them hail from communities that are home to large concentrations of parents who refuse or fail to vaccinate their children against a disease that can be serious – even fatal. However, months prior to that, the Health Ministry was aware that a measles outbreak could be imminent as a result of outbreaks in some European countries. Moreover, the ministry knew years ago that there were dangerous concentrations of parents who refused to vaccinate their children in various communities, and the State Comptroller warned of the risk as early as 2014.
But the Health Ministry did nearly nothing to reduce the "resistance pockets" that put not only their own unvaccinated children, but the public as a whole, at risk, because vaccinations protect not only those who receive them directly, but also provide herd immunity for the general population when the rate of vaccination is high enough.
But that's not all. This past year, the Health Ministry received a number of complaints about specific doctors who advise parents not to vaccinate their children – some of whom even gave parents the false information that vaccinations are dangerous. And what did the Health Ministry do? Again, nearly nothing. The ministry remembered to take action only after an exposé in the Israel Hayom weekend magazine interviewed senior health care officials, who warned about the ministry's helplessness.
There's more: In November 2018, the Knesset State Control Committee held a special discussion on the Health Ministry's failures to combat the anti-vaccination phenomenon, and senior Health Ministry officials said a specially-appointed committee would be done "clarifying" the actions of doctors who discourage vaccination within a period of three weeks. Since then, more than five months have passed. The "clarification" just wrapped up this week, and it did not include all the doctors allegedly involved.
The committee appointed to look into doctors who discourage vaccinations made the unprecedented determination that the reduced rate of vaccination in Israel, which has helped spur the measles outbreak, was caused in party by "dangerous calls by members of health professions not to vaccinate in accordance with the vaccination program, in violation of the [country's] vaccination policy." Yet even these hard findings are not prompting the Health Ministry to launch a nation-wide campaign to encourage vaccination and an explanatory campaign aimed at both doctors and the public.
The findings of the Health Ministry committee are groundbreaking, and the committee has done impressive work. But the Health Ministry is still doing too little, too late in fighting the dangerous anti-vaxxer phenomenon and, as usual, is not launching any national program to deal with the problem or with the measles outbreak itself. The Health Ministry continues to put out small fires without addressing the big picture, which is going up in the flames of ignorance and manipulation by doctors; the ministry's own insufficient preparedness for a measles outbreak; and the ongoing harm to public health care.
